Bioethics: Its Scope and Purpose

Abstract

Bioethics is a term that is becoming widely used today. It entails the objective appraisal of how our values, desires and actions affect others, including animals and the environment. We have medical bioethics, which focuses on such ethical issues as euthanasia, surrogate parenting and genetic engineering involving human beings. Such bioethical issues have been deliberated by the World Council of Churches, among other groups. Increasingly these groups are beginning to apply bioethics in addressing and seeking remedies for a host of other social and environmental issues. A healthy humanity is concerned about its humanity-how compassionately itacts toward its own kind and toward other sentient beings and the Earth itself. It has respect for all life because it realizes that when it damages the environment, it harms itself. Bioethics, in this regard, is a field of self investigation and enlightened self-interest. And it provides a foundation to establish meaning in our lives. Bioethics offers a holistic, rational appraisal of our place in the world and how best can live for the good of the life community of the planet. It mandates that equal and fair consideration be given to human rights issues, animal rights issues, and environmental concerns. It includes a temporal principle of transgenerational equity-of being concerned about the well-being of future generations and having a respectful understanding of the wisdom and folly of our ancestors. We should neither forget our history, lest repeat it, nor forget that we do not own the land, borrow it from our children. The polemicized rhetoric and bickerings within and among frustrated factions of the human, animal, and environmental rights movements are reconciled by the integrative approach that applied bioethics provides. Bioethics can be an antidote to the prevailing dominionistic attitude toward life. The subjugation of minorities and other life communities will continue as will war and other forms of violence until reverse the belief that are superior and apart from nature. l Within what some call the establishmentmeaning the government-industrial complex-bioethics is also taking root. Ethical conduct, ethical advertising, ethical products, full cost-accounting (social and environmental) are beginning to appear on its agenda. Protection of endangered species; humane treatment of domestic animals; sustainable use of agricultural and other natural resources; loss of biodiversity; global warming, air pollution; national economic security; and industrial-economic sustainability; these and other issues fall within the sphere of bioethics.