The principle of autonomy and biotechnological applications : a bioethics approach

What is it that makes the subject of bioethics autonomous? The problem that this research tries to clarify is What is it that makes the subject of bioethics autonomous? This question is answered from an applied ethics, bioethics. This article will show a new methodological approach to study the subject of bioethics. The principal objetives of this research that is presented here, are related to the relationship between: 1) Autonomy and information; 2) Autonomy and responsability; 3) Autonomy and freedom; and 4) Autonomy and social ties or social links

Erasmus Mundus Master of Bioethics: a case for an effective model for international bioethics education

Designing bioethics curriculum for international postgraduate students is a challenging task. There are at least two main questions, which have to be resolved in advance: (1) what is a purpose of a particular teaching program and (2) how to respectfully arrange a classroom for students coming from different cultural and professional backgrounds. In our paper we analyze the case of the Erasmus Mundus Master of Bioethics program and provide recommendations for international bioethics education. In our opinion teaching bioethics to postgraduate international students goes beyond curriculum. It means that such a program requires not only well-defined goals, including equipping students with necessary skills and knowledge, but also it should first and foremost facilitate positive group dynamics among students and enables them to engage in dialogue to learn from one another

Bioethics bonanza

Over the past couple of years, the Bioethics Consultative Committee has been active in promoting an understanding of bioethical issues within the medical profession, as well as more generally among the paramedical, and indeed the lay public. As part of this programme, a conferences was held on three consecutive evenings in November 1999 and dealt with three different topics, namely, Patient Rights, Reproductive Technology and Transplantation.peer-reviewe

Docile Bodies: Transnational Research Ethics as Biopolitics

This essay explores the claim that bioethics has become a mode of biopolitics. It seeks to illuminate one of the myriad of ways that bioethics joins other institutionalized discursive practices in the task of producing, organizing, and managing the bodies—of policing and controlling populations—in order to empower larger institutional agents. The focus of this analysis is the contemporary practice of transnational biomedical research. The analysis is catalyzed by the enormous transformation in the political economy of transnational research that has occurred over the past three decades and the accompanying increase in the numbers of human bodies now subjected to research. This essay uses the work of Michel Foucault, particularly his notion of docile bodies, to analyze these changes. Two loci from the bioethics literature are explored—one treating research in the United States and one treating research in developing countries. In the latter, we see a novel dynamic of the new biopolitics: the ways in which bioethics helps to create docile political bodies that will police themselves and who will, in turn, facilitate the production of docile human bodies for research

And Power Corrupts…: Theology and the Disciplinary Matrix of Bioethics

What role should religion play in a religiously pluralistic liberal society? Public bioethics unavoidably raises this question in a particularly insistent fashion. As the 20 papers in this collection demonstrate, the issues are complex and multifaceted. The authors address specific and highly contested issues as assisted suicide, stem cell research, cloning, reproductive health, and alternative medicine as well as more general questions such as who legitimately speaks for religion in public bioethics, what religion can add to our understanding of justice, and the value of faith-based contributions to healthcare. Christian (Catholic and Protestant), Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist viewpoints are represented. The first book to focus on the interface of religion and bioethics, this collection fills a significant void in the literature

A “Principled Resolution”: The Fulcrum for Bioethics Mediation

The concept of a principled resolution is the foundation for bioethics mediation. Dubler presents the core bioethical principles that support the creation of principled resolutions as fulcrums for resolving disagreements in the healthcare setting. These disputes may arise among medical providers, between medical providers and patients, or among members of a patient\u27s family and can be managed or resolved by bioethics mediation using the conceptual tool of a principled resolution

A “Principled Resolution”: The Fulcrum for Bioethics Mediation

The concept of a principled resolution is the foundation for bioethics mediation. Dubler presents the core bioethical principles that support the creation of principled resolutions as fulcrums for resolving disagreements in the healthcare setting. These disputes may arise among medical providers, between medical providers and patients, or among members of a patient\u27