Jessica Pierce seeks to change the practice of bioethics—and therefore of medicine and many related endeavors—in two interrelated ways: by challenging current paradigms about what morality is and how it shapes behavior, and by insisting that the health of our health care system depends upon its becoming more responsible ecologically.
       Dr. Pierce’s most recent publication is Contemporary Bioethics: A Reader
with Cases, which will be available from Oxford University Press in October.
This college and graduate level textbook introduces and explores the exciting
and continually evolving field of bioethics. The text spans the breadth of
this broad discipline, covering all the main topic areas of bioethics,
including abortion, reproductive ethics, end of life care, research ethics,
the doctor-patient relationship, and allocation of resources. It also pushes
into new territory not traditionally covered in introductory texts:
environmental sustainability and climate change, terrorism, neuroethics,
immigration, genetic manipulations, and interconnections between first and
third world health.
       Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (University of Chicago Press, May 2009), co-authored with ethologist Marc Bekoff, draws on a rich and diverse body of research—from ethology to social neuroscience to experimental philosophy. Pierce and Bekoff show that animals have a broad repertoire of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, forgiveness, trust, and reciprocity. In addition to changing our perceptions about animals, Wild Justice suggests that Western philosophy, and indeed Western common sense, may need to reconsider many of its fundamental axioms about human ethics.
       The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care, written with fellow bioethicist Andrew Jameton, is the first sustained treatment of environmental issues in health care, and has been a clarion call for health professionals and ethicists alike to integrate environmental values into the everyday decision-making and vocabulary of health professionals. Drs. Pierce and Jameton, with funding from the Greenwall Foundation, developed the concept of a Green Health Center, a hypothetical health clinic grounded upon principles of ecologically sustainability.
       Dr Pierce continues to work in environmental bioethics, with particular attention to the implications of global climate change for human health and health care systems. Her other books include Morality Play: Case Studies in Ethics, and Environmentalism and the New Logic of Business (co-authored with R. Edward Freeman and Richard Dodd).
       Dr. Pierce received a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, Department of Religious Studies. She has a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Scripps College. She lives in Longmont, Colorado.