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Bioethics

Bioethics is the ethics of biological science and medicine.


Contents

Definition and scope

Bioethics concerns the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among biology, medicine, cybernetics, politics, law, philosophy, and theology. Disagreement exists about the proper scope for the application of ethical evaluation to questions involving biology. Some bioethicists would narrow ethical evaluation only to the morality of medical treatments or technological innovations, and the timing of medical treatment of humans. Other bioethicists would broaden the scope of ethical evaluation to include the morality of all actions that might help or harm organisms capable of feeling fear and pain. Since beginning, Bioethics has a comprehensive scope, including human health, human life, animal and vegetable life, in other words, all issues related to life and living.

Bioethics involves many public policy questions that are sometimes politicized and used to mobilize political constituencies, hence the emergence of biopolitics and its techno-progressive/bioconservative branches. For this reason, some biologists and others involved in the development of technology have come to see any mention of "bioethics" as an attempt to derail their work and react to it as such, regardless of the true intent. Some biologists can be inclined to this line of thought, as they see their work as inherently ethical, and attacks on it as misguided.

Bioethics is among the fastest growing academic areas of inquiry, and within its thirty year history as an institutionalized group of scholars meeting regularly to discuss bioethics issues, more than one dozen English language journals have emerged. In addition, many academic medical centers and some schools of law, engineering and the liberal arts offer degree programs with a specialization in bioethics, with the varying aims of training physicians and nurses, attorneys, philosopher/theologian "ethicists", health services researchers and even bench scientists in the analysis of ethical issues in bioethics. The development of bioethics as a concerted area of institutionalized inquiry was greatly aided in 1989 by major dedication of funds by the U.S. Human Genome Project, today known as the NHGRI, referred to by Arthur Caplan as the "full employment act" for bioethicists. With those funds, in the 1990s a group of social scientists created what has today become the predominant academic mode of discourse for bioethicists: research concerning ethical issues as they are encountered and resolved in society, culminating in data that is subject to the same rigors of peer review as other social science.

The questions begged by the idea of bioethics as a distinct area of academic inquiry (why must it exist apart from philosophy? isn't everyone an 'ethicist'?) are largely answered by the needs of institutions. Bioethicists today are not hired or engaged in conversation (and thus "named") because of their opinions or because they have special skills of reasoning, but because they know and can put to work the enormous body of research and history of discussions about bioethics in a fair, honest and intelligent way. The training programs in bioethics differ in skill sets of faculty and size of program, but they do across the US, with few exceptions, seem to share a commitment to that goal.

As a result, bioethics has been created as a distinct entity but institutions, specifically the multi-million dollar commitment of major and minor medical centers to the study of medical ethics as part of the development of curriculum and research efforts. Today it is all but impossible to create a major medical research effort without ethicists to assist in not only the regulatory review of research IRB, which can be staffed by those not trained in ethics in any rigorous way, but also by those who can think in advance of the onset of research about its social, ethical and economic implications. A shrinking number of those who would say that they "work in bioethics" are actually employed in other academic disciplines, because so many such disciplines reject as credible or important the work of bioethics in journals that are outside the methods of the traditional discipline within which such a person would work. A publication in JAMA would be meaningless to a tenure committee in most philosophy departments. A publication in the Journal of Philosophy would be meaningless to the same committee in a medical school. Seven articles would be sufficient for promotion in many philosophy departments, where 37 might be closer to the typical number of peer-reviewed publications for bioethicists, but of much shorter length, and philosophers would contest the possibility of rigor at that level of productivity. A book is a primary credential in the liberal arts and law. A book is virtually meaningless in medicine. So, as institutions employing bioethics change, the jobs change, and thus the training changes.

Nonetheless, many claim to work in bioethics, and indeed can feel free to do so, in just the same way that self-help book authors claim to work in philosophy. However, those not working in and trained in bioethics in the now fairly well established range of ways typical of bioethicists, demonstrated by, e.g., publishing in AJOB, Hastings Center Report, Journal of Medical Ethics, etc., will be understood as amateurs by those in the field per se, again for the same reason that while Einstein did fabulous work as a patent clerk, he would not have been properly considered a physicist (and was not) until he joined the academic community, because without such standards universities and their growth in terms of new disciplines would spiral out of control.

Ideology and methodology

Bioethicists often focus on using philosophy to help analyze issues, and philosophical ethicists such as Peter Singer tend to treat the field as a branch of moral or ethical philosophy. However, this approach is sometimes challenged, and bioethics is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. Many bioethicists come from backgrounds outside of academic philosophy, and some even claim that the methods of analytic philosophy have had a negative effect on the field's development. The percentage of bioethicists with professional backgrounds in health care, especially physicians, has been steadily increasing over time. In fact, the last two Presidents of the primary academic society for bioethicists in the U.S. (the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities) have been physicians. Some bioethicists, especially those who perform ethics consultation in clinical settings, emphasize the practical aspects of bioethics, and view the field as more closely related to clinical practice or public health than philosophy.

Religious bioethicists have developed rules and guidelines on how to deal with these issues from within the viewpoint of their respective faiths. Some Western secular bioethicists are critical of the fact that these are usually religious scholars without an academic degree or training in disciplines that pertain to the issues, such as philosophy (wherein the formal study of ethics is usually found), biology or medicine. Although there are a number of eminently qualified philosophers who approach bioethics from a religious perspective.

Many religious bioethicists are Jewish or Christian scholars. However a growing number of religious scholars from other religions have become involved in this field as well. Islamic clerics have begun to write on this topic. Muslim bioethicists include Abdulaziz Sachedina, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. There has been some criticism by liberal Muslims that only the more religiously conservative voices in Islam are being heard on this issue.

In the case of most non-Western cultures a strict separation of religion from philosophy does not exist. In many Asian cultures, there is a lively (and often less dogmatic, but more pragmatic) discussion on bioethical issues. The discussion often refers to common demographic policies which are criticised, as in the case of China. Buddhist bioethics, in general, is characterised by a naturalistic outlook that leads to a rationalistic, pragmatic approach. Buddhist bioethicists include Damien Keown. In Africa, and partly also in Latin America, the debate on bioethics frequently focus on its practical relevance in the context of underdevelopment and (national or global) power relations.

Issues

Areas of health sciences that are the subject of published, peer-reviewed bioethical analysis include:

List of Prominent Living Bioethicists

See also

General References

Muslim bioethics

Jewish bioethics

Christian bioethics

Buddhist bioethics

Categories


Bioethics | Applied ethics | Ethics of science and technology

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