Margaret Pabst Battin, Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), viii + 344 pp. Margaret Battin is an imaginative philosopher. She comes at issues at different angles and in different ways from most philosophers. She has a keen eye for points where philosophical argument and the public conversation have become polarized and unproductively stalled. She is deeply concerned about the social consequences of these stalled arguments. As a result, she is on the lookout for ways to get the argument unstuck. All of this makes Battin a good philosopher to read on issues that have reached an impasse, with entrenched sides churning out ever-more-sophisticated versions of well-mapped terrain.
