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 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

PubMed2003

Intervention bioethics: a proposal for peripheral countries in a context of power and injustice.

The bioethics of the so-called 'peripheral countries' must preferably be concerned with persistent situations, that is, with those problems that are still happening, but should not happen anymore in the 21st century. Resulting conflicts cannot be exclusively analysed based on ethical (or bioethical) theories derived from 'central countries.' The authors warn of the growing lack of political analysis of moral conflicts and of human indignation. The indiscriminate utilisation of the bioethics justification as a neutral methodological tool softens and even cancels out the seriousness of several problems, even those that might result in the most profound social distortions. The current study takes as a theoretical reference the fact that natural resources (which affect us all) are relevant. Based on these premises, and on the concept that equity means 'treating unevenly the unequal', a proposal of a hard bioethics (or intervention bioethics) is introduced, in defence of the historical insights and rights of economically and socially excluded populations that are separated from the international developmental process.

Bioethics↗

PubMed2004

Accounting for culture in a globalized bioethics.

How might a global bioethics account for profound cultural difference in a world marked by porous borders? The authors endorse a critical, self-reflexive bioethics, suggesting that bioethics needs to change its fundamental orientation if it is going to remain relevant and intellectually vibrant throughout the twenty-first century. Bioethics must attend to issue of social justice and public health, while seriously considering the implications of social context for medical morality. Negotiating moral consensus across cultural boundaries will be difficult, but is is more likely to succeed if we critically engage with the cultural assumptions underlying bioethics itself.

Bioethics↗

PubMed2004

Bioethics: a field in transition.

Bioethics is clearly a field in transition, if not confusion. The author examines two questions at the core of this transition. First, how will bioethics accommodate the different training needs and professional interests of those who understand themselves to be primarily scholars of bioethics, and those who understand themselves to be primarily practitioners of bioethics? And second, whether bioethics will continue to function as an interdisciplinary field or whether it will morph into a discipline in its own right.

Bioethics↗

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↗

PubMed2003

Differences from somewhere: the normativity of whiteness in bioethics in the United States.

I argue that there has been inadequate attention to and questioning of the dominance and normativity of whiteness in the cultural construction of bioethics in the United States. Therefore we risk reproducing white privilege and white supremacy in its theory, method, and practices. To make my argument, I define whiteness and trace its broader social and legal history in the United States. I then begin to mark whiteness in U.S. bioethics, recasting Renee Fox's sociological marking of its American-ness as an important initial marking of its whiteness/WASP ethos. Furthermore, I consider the attempts of social scientists to highlight sociocultural diversity as a corrective in U.S. bioethics. I argue that because they fail to problematize white dominance and normativity and the white-other dualism when they describe the standpoints of African-American, Asian-American, and Native-American others, their work merely inoculates difference and creates or maintains minoritized spaces. Accordingly, the dominant white center of mainstream U.S. bioethics must be problematized and displaced for diversity research to make a difference. In conclusion, I give several examples of how we might advance the recommended endeavor of exploring our own ethnicity, class, and other social positioning and norms operating in U.S. bioethics, briefly highlighting "white talk" as one challenge.

Bioethics↗

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↗

PubMed1999

The origins and evolution of bioethics: some personal reflections.

Bioethics was officially baptized in 1972, but its birth took place a decade or so before that date. Since its birth, what is known today as bioethics has undergone a complex conceptual metamorphosis. This essay loosely divides that metamorphosis into three stages: an educational, an ethical, and a global stage. In the educational era, bioethics focused on a perceived "dehumanization" of medicine by the rising power of science and technology. Remedies were sought by introducing humanities, ethics, and human "values" into the medical curriculum. Ethics was one among the humanistic disciplines, but not the dominant one. In the second era, ethics assumed a dominant role as ever more complex dilemmas emerged from the rapid pace of biological research. As such dilemmas were applied to medical practice, the need for a more rigorous and more formal analysis of their moral status was clear. Philosophically-trained ethicists had an obvious role. They began to teach, write, and profoundly influence medical education and practice. In the third -- and present -- period, the breadth of problems has become so broad that ethicists must, themselves, draw on disciplines well beyond their expertise -- e.g., law, religion, anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and the like. The era of bioethics as a global enterprise is upon us. The original hope for humanizing medicine has not been overtly successful; however, much has been accomplished of value to patients, the profession, and society. Medical morality has been transformed into a formal, systematic study of a whole range of issues of the greatest significance to humanity. Now the major challenge is one of identity, or inter-relationships and connections between the theoretical and the practical. Bioethics has outgrown its beginnings.

Academies and Institutes↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Theology, religious traditions, and bioethics.

The social and medical ethos within which bioethics emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s was constituted in part by religious questions and religious thinkers. However, this identifiably religious influence on bioethics subsequently seemed to decline. How has this diminished impact come about, and what significance, if any, does it hold for the ways we now do bioethics? What difference, finally, do religious perspectives make for bioethics? These were the overarching questions that led the Hastings Center to initiate a research project on the relation of Religion and Bioethics, culminating in this special supplement to the Hastings Center Report.

Bioethics↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Bioethics, power and injustice: for an ethics of intervention.

Bioethics of the so-called "peripheral countries" should be preferably concerned with the persistent situations, that is, with those problems that are still happening, but should not happen anymore in the 21st century. The resulting conflicts cannot be exclusively analyzed based on the ethical theories (or bioethical) arriving from "central countries". The authors alert for the increasing depoliticization of moral conflicts and for the lack of capacity of human indignation. The indiscriminate utilization of bioethics justification as a neutral methodological tool softens and even cancels out the gravity of different problems, even those that might result in the most profound social distortion. The current study sets as a theoretical reference the finitude of natural resources (which are all of them...) and corporality, pleasures and pain. From these premises and the introduction of the concept that equity means "to treat unevenly the unequal", the authors introduced a proposal of a hard bioethics or intervention bioethics, in support of the interest and the historical rights of the population economically and socially excluded from the international development practice.

Bioethics↗

PubMed2004

[Italian Thesaurus of Bioethics, TIB].

The article aims at illustrating the characteristics and functions of a monolingual thesaurus, focusing on the Italian Thesaurus of Bioethics (Thesaurus Italiano di Bioetica, TIB) the controlled vocabulary used to index and retrieve documents within SIBIL (Italian Online Bioethics Information System). TIB includes controlled terms (descriptors) translated from the Bioethics Thesaurus adopted by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics of the Georgetown University of Washington and revised according to the Italian context of study and scientific debate in the field of bioethics. The overall amount of TIB terms consists in over 1600 headings. Methods to link thesaurus terms hierarchically, by association and by showing synonyms as recommended in ISO standards are applied with reference to descriptors drawn from TIB. Future plans to make the English version of TIB available online within European networks are also illustrated, aiming at spreading information relating to bioethics at an international level.

Bioethical Issues↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Globalization of bioethics as an intercultural social tuning technology.

Now, in the beginning of the 21st century, bioethics must be urgently globalized into a Global Bioethics which combines the ongoing Bioethics based on the modern European humanism with the newly arising Environmental Ethics based on the rather communitarian (or Asian) ways of thinking. This does not always mean that the new global bioethics is necessarily universalistic, for we should stand on the recognition of the wide spread variety of value systems in the world, north and south, east and west. However, it is not particularistic either, for in order to establish a post-modern global ethics, we have to accept and harmonize every kind of antagonistic values on the Globe. For this purpose we have to cultivate a new social technology of tuning social disorder of not only international but also inter-ethnic and inter-cultural level of ideology beyond the modern European humanism. Here the concept of "human rights" or the concept of "human dignity" may lose its significance as it has held in the past bioethical thinking in the western world.

Asia↗

PubMed2005

Reflections on public bioethics: a view from the trenches.

For many reasons, and more than its predecessors, the President's Council on Bioethics has been the subject of much public attention and heated controversy. But little of that attention and controversy has been informed by knowledge of the Council's mission, its ways of working, and, most importantly, its actual work. This essay describes the Council's mission, discusses its public ways of working, and reviews the five major works produced during the Council's first term. In all its activities, the Council has sought to develop a richer bioethics, one that recognizes and tries to do justice to the deep issues of our humanity raised by the age of biotechnology. Believing that these issues are properly matters to be discussed and governed by the polity as a whole, the Council also has sought to contribute to a genuinely public or political bioethics, beyond the rule of "experts," scientific and bioethical.

Advisory Committees↗

PubMed2004

Law & bioethics: from values to violence.

The relationship of law of bioethics always complex, has shifted post 9/11. Instead of looking to law as protector of rights and liberties, the new bioethics approach, exemplified by the President's Council on Bioethics, deploys law as aggressor. Thus we see a call to get tough, to prohibit a range of biomedical practices, with the prospect of not only civil but criminal enforcement. Bioethicists face a grave choice, whether to embrace the use of state force to resolve bioethics debates.

Bioethical Issues↗

PubMed2004

The Olivieri debacle: where were the heroes of bioethics?

All Canadian bioethicists need to reflect on the meaning and value of their work, to see more clearly how the ethics of bioethics is being undermined from within. In the case involving Dr Olivieri, the Hospital for Sick Children, the University of Toronto, and Apotex Inc, there were countless opportunities for bioethical heroism. And yet, no bioethics heroes emerged from this case. Much has been written about the hospital's and the university's failures in this case. But what about the deafening silence from the Canadian bioethics community? Given the duty of bioethicists to "speak truth to power", this silence is troubling. To date, nothing has been written about the silence. This article is intended as a partial remedy. As well, the article pays tribute to heretofore unsung heroes among Dr Olivieri's research colleagues.

Academic Medical Centers↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Medical bioethics and cultural diversity.

Medical bioethics has developed as a new field of study in the US in the past quarter decade, focusing upon the moral principles of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. These principles may, however, reflect biases in American culture, rather than a truly universal approach to ethical problems in medicine and health care. Alternative models for bioethics may take the cultural beliefs and practices of different countries more seriously. These different models of bioethics may have important implications for the study of ethical issues in pediatrics. Effective dialogue between America and other countries such as India, especially when focused on particular clinical cases, should expand the understanding of bioethics in those other countries, as well as bringing new light upon American bioethical principles.

Bioethics↗

PubMed2006

Findings from a European survey on current bioethics training activities in hospitals.

While much work has been done on improving undergraduate education in bioethics, particularly in medicine, less has been said about continuing education of health care workers, particularly non-medical and nursing personnel. Hospitals bring together a variety of professional and non-professional groups in the place where clinical dilemmas are daily events, and would seem ideal places to conduct an ongoing bioethics dialogue. Yet evidence that this is being achieved is sparse. The European Hospital (-Based) Bioethics Program (EHBP) brings together both current and aspirant members of the EU as partners in a project that aims to assess the current situation with regard to bioethics education in hospitals, identify shortfalls, and address these. In order to achieve the first objective of the EHBP a survey of the current training activities (focused on activities in hospitals) in clinical bioethics in Europe was carried out. The results are presented in this paper, along with a discussion about the implications for the EHBP to address these issues.

Bioethics↗