Applied humanities as the antidote for the malaise of bioethics.

Abstract

The present paper highlights the urgency for a revitalization of the field of bioethics. The authors have identified the "malaise" present in contemporary bioethics, and they claim that it has become a boring way to approach medicine and life sciences instead of challenging them. Starting from a brief explanation of the origin of bioethics, this paper analyzes the main issues at the core of its malaise, i.e., its depersonalization and extreme specialization which exclude of a holistic view of the patient. Clinical ethics, an applied branch of bioethics, provides a prime example of a bioethical discipline that operates in real-world contexts, and it contrasts with the more theoretical nature of traditional bioethical frameworks. Thus, the inherent multidisciplinary nature of clinical ethics offers an opportunity to a way of connecting the hard and soft sciences, and, ultimately, of transcending this distinction in the medical humanities. The cure of the malaise of bioethics proposed in this article comes from the medical humanities, specifically from the applied humanities perspective, which offers a comprehensive approach to current world issues, including the fast evolution of technologies with applications to the health field.