For a bioethics of complexity

Abstract

The bioethics of complexity is aimed at overcoming a simple and rough meaning of bioethics and its regulatory ambitions, which risks to flatten humans’ peculiarities at the same level of what is typical of the natural and biological world, and proposes a new complex thinking, able to merge what seems separated and to distinguish interdependences and feedbacks between events, recognizing the interrelations between forms and aspects of life, the relations between phenomenons and their backgrounds and between backgrounds and Earth and eventually to accept uncertainty, that is composed by some elements like unpredictability, innovation and mutation. Thanks to this new approach it is possible to understand new forms of relationships between patients and physicians and to propose a different vision of disease and therapy (medicine of complexity), it it possible to re-think about our relationship with nature, which is impossible to understand in a reducing and separate way (environmental bioethics and ecology), proposing a new humanism open to the ecological dimension, which has not the limits of the strong anthropocentric approach. Finally, the bioethics of complexity could teach us to re-think in a non antagonistic way the couple humanity/animality, leading to a new way of animal bioethics and a new way to think about pity, aware of the dangers of the anthropomorphization of our travel companions in the voyage of Life on Earth.