Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Bioethics”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
PubMed1995

The ecumenical and non-ecumenical dialectic of Christian bioethics.

Non-ecumenical Christian bioethics will seem a strange category for many. The category relies on the recognition that bioethics mediates morality and ethics in healthcare. As such bioethics will have particular content. It is the content of a moral vision that both divides and unites. The enterprise of non-ecumenical Christian bioethics explores how Christians are both divided and united on the issue of bioethics. Non-ecumenical Christian bioethics is opposed to a facile ecumenism that reduces the content of Christian morality to the lowest common denominator.

Bioethics↗
PubMed1992

Policy arguments in a public church: Catholic social ethics and bioethics.

This paper is an analysis of the relationship of social ethics and bioethics in Roman Catholic theology. The argument of the paper is that the character of both Catholic moral theology and ecclesiology shape the broadly defined interest of the church in bioethics. The paper examines the common elements of social ethics and bioethics in Catholic teaching, describes how ecclesiology shapes Catholic public policy and uses the examples of abortion and health care to illustrate the relationship of Catholic social thought and bioethics. In developing the relationship of these two dimensions of Catholic moral argument the article highlights how the appeal to natural law categories differs in social ethics and bioethics and how the two topics are received differently in the theological community. It also seeks to illustrate how the premises of Catholic social ethics remain central to public positions taken on bioethics.

Abortion, Induced↗
PubMed2000

The plurality of Chinese and American medical moralities: toward an interpretive cross-cultural bioethics.

Since the late 1970s, American appraisals of Chinese medical ethics and Chinese responses to American bioethics range from frank criticism to warm appreciation, from refutation to acceptance. Yet in the United States as well as in China, American bioethics and Chinese medical ethics have been seen, respectively, as individualistic and communitarian. In this widely-accepted general comparison, the great variation in the two medical moralities, especially the diversity of Chinese experiences, has been unfortunately minimized, if not totally ignored. Neither American bioethics nor Chinese medical ethics is a field with only one dominant way of thinking. Medical moralities in America and China -- traditional and modern -- have always been plural and diverse. For example, American and Chinese cultures and medical moralities both exhibit individualistic and communitarian traditions. For this reason, bioethics in general and cross-cultural bioethics in particular must be fundamentally interpretive. Interpretive cross-cultural bioethics appreciates the plurality of medical morality within any culture. It can serve as a vital means of social and cultural criticism through engaged interpretations.

Attitude↗
PubMed1991

Clinical judgment and bioethics: the decision making link.

The literature on bioethics is diverse and confusing in its treatment of appropriate components for decision making. As a result, the literature on teaching bioethics is also confusing, even contradictory, in presenting an 'appropriate' framework within which learners may come to understand the nature and process of bioethics. The article sets out five decision components which are seen as common to all decision making. These components are then shown to have a significant influence both on bioethics decision making and on bioethics teaching. They are also shown to play a role in breaking down the separatism evidenced in contemporary bioethics literature aimed at individual professions.

Beneficence↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Bioethics and health instruction: issues, questions, and advocacy.

The purpose of this article is to define bioethics and illustrate some current bioethical issues facing society today, provide an overview of arguments opposing teaching about bioethics by health educators, describe selected aspects of the who, what and how of the teaching of bioethics, and advocate the teaching of bioethics at all levels of health education curricula. The intent is not to provide conclusive solutions to the many complex issues related to the teaching of bioethics, but rather to discuss some of the issues and stimulate debate.

Bioethics↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[Current status and perspectives of bioethics in Argentina].

The study of bioethics in Argentina owes much to the efforts of José Alberto Mainetti, who in 1972 founded the Institute of Medical Humanities, devoted to researching, teaching, and publicizing the discipline. Because of growing interest in the field of bioethics, a Bioethics Center was created in the Institute in 1987 and it has stimulated the organization of several groups in various provinces in the country. One of the most important of them, located at the National University of Mar del Plata, is responsible for designing a graduate-level specialization in bioethics and for organizing the First Mar del Plata Bioethics Workshop. This interdisciplinary group examines the bioethical implications of concrete scientific and professional activities as well as legislative measures and decisions affecting the public.

Argentina↗
PubMed2000

What would John Dewey do? The promises and perils of pragmatic bioethics.

