Term Bioethics Research Articles

A bioethics course for biology and science education students

The term bioethics has multiple origins but has generally been taken to mean medical ethics, especially in the USA. The usage adopted in this paper is somewhat wider, encompassing environmental ethics and the social and ethical dimensions of biological and biomedical science and of medicine. There is a growing awareness of these issues amongst the public and in the media, and an increasing level of debate about them. It is important that biologists and those who teach biology are aware of the ethical and social implications of their work and have the intellectual tools to enter the debate. Thus, at the University of Exeter, a bioethics module has been established. It is aimed mainly at biology and science education students but is open to students from other disciplines. The range of topics covered by our broad definition is presented by several different means, including lectures, structured role play, case studies and videos. Students carry out more detailed case studies in small groups, mentored by postgraduate students, and present posters on their case studies. This forms part of their assessment and they also submit individual essays. Student feedback on the module has been consistently favourable since its introduction.

¿Qué es la bioética?

Los rápidos avances científicos y técnicos producidos en las diferentes áreas de la Medicina y la Biología, son considerados como el punto de partida para la aparición del término Bioética, que más tarde, con la aparición de los movimientos ecologistas, quienes reconocen los efectos deletéreos a nivel del medio ambiente producidos por la contaminación generada por la industrialización, y su preocupación por la calidad de vida de las generaciones futuras, generan una serie de conflictos que culminan con el nacimiento de la Bioética como una ciencia: rama de la ética que se ocupa de la vida en cuanto es.

Sustainable Bioethics: Extending Care to an Aging Planet

About 1970, Van Rensselaer Potter coined the term bioethics to bring under one heading broad questions of human survival, environment, and biology. In 1971, Potter outlined a statement of principles that linked the ethics of the biological sciences with the ethics of environmental concern. Regrettably, the field that adopted his rubric bioethics immediately diverged from Potter’s interests. Bioethics has become for the most part identified with medical ethics or health care ethics and in so doing has developed few ethical principles and analyses in relationship to environmental ethics. Similarly, environmental ethics seldom touches on clinical or health care issues, even though the field of environmental health has grown greatly in recent decades. It is the purpose of this article to indicate briefly some of the topics that could be treated effectively as part of a project to reconnect medical ethics and environmental ethics into what may be called sustainable bioethics.

Fragmented Ethics and "Bridge Bioethics"

The Report's editorial mandate is both to examine issues of current importance and to invite bioethics to broaden the range of issues it probes. Thus along with articles exploring the relationship between patients and doctors, or health policy, or any of the myriad other familiar concerns of ethics in medicine, from time to time the Report has published articles about public health, animal experimentation, or “environmental ethics” broadly construed. The most recent was the special supplement Nature, Polis, Ethics in the November-December (1998) issue. Some, of course, have argued that “bio-ethics” ought always to encompass concern for issues beyond the bedside. When the biologist Van Rensselaer Potter proposed the term bioethics nearly thirty years ago, the field he had in mind lay at the intersection of ethics and the biological sciences in general. In light especially of Nature, Polis, Ethics's call for a substantive “humans-nature ethics” it seems appropriate, therefore, to invite one of the earliest proponents of a generous understanding of bioethics to reflect on the character of the field and the questions with which it should grapple. Below Potter and colleague Peter Whitehouse share their thoughts on this most interdisciplinary of disciplines. —B-JC, GK

Spirituality, health care, and bioethics.

This article explores the relationship of spirituality to health care and bioethics in terms of the need and efforts of people to make sense of their lives in the face of illness, injury, or impending death. Moving beyond earlier associations with specific religious traditions, spirituality has come to designate the way in which people can integrate their experiences with their sense of ultimate meaning and related values. The holistic model of health care also affirms that one should not simply treat a body in pain, but respond to the suffering of the whole person within his or her full life. A narrative emphasis in ethics also maintains that ethical decisions occur within the framework of interacting life-stories, each of which embodies a certain core vision and set of values. In each instance it is the life stories of people, their lived narratives, that provide a common thread. The telling of these stories and the discernment of the lived spirituality they contain may assist persons in the process of achieving understanding, making decisions, and finding purpose in the experience of illness, injury, or disability.

Christian bioethics as non-ecumenical.

A community's morality depends on the moral premises, rules of evidence, and rules of inference it acknowledges, as well as on the social structure of those in authority to rule knowledge claims in or out of a community's set of commitments. For Christians, who is an authority and who is in authority are determined by Holy Tradition, through which in the Mysteries one experiences the Holy Spirit. Because of the requirement of repentance and conversion to the message of Christ preserved in the Tradition, the authority of the community must not only exclude heretical teaching but heretical communities from communion. Understanding Christian bioethics requires a focus on the content of that bioethics in terms of its social context within a right-believing, right-worshipping community. Christian bioethics should be non-ecumenical by recognizing that true moral knowledge has particular moral content, is communal, and is not fully available outside of the community of right worship. The difficulty with Roman Catholicism's understandings of bioethics lies not just in its continued inordinate accent on the role of reason apart from repentance (as well as in its defining novel doctrines), but in Roman Catholicism's not recognizing that the contemporary, post-Christian age is in good measure the consequence of its post-Vatican II failure to call for a return to the traditional pieties and asceticisms of the Fathers so that all might know rightly concerning the requirements of Christian bioethics.

Global bioethics.

Because there is a large agenda of work that needs to be done to help ethicists to be better able to address ethical questions in healthcare from an environmentally conscious and globally coherent point of view, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics is initiating this occasional column on global bioethics to provide a space to publish and discuss environmental issues in healthcare. We are initiating this section with a paper of my own outlining some broad concerns about healthcare ethics in a global context ["Casuist or Cassandra? Two conceptions of the bioethicist's role," p. 451-466] and are inviting readers to submit philosophical and multidisciplinary papers taking a global perspective on ethical issues in healthcare....

Medical ethics in France: the latest great political debate.

The American term Bioethics has been adopted over the last ten years and the development of Bioethics committees on the American model testifies this influence, even before the official appointment of a National Committee in 1983. This phenomenon acknowledged as the “emergence of French bioethics” is in fact the final outcome of a long-lasting crisis in the medical profession, in quest for a new style of ethics, breaking with the traditional professional ethics (French Deontologie, through the Ordre des Medecins). Among other factors of conceptual and institutional change, the increase of biomedical research comes first: a major consequence is the sharing of moral responsibilities in decision-making with outsider scientists and finally the involvement of the whole population as potential moral subjects. The designation of these events as the emergence of French bioethics is hardly appropriate for an account of this dramatic shift in ethical norms and roles in medicine. This paper attempts to review the intellectual roots of the recent evolution and to summarize present and prospective trends.

The New Medical Ethics

To the Editor. —In the recent editorial in theArchives 1 and in several other publications, 2,3 Sider and Clements have criticized the contemporary field of medical ethics or bioethics in terms that most of us who are involved in that enterprise on a day-to-day basis find unrecognizable and irrelevant. The flaws in these authors' condemnation of philosophical ethical theory as necessarily formalistic and empty, and their proposed alternative ethical theory based on systems concepts and biological norms, require criticism of a much more extended scope than can be encompassed in a letter to the editor. I wish merely to indicate that their portrayal of contemporary bioethics omits mention of active debates which address the very issues that they feel have been excluded. 1 The centrality of the concept of autonomy in contemporary bioethics cannot be doubted. However, the way in which autonomy must be balanced against other ethical principles,