Bioethics

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Terms modified by Bioethics

  • bioethics reviewer

  • Selected Abstracts


    GLOBAL BIOETHICS: UTOPIA OR REALITY?

    DEVELOPING WORLD BIOETHICS, Issue 2 2008
    SIRKKU K. HELLSTEN
    ABSTRACT This article discusses what ,global bioethics' means today and what features make bioethical research ,global'. The article provides a historical view of the development of the field of ,bioethics', from medical ethics to the wider study of bioethics in a global context. It critically examines the particular problems that ,global bioethics' research faces across cultural and political borders and suggests some solutions on how to move towards a more balanced and culturally less biased dialogue in the issues of bioethics. The main thesis is that we need to bring global and local aspects closer together, when looking for international guidelines, by paying more attention to particular cultures and local economic and social circumstances in reaching a shared understanding of the main values and principles of bioethics, and in building ,biodemocracy'. [source]


    UNIVERSAL DRAFT DECLARATION ON BIOETHICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

    DEVELOPING WORLD BIOETHICS, Issue 3 2005
    Cultural Organization, Scientific, United Nations Educational
    First page of article [source]


    THE PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON BIOETHICS,REQUIESCAT IN PACE

    JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 2 2010
    Ronald M. Green
    ABSTRACT In mid-June 2009, the Obama administration dissolved the President's Council on Bioethics (PCBE), a group established by President George W. Bush in August 2001 and whose nearly eight-year life was marked from beginning to end by controversy. While some will regret the PCBE's passing, others will regard the Council as a failed experiment in doing public bioethics. [source]


    CHRISTIAN BIOETHICS: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED by Agneta Sutton

    NEW BLACKFRIARS, Issue 1026 2009
    LAWRENCE LEW OP
    No abstract is available for this article. [source]


    THE DEATH OF BIOETHICS (AS WE ONCE KNEW IT)

    BIOETHICS, Issue 5 2010
    RUTH MACKLIN
    ABSTRACT Fast forward 50 years into the future. A look back at what occurred in the field of bioethics since 2010 reveals that a conference in 2050 commemorated the death of bioethics. In a steady progression over the years, the field became increasingly fragmented and bureaucratized. Disagreement and dissension were rife, and this once flourishing, multidisciplinary field began to splinter in multiple ways. Prominent journals folded, one by one, and were replaced with specialized publications dealing with genethics, reproethics, nanoethics, and necroethics. Mainstream bioethics organizations also collapsed, giving way to new associations along disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines. Physicians established their own journals, and specialty groups broke away from more general associations of medical ethics. Lawyers also split into three separate factions, and philosophers rejected all but the most rigorous, analytic articles into their newly established journal. Matters finally came to a head with global warming, the world-wide spread of malaria and dengue, and the cost of medical treatments out of reach for almost everyone. The result was the need to develop plans for strict rationing of medical care. At the same time, recognition emerged of the importance of the right to health and the need for global justice in health. By 2060, a spark of hope was ignited, opening the door to the resuscitation of bioethics and involvement of the global community. [source]


    THE FUTURE OF BIOETHICS: THREE DOGMAS AND A CUP OF HEMLOCK

    BIOETHICS, Issue 5 2010
    ANGUS DAWSON
    ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that bioethics is in crisis and that it will not have a future unless it begins to embrace a more Socratic approach to its leading assumptions. The absence of a critical and sceptical spirit has resulted in little more than a dominant ideology. I focus on three key issues. First, that too often bioethics collapses into medical ethics. Second, that medical ethics itself is beset by a lack of self-reflection that I characterize here as a commitment to three dogmas. Third, I offer a more positive perspective by suggesting how bioethics may benefit from looking towards public health ethics as a new source of inspiration and direction. [source]


    HOW TO CONNECT BIOETHICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: HEALTH, SUSTAINABILITY, AND JUSTICE

    BIOETHICS, Issue 9 2009
    JAMES DWYER
    ABSTRACT In this paper, I explore one way to bring bioethics and environmental ethics closer together. I focus on a question at the interface of health, sustainability, and justice: How well does a society promote health with the use of no more than a just share of environmental capacity? To address this question, I propose and discuss a mode of assessment that combines a measurement of population health, an estimate of environmental sustainability, and an assumption about what constitutes a fair or just share. This mode of assessment provides an estimate of the just and sustainable life expectancy of a population. It could be used to monitor how well a particular society promotes health within just environmental limits. It could also serve as a source of information that stakeholders use when they deliberate about programs, policies, and technologies. The purpose of this work is to focus attention on an ethical task: the need to fashion institutions and forms of life that promote health in ways that recognize the claims of sustainability and justice. [source]


    THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH: A GLOBAL RENAISSANCE FOR BIOETHICS

    BIOETHICS, Issue 2 2009
    PATRICIA ILLINGWORTH
    First page of article [source]


    IS IT TIME FOR BIOETHICS TO GO EMPIRICAL?

    BIOETHICS, Issue 3 2008
    CHRIS HERRERA
    ABSTRACT Observers who note the increasing popularity of bioethics discussions often complain that the social sciences are poorly represented in discussions about things like abortion and stem-cell research. Critics say that bioethicists should be incorporating the methods and findings of social scientists, and should move towards making the discipline more empirically oriented. This way, critics argue, bioethics will remain relevant, and truly reflect the needs of actual people. Such recommendations ignore the diversity of viewpoints in bioethics, however. Bioethics can gain much from the methods and findings from ethnographies and similar research. But it is misleading to suggest that bioethicists are unaware of this potential benefit. Not only that, bioethicists are justified in having doubts about the utility of the social science approach in some cases. This is not because there is some inherent superiority in non-empirical approaches to moral argument. Rather, the doubts concern the nature of the facts that the sciences would provide. Perhaps the larger point is that disagreements about the relationship between facts and normative arguments should be seen as part of the normal inquiry in bioethics, not evidence that reform is needed. [source]


    THE 8TH WORLD CONGRESS OF BIOETHICS, BEIJING, AUGUST 2006.

    BIOETHICS, Issue 8 2007
    A JUST AND HEALTHY SOCIETY
    No abstract is available for this article. [source]


    IMAGINING A NEW WORLD: USING INTERNATIONALISM TO OVERCOME THE 10/90 GAP IN BIOETHICS

    BIOETHICS, Issue 8 2007
    ALEXANDER MORGAN CAPRON
    ABSTRACT The IAB Presidential Address was delivered by Alexander Capron to the internationally gathered audience at the Closing Ceremony of the 8th World Congress of Bioethics, Beijing on 9th August 2006. [source]


    WHAT ,EMPIRICAL TURN IN BIOETHICS'?

    BIOETHICS, Issue 8 2010
    SAMIA HURST
    ABSTRACT Uncertainty as to how we should articulate empirical data and normative reasoning seems to underlie most difficulties regarding the ,empirical turn' in bioethics. This article examines three different ways in which we could understand ,empirical turn'. Using real facts in normative reasoning is trivial and would not represent a ,turn'. Becoming an empirical discipline through a shift to the social and neurosciences would be a turn away from normative thinking, which we should not take. Conducting empirical research to inform normative reasoning is the usual meaning given to the term ,empirical turn'. In this sense, however, the turn is incomplete. Bioethics has imported methodological tools from empirical disciplines, but too often it has not imported the standards to which researchers in these disciplines are held. Integrating empirical and normative approaches also represents true added difficulties. Addressing these issues from the standpoint of debates on the fact-value distinction can cloud very real methodological concerns by displacing the debate to a level of abstraction where they need not be apparent. Ideally, empirical research in bioethics should meet standards for empirical and normative validity similar to those used in the source disciplines for these methods, and articulate these aspects clearly and appropriately. More modestly, criteria to ensure that none of these standards are completely left aside would improve the quality of empirical bioethics research and partly clear the air of critiques addressing its theoretical justification, when its rigour in the particularly difficult context of interdisciplinarity is what should be at stake. [source]


    GOOD GIFTS FOR THE COMMON GOOD: Blood and Bioethics in the Market of Genetic Research

    CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2007
    DEEPA S. REDDY
    This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Indian community in Houston, as part of a NIH,NHGRI-sponsored ethics study and sample collection initiative entitled "Indian and Hindu Perspectives on Genetic Variation Research." At the heart of this research is one central exchange,blood samples donated for genetic research,that draws both the Indian community and a community of researchers into an encounter with bioethics. I consider the meanings that come to be associated with blood donation as it passes through various hands, agendas, and associated ethical filters on its way to the lab bench: how and why blood is solicited, how the giving and taking of blood is rationalized, how blood as material substance is alienated, processed, documented, and made available for the promised ends of basic science research. Examining corporeal substances and asking what sorts of gifts and problems these represent, I argue, sheds some light on two imbricated tensions expressed by a community of Indians, on the one hand, and of geneticists and basic science researchers, on the other hand: that gifts ought to be free (but are not), and that science ought to be pure (but is not). In this article, I explore how experiences of bioethics are variously shaped by the histories and habits of Indic giving, prior sample collection controversies, commitments to "good science" and the common "good of humanity," and negotiations of the sites where research findings circulate. [source]


    Globalization and Health: Challenges for Health Law and Bioethics , By Belinda Bennett & George Tomossy

    DEVELOPING WORLD BIOETHICS, Issue 3 2007
    BERNARD DICKENS
    No abstract is available for this article. [source]


    Who should fund and control the direction of human behavior genetics?

    GENES, BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR, Issue 6 2003
    Genetics, Human Behaviour: the Ethical Context, Review of Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2002 Report
    In this (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2002), the third in its series on ethics and related issues in genetics (see also Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1993 and Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1998), the Nuffield Council has focused on four ,normal' behaviors; intelligence, personality, antisocial behavior and sexual orientation. This is a narrow range of behaviors and one where their discussion of the potential impact of predictive genetic testing is probably inappropriate. They also take an unduly narrow view of the purposes of behavior genetics in the 21st century. It is not simply to estimate heritability but to understand more about the structure of behavior and the processes which underlie it. Their narrow focus and their negative approach to the history and achievements of genetics is reflected in their less than positive support for future behavior genetic research. Behavior geneticists need to do more to publicize what their field has achieved in order to counter the very extensive antibehavior genetics initiatives which are almost unique in science. At the same time, organizations such as the Nuffield Council need to consider carefully the impact their deliberations may have on research funding. [source]


    Bioethics and the Samoan indigenous reference

    INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 195 2009
    Tupua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi Tui Atua
    Bioethical questions are of primary concern to science, religion and traditional or indigenous knowledge. What the indigenous reference can offer the world is a re-appreciation of the rightful place of the spiritual, sacred and tapu (implicit in indigenous cultural rituals) in ethical debates. This article explores what might be the ethical in the Samoan indigenous reference. Two main indigenous Samoan concepts, tapu (the sacred) and tofa sa'ili (the search for wisdom), are considered and situated in contemporary Samoan experiences and understandings of the ethical. If ethics is about moral principles or values, these two Samoan concepts provide the basis for ethical research in a Samoan indigenous context. This article aims at providing a Samoan frame of reference to deliberate about universal codes for bioethical research and the nature of ethical research practice in the Pacific. [source]


    The rationale of value-laden medicine

    JOURNAL OF EVALUATION IN CLINICAL PRACTICE, Issue 1 2002
    Michael H. Kottow MA(Soc) MD
    Abstract Medicine is becoming increasingly confident that scientific advances, especially in the area of genetics, will allow a major improvement in the control and eradication of disease. This development seems to go hand in hand with health-enhancement strategies, erasing the distinction between the states of health and disease, and blurring the specific goals of medical services. Medicine tends to become an increasingly technocentric practice that relies heavily on expert knowledge and on epidemiological evidence, neglecting the lived-body experience of being ill, and tending to transform costly medical services into commodities only affordable by the affluent. This paper argues that disease is not merely a functional description, but rather a definitely value-laden organismic state that is experienced by the patient, needs to be explored and treated by medical practitioners, and requires the assessment and participation of social institutions concerned with the delivery and support of medical services. Each of these perspectives introduces its own set of values, both in the clinical encounter and in public health programmes. Bioethics seems to be the appropriate discipline to discuss all these values involved, and help assign them properly in order to rescue the caring concern of medicine for the sick, as well as uphold a principle of fairness in publicly funded medical services. [source]


    THE PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON BIOETHICS,REQUIESCAT IN PACE

    JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 2 2010
    Ronald M. Green
    ABSTRACT In mid-June 2009, the Obama administration dissolved the President's Council on Bioethics (PCBE), a group established by President George W. Bush in August 2001 and whose nearly eight-year life was marked from beginning to end by controversy. While some will regret the PCBE's passing, others will regard the Council as a failed experiment in doing public bioethics. [source]


    Bioethics, Theology, and Social Change

    JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 3 2003
    Lisa Sowle Cahill
    ABSTRACT Recent years have witnessed a concern among theological bioethicists that secular debate has grown increasingly "thin," and that "thick" religious traditions and their spokespersons have been correspondingly excluded. This essay disputes that analysis. First, religious and theological voices compete for public attention and effectiveness with the equally "thick" cultural traditions of modern science and market capitalism. The distinctive contribution of religion should be to emphasize social justice in access to the benefits of health care, challenging the for-profit global marketing of research and biotechnology to wealthy consumers. Second, religion and theology have been and are still socially effective in sponsoring activism for practical change, both locally and globally. This claim will be supported with specific examples; with familiar concepts like subsidiarity and "middle axioms"; and with recent analyses of "participatory democracy" and of emerging, decentralized forms of global governance. [source]


    Feminist Bioethics: Where We've Been, Where We's Going

    METAPHILOSOPHY, Issue 5 2000
    Hilde Lindemann Nelson
    The primary contribution of feminism to bioethics is to note how imbalances of power in the sex-gender system play themselves out in medical practice and in the theory surrounding that practice. I trace the ten-year history of feminist approaches to bioethics, arguing that while feminists have usefully critiqued medicine's biases in favor of men, they have unmasked sexism primarily in the arena of women's reproductive health, leaving other areas of health care sorely in need of feminist scrutiny. I note as well that feminist bioethicists have contributed very little to bioethical theory. In the second part of the paper I suggest two future directions for feminist bioethics. The first is to expand its critique of gender bias beyond reproductive medicine, devoting attention to the same issues raised by advances in biomedical technology as are taken up by mainstream bioethicists. The second is to develop bioethical theory that is more responsive than are mainstream moral theories to the social practices that subordinate women and minority groups. [source]


    Obtaining informed consent for clinical pain research: patients' concerns and informational needs. (University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, Philadelphia, PA) Pain.

    PAIN PRACTICE, Issue 4 2001
    2001;92:7
    Investigators who conduct pain research are required to obtain voluntary informed consent from patients. However, little is known about what information patients expect when they decide whether to enroll in such studies. It is important that the investigators understand the need for information so that they can effectively and clearly describe the research risks and potential benefits that matter to the potential subjects. This study was designed to define information needs that patients have when they decide whether to participate in clinical pain research and identified clinical and demographic variables associate with specific needs. [source]


    Bioethics: A Systematic Approach.

    THE HEYTHROP JOURNAL, Issue 3 2008
    By Bernard Gert, Charles M. Culver, K. Danner Clouser Bioethic: An Anthology.
    First page of article [source]


    Looking Forward in Bioethics

    THE JOURNAL OF LAW, MEDICINE & ETHICS, Issue 2 2004
    Jeffrey Kahn
    No abstract is available for this article. [source]


    Does Ethical Theory Have a Future in Bioethics?

    THE JOURNAL OF LAW, MEDICINE & ETHICS, Issue 2 2004
    Tom L. Beauchamp
    First page of article [source]


    The Animal Research Debate

    THE POLITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2005
    SIMON FESTING
    Animal rights extremism has encouraged the media to examine the benefits and justification of animal research. There is broad support from the scientific community and government for carefully conducted animal research; however, Parliament is hindered, as many MPs are ill-informed. The recent Nuffield Council on Bioethics investigated the issue and determined that in carefully considered cases animal research is justified, scientifically valid, and has contributed to human health. The great majority of the public accept the need for animal research for medical progress when there is no alternative method available. Arguments used by anti-vivisectionists are discussed, many of which are unfounded and based on misconceptions. [source]


    Bioethics and the new embryology: Springboards for debate: Gilbert, Scott F., Tyler, Anna L., and Zackin, Emily J.

    BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EDUCATION, Issue 2 2006
    Donald Voet
    No abstract is available for this article. [source]


    Enhancing bioethics, enhancing bioscience: Bioethics and the New Embryology: Springboards for Debate by Scott F. Gilbert, Anna L. Tyler, and Emily J. Zackin. (2005).

    BIOESSAYS, Issue 10 2006
    Sunderland MA: Sinauer Associates.
    No abstract is available for this article. [source]


    WHAT ,EMPIRICAL TURN IN BIOETHICS'?

    BIOETHICS, Issue 8 2010
    SAMIA HURST
    ABSTRACT Uncertainty as to how we should articulate empirical data and normative reasoning seems to underlie most difficulties regarding the ,empirical turn' in bioethics. This article examines three different ways in which we could understand ,empirical turn'. Using real facts in normative reasoning is trivial and would not represent a ,turn'. Becoming an empirical discipline through a shift to the social and neurosciences would be a turn away from normative thinking, which we should not take. Conducting empirical research to inform normative reasoning is the usual meaning given to the term ,empirical turn'. In this sense, however, the turn is incomplete. Bioethics has imported methodological tools from empirical disciplines, but too often it has not imported the standards to which researchers in these disciplines are held. Integrating empirical and normative approaches also represents true added difficulties. Addressing these issues from the standpoint of debates on the fact-value distinction can cloud very real methodological concerns by displacing the debate to a level of abstraction where they need not be apparent. Ideally, empirical research in bioethics should meet standards for empirical and normative validity similar to those used in the source disciplines for these methods, and articulate these aspects clearly and appropriately. More modestly, criteria to ensure that none of these standards are completely left aside would improve the quality of empirical bioethics research and partly clear the air of critiques addressing its theoretical justification, when its rigour in the particularly difficult context of interdisciplinarity is what should be at stake. [source]


    A STUDY OF BIOETHICAL KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTIONS IN KOREA

    BIOETHICS, Issue 6 2010
    YOUNG-JOON PARK
    ABSTRACT This study assessed the knowledge and perception of human biological materials (HBM) and biorepositories among three study groups in South Korea. The relationship between the knowledge and the perception among different groups was also examined by using factor and regression analyses. In a self-reporting survey of 440 respondents, the expert group was found more likely to be knowledgeable and positively perceived than the others. Four factors emerged: Sale and Consent, Flexible Use, Self-Confidence, and Korean Bioethics and Biosafety Action restriction perception. The results indicate that those who are well aware of the existence of biobanks were more positively inclined to receive the Sale and Consent perception. As a result of the need for high quality HBMs and the use of appropriate sampling procedures for every aspect of the collection and use process, the biorepository community should pay attention to ethical, legal, and policy issues. [source]


    END-OF-LIFE CARE IN THE 21st CENTURY: ADVANCE DIRECTIVES IN UNIVERSAL RIGHTS DISCOURSE

    BIOETHICS, Issue 3 2010
    IREVI, VIOLETA BE
    ABSTRACT This article explores universal normative bases that could help to shape a workable legal construct that would facilitate a global use of advance directives. Although I believe that advance directives are of universal character, my primary aim in approaching this issue is to remain realistic. I will make three claims. First, I will argue that the principles of autonomy, dignity and informed consent, embodied in the Oviedo Convention and the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, could arguably be regarded as universal bases for the global use of advance directives. Second, I will demonstrate that, despite the apparent consensus of ethical authorities in support of their global use, it is unlikely, for the time being, that such consensus could lead to unqualified legal recognition of advance directives, because of different understandings of the nature of the international rules, meanings of autonomy and dignity which are context-specific and culture-specific, and existing imperfections that make advance directives either unworkable or hardly applicable in practice. The third claim suggests that the fact that the concept of the advance directive is not universally shared does not mean that it should not become so, but never as the only option in managing incompetent patients. A way to proceed is to prioritize work on developing higher standards in managing incompetent patients and on progressing towards the realization of universal human rights in the sphere of bioethics, by advocating a universal, legally binding international convention that would outlaw human rights violations in end-of-life decision-making. [source]