Recent work done at the intersection of classical American pragmatism and bioethics promises much: a clarified self-understanding for bioethics, a modus vivendi for progress, and liberation from misguided and misguiding theories and principles. The revival of pragmatism outside bioethics in the past twenty years, however, has been of a distinctly anti-realist orientation. Richard Rorty, for example, has urged that there is no objective truth or good for philosophy to be concerned with. I ask whether the work in Pragmatic Bioethics follows this perilous Rortyan trend. It will move towards anti-realism if its account of the good abandons any notion of truth or objectivity, and if, in its discussion of specific problems, it divides these problems into public and the private, urging consensus as the goal of the one, and an unconstrained notion of happiness as the goal of the other. In a final section, I suggest that bioethics done in the spirit of Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty might have much to offer to those dissatisfied with anti-realism.

Bioethics↗
PubMed1999

Bioethics and the newspapers.

Many bioethics questions are resistant to journalistic exploration on account of their inherently philosophical dimensions. Such dimensions are ill-suited to what we may term the internal goods (in MacIntyre's sense) of the newspapers and mass media generally, which constrain newspaper coverage to an abbreviated form of narrative that, whilst not in itself objectionable, is nonetheless inimical to the conduct of philosophical reflection. The internal goods of academic bioethics, by contrast, include attention to philosophical questions inherent in bioethical issues and value-enquiry. The danger for bioethics is that its agenda for reflective enquiry will, if dictated by this abbreviated narrative, be distorted in terms of both range and priorities, to the inevitable neglect of questions having a philosophical dimension to them. This danger can be avoided by a constructive partnership between the media and academic bioethics. The success of this partnership relies on four suggested provisos, for the meeting of which both journalists and academics bear responsibility.

Bioethical Issues↗
PubMed1999

Philosophy as news: bioethics, journalism and public policy.

News media accounts of issues in bioethics gain significance to the extent that the media influence public policy and inform personal decision making. The increasingly frequent appearance of bioethics in the news thus imposes responsibilities on journalists and their sources. These responsibilities are identified and discussed, as is (i) the concept of "news-worthiness" as applied to bioethics, (ii) the variable quality of bioethics reportage and (iii) journalists' reliance on ethicists to pass judgment. Because of the potential social and other benefits of high quality reporting on ethical issues, it is argued that journalists and their bioethics sources should explore and accommodate more productive relationships. An optimal journalism-ethics relationship will be one characterized by "para-ethics," in which journalistic constraints are noted but also in which issues and arguments are presented without oversimplification and credible disagreement is given appropriate attention.

Bioethical Issues↗
PubMed1995

Moral content, tradition, and grace: rethinking the possibility of a Christian bioethics.

Birth, suffering, disability, disease and death were by medicine's successes placed within a context of seemingly novel challenges that cried out for new responses. Secular bioethics rose in response to the demands of these new biomedical technologies in the context of culture fragmented in moral pluralism. While secular bioethics promised to unite persons separated by diverse religious and moral assumption, this is a promise that could not be fulfilled. Reason alone cannot provide canonical, content-full moral guidance or justify a moral community capable of binding all persons. Christian bioethics, as part of a way of life enbedded in authentic worship, offers content, meaning and understanding where secular bioethics has failed. For Christians, resolution of bioethical controversies will not be found through appeals to foundational rational arguments or isolated scriptural quotations, but only in a Christian community united in authentic faith.

Bioethical Issues↗
PubMed2001

Disability: an agenda for bioethics.

Contemporary bioethics has been somewhat skewed by its focus on high-tech medicine and the resulting development of ethical frameworks based on an acute-care model of healthcare. Research and scholarship in bioethics have payed only cursory attention to ethical issues related to disability. I argue that bioethics should concern itself with the full range of theoretical and practical issues related to disability. This encounter with the disability community will enrich bioethics and, potentially, society as well. I suggest a number of items that the bioethics agenda should include, such as the development of a casuistry of the right to healthcare and to community integration and an advocacy role in fostering an understanding among the public and policy makers of the need to reform research and treatment related to disability.

Bioethical Issues↗
PubMed1998

The foundations of bioethics: contingency and relevance.

In this essay, I proceed by, first, laying out H. Tristram Engelhardt's argument for the principle of permission as the proper foundation for a secular bioethic. After considering how a number of commentators have tried to undermine this argument, I show why it is immune to some of these advances. I then offer my own critique of Engelhardt's project. This critique is two pronged. First, I argue that Engelhardt is unable to establish his own foundation for a secular bioethic. This inability leaves him with only contingent points of departure for a secular bioethic, some of the more salient of which he has ignored. Second, I argue that even if Engelhardt's project succeeds, it is in danger of being irrelevant in a practical sense because it ignores important contextual dimensions of the peculiar enterprise we call bioethics. Ultimately, the proper foundations for a relevant secular bioethic. I argue, must appeal to certain contingent features of the context that gives rise to the need for it.

Bioethics↗
PubMed2001

Feminist bioethics and psychiatry.

