Biomedical subjects

Elizabeth F Cooke

Publications and source records attributed to Elizabeth F Cooke.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

Germ-line engineering, freedom, and future generations.

New technologies in germ-line engineering have raised many questions about obligations to future generations. In this article, I focus on the importance of increasing freedom and the equality of freedom for present and future generations, because these two ideals are necessary for a just society and because they are most threatened by the wide-scale privatisation of GLE technologies. However, there are ambiguities in applying these ideals to the issue of genetic technologies. I argue that Amartya Sen's capability theory can be used as a framework to ensure freedom and equality in the use of GLE technology. Capability theory articulates the goal of equalising real freedom by bringing all people up to a threshold of basic human capabilities. Sen's capability theory can clarify the proper moral goal of GLE insofar as this technology could be used to bring people up to certain basic human capabilities, thereby increasing their real freedom. And by increasing the freedom of those who lack basic human capabilities, GLE can aid in decreasing the inequalities of freedom among classes of people.

Ethical Analysis↗

PubMedDate not supplied

On the possibility of a pragmatic discourse bioethics: Putnam, Habermas, and the normative logic of bioethical inquiry.

Pragmatic bioethics represents a novel approach to the discipline of bioethics, yet has met with criticisms which have beset the discipline of bioethics in the past. In particular, pragmatic bioethics has been criticized for its excessively fuzzy approach to fundamental questions of normativity, which are crucial to a field like bioethics. Normative questions need answers, and consensus is not always enough. The approach here is to apply elements of the discourse ethics of Habermas and Putnam to the sphere of bioethics, in order to develop a normative structure out of the framework of bioethical inquiry as it stands. The idea here is that the process of inquiry contains its own normative structure as it aims to discover norms. Such an approach, which fuses pragmatic bioethics with discourse ethics (which equally draws on pragmatism), may rightly be called a "Pragmatic Discourse Bioethics."

Bioethics↗