SEARCH · PubMed Health

Results for “Bioethics”

Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

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

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

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↗

PubMed2006

From biopolitics to bioethics: church, state, medicine and assisted reproductive technology in Ireland.

This paper examines the emerging bioethical debate on assisted reproductive technology (ART) in Ireland, which is shaped by the long-standing contentious issue of abortion and the constitutional protection afforded to the 'unborn'. The focus of the paper is on the way in which the terms of this debate are shaped and constrained by the historical relations of power between church, state and medicine. Since the representation of Ireland as a post-Catholic, plural republic is becoming increasingly mainstream to cultural and political discourse, we pay particular attention to how the Catholic Church embraces bioethics as a meta frame or code for refocusing questions of values, beliefs and meanings to sustain the ideal of Ireland as a 'pro-life' and essentially Catholic nation. The Catholic Church is not simply asserting its voice of dissent in the context of public debate as one voice amongst a plurality of other voices, but to shape the emerging debate as a powerful, institutional actor. The opportunity to do so is afforded by the lack of public debate on bioethical issues and the exceedingly slow pace at which bioethics is moving towards an institutionalised framework in Ireland. These events can be explained by the legacy of the social power of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the direct and indirect influence it has long exercised over public policy vis-à-vis the state and its institutions, including medicine. There are two interconnected threads to the contextual analysis presented in our case study: first, the legacy of the social power wielded by the Catholic Church, and its slow and incremental demise reflected in the pace of secularisation in Ireland and the privatisation of morality; second, the emergence of a bioethical regulatory debate on ART, which is mired in the abortion controversy. Our analysis focuses on a number of key contradictions and tensions in the way in which the key institutions of church, state and medicine navigate their own positions vis-à-vis a bioethics debate, and how this constrains public participation.

Bioethics↗

PubMed2005

[The need for bioethics training in the Community of Madrid].

OBJECTIVES MAIN OBJECTIVE: to understand the significance and sense of bioethics for social work/health professionals; the secondary objective is to quantify the bioethics training given in IMSALUD primary care. DESIGN: Interviews with key reporters. Face-to-face interviews with people in charge of the training and research departments. SETTING: The 11 primary health care areas of IMSALUD. PARTICIPANTS AND/OR CONTEXTS: Key reporters (1 for each health area) chosen by heads of teaching: people working in the area with a specific weight or personal interest in bioethics. METHOD: 11 key reporters (1 for each health area); telephone contact and mailing of open-question questionnaire. RESULTS: Bioethics is implicit in daily activity, but unconsciously. General rejection due to its themes, which involve self-criticism. Ethical conflicts basically arising from the relationship of health workers with patients and the family, especially concerning information-giving, were pointed to. Themes considered very important were informed consent and confidentiality. Other ethical problems were allocation and distribution of limited resources, responsibility for taking up situations that worsen health care (lists too long, burnt-out companions, malpractice...). More training, both practical and theoretical, and more time to perform tasks were called for. CONCLUSIONS: The strategy to improve health professionals' ethical approach is to increase their Bioethics training. Very little bioethics training is provided for social work/health professionals by primary care management in the Community of Madrid.

Bioethics↗

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↗

PubMed2005

Will international human rights subsume medical ethics? Intersections in the UNESCO Universal Bioethics Declaration.

The International Bioethics Committee (IBC) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is currently drafting a Universal Bioethics Declaration ("the declaration"). The content and even the name of the declaration has yet to be finalized, but it is expected to range widely over human and non-human bioethics. It appears likely to include many articles directly related to medical ethics. The declaration may well evolve, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, into a component of international customary law, or be the precursor to an International Convention on Bioethics. This article discusses whether this process will facilitate bioethics and, in particular, medical ethics, being subsumed by the normative system of international human rights.

Bioethics↗

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↗

PubMed2004

Bioethics in Germany: debates and infrastructure.

In Germany the public awareness on ethical problems of the application of medicine and life sciences on human beings is very high. It can be observed that German Society is rather sensitive concerning bioethical issues. Politics supports this attitude. Many articles in professional journals as well as in newspapers cover bioethical issues. Conferences and workshops on a professional and an educational level deal with topics on ethics of life sciences and ethics in general. Moreover, in the case of bioethics many different disciplines contribute with relevant considerations to the process of opinion and judgment formation. This paper summarizes the main ethical and legal debates on bioethical issues in Germany, specifies the focus of leading German centres of bioethics and biolaw, and explains the tasks, services and networking of the German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE) which was founded by the Federal Government.

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↗

PubMed2002

Teaching bioethics in the new millennium: holding theories accountable to actual practices and real people.

Teaching bioethics in the new millennium requires its practitioners to confront a wide area of methodological alternatives. This essay chronicles the author's journey from the principlism of Beauchamp and Childress, through narrative and postmodern bioethics, to a complex feminist critique of postmodern bioethics that emphasizes functional human capabilities and the creation of structures that can facilitate free discussion of those capabilities and how best to realize them. Teaching bioethics concerns not only the acknowledgement of differences but also reminding ourselves of our samenesses. Sustained Habermasian democratic conversations might help us to escape the narrow confines of a postmodern bioethics of moral strangers for a richer world of moral friends.

Bioethics↗

PubMed2002

Teaching bioethics at (or near) the bedside.

Many teachers of bioethics often express concern, in their writings and otherwise, about the theoretical basis (or lack of it) of bioethics and the allied issue of relativism. The companion articles by Tong and Momeyer are in this vein and rightly address such issues within the context of a liberal arts education. This article addresses such issues in a different venue, i.e., bioethics teaching in the clinical sphere of health care institutions. It presumes to suggest that many of these theoretical concerns, as well as the threat of relativism, seldom arise in this sphere. Rather, a broad based, well accepted body of moral truth has been fashioned over the last quarter century and it is this that clinical bioethics regularly keys to and to which most moral dilemmas are referred for resolution. The various forms of this pedagogy, e.g., case consultations or institutional policy statements, are charted out in this regard, as well as the often tactical character of much of this teaching, i.e., not "what should we do?", but "how might we best do it?". The article then goes on to conclude with a reflection on the use and abuse of power in clinical bioethics teaching and consultation.

Bioethics↗

PubMed2005

Between morality and repentance: recapturing "sin" for bioethics.

Distinguishing within "sin" the dimensions of anomia, hamartia, and asthenia makes it possible to analyze in greater detail the contrary manners in which traditional and post-traditional Christianities in this issue of Christian Bioethics endeavor to recapture what was lost when secular bioethics reconstructed the specifically spiritual-context-oriented normative commitments of Christianity in one-dimensionally moral terms. Various post-traditional attempts at securing moral orientation and resources for forgiveness, both of which secular bioethics finds increasingly difficult to provide, are critically reviewed. Their engagement of secular moral concepts and concerns, and even their adoption of an academically philosophical posture and language, is presented as responsible for their failure to adequately preserve what in traditional Christianity would count as prohibited vs. permitted, and advisable vs. non-advisable, or what would allow to resolve "tragic conflicts." The deeper reason for this failure lies in post-traditional Christianity's restricting the Christian life (with its central tension between love and the law) to what can be captured by cognitive categories. As the survey of several traditionally Christian accounts of sin in bioethics makes clear, both moral orientation (along with the resolution of "tragic" conflicts) and the sources of forgiveness are available, once that Christian life is framed in terms of persons' spirit-supported practical involvement in ascesis and liturgy, and once bioethical reflections are situated in the experiential context of such involvement.

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↗