Feminist bioethics is a relatively new field, the major works in which only started to appear in the late 1980s. At first feminist bioethicists focused mainly on issues of particular concern to women such as reproduction. Recently, papers have begun to appear that show that a feminist analysis can be brought to bear on any subject traditional bioethics discusses. So far, however, feminist bioethics has not been brought to bear on psychiatry. There have been feminist critiques of psychiatry and feminist discussions of certain diagnostic categories that disproportionately affect women, but these are concerned with women's issues within psychiatry and how psychiatry has been used to oppress women. Certainly these are important, but what has been missing is a discussion of psychiatry in the sense that feminist bioethics suggests a general critique of psychiatry and the rethinking of the practice of psychiatry, regardless of whether the specific instances involved are women's issues. In this paper I look at what such a feminist bioethical intervention into psychiatry would look like.

Bioethics↗
PubMed1995

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.

Abortion, Induced↗
PubMed2000

Talking about cases in bioethics: the effect of an intensive course on health care professionals.

Educational efforts in bioethics are prevalent, but little is known about their efficacy. Although previous work indicates that courses in bioethics have a demonstrable effect on medical students, it has not examined their effect on health care professionals. In this report, we describe a study designed to investigate the effect of bioethics education on health care professionals. At the Intensive Bioethics Course, a six-day course held annually at Georgetown University, we administered a questionnaire requiring open-ended responses to vignettes both before and after the course. Following the course, respondents defended their responses more carefully and articulated their thoughts more clearly. In addition, after the course respondents seemed to have a more subtle understanding of the relevant issues in the cases and applied theory to these cases more frequently. These findings help to formulate an understanding of the effect of bioethics education on health care professionals.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Bioethics in the twenty-first century: why we should pay attention to eighteenth-century medical ethics.

Those of us who work in the field of bioethics tend to think that, because the word "bioethics" is new, so too the field is new in all respects, but we are not the first to do bioethics. John Gregory (1724-1773) did bioethics just as we do it, at least two centuries before we thought to do it. He deployed philosophical methods as sophisticated as our own. Indeed, Gregory took up the very best moral philosophy available to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, namely, David Hume's moral philosophy and its core concept of sympathy. Gregory also responded in a conceptually powerful and clinically applicable way to the problems of his time, just as we do. I want here to outline Gregory's accomplishment and to identify some aspects of its importance for bioethics in the twenty-first century.

Bioethics↗
PubMed1998

A theory of international bioethics: multiculturalism, postmodernism, and the bankruptcy of fundamentalism.

The first of two articles analyzing the justifiability of international bioethical codes and of cross-cultural moral judgments reviews "moral fundamentalism," the theory that cross-cultural moral judgments and international bioethical codes are justified by certain "basic" or "fundamental" moral priniciples that are universally accepted in all cultures and eras. Initially propounded by the judges at the 1947 Nuremberg Tribunal, moral fundamentalism has become the received justification of international bioethics, and of cross-temporal and cross-cultural moral judgments. Yet today we are said to live in a multicultural and postmodern world. This article assesses the challenges that multiculturalism and postmodernism pose to fundamentalism and concludes that these challenges render the position philosophically untenable, thereby undermining the received conception of the foundations of international bioethics. The second article, which follows, offers an alternative model -- a model of negotiated moral order -- as a viable justification for international bioethics and for transcultural and transtemporal moral judgments.

Advisory Committees↗
PubMed1998

Negotiating international bioethics: a response to Tom Beauchamp and Ruth Macklin.

Can the bioethical theories that have served American bioethics so well, serve international bioethics as well? In two papers in the previous issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, I contend that the form of principlist fundamentalism endorsed by American bioethicists like Tom Beauchamp and Ruth Macklin will not play on an international stage. Deploying techniques of postmodern scholarship, I argue that principlist fundamentalism justifies neither the condemnation of the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg, nor, as the Report of the Advisory Committee on the Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) demonstrates, condemnation of Cold War radiation researchers. Principlist fundamentalism thus appears to be philosophy bankrupt. In this issue of the Journal, Beauchamp and Macklin reject this claim, arguing that I have misread the ACHRE report and misunderstood Nazism. They also argue that the form of post-postmodern negotiated human rights theory that I proffer is adequate only insofar as it is itself really fundamentalist; insofar as I take postmodernism seriously, however, I mire international bioethics in relativism. In this response, I reaffirm my anti-fundamentalism, provide further evidence in support of my reading of the ACHRE report, and defend my post-postmodern version of rights theory. I also develop criteria for a minimally adequate theoretical framework for international bioethics.

Advisory Committees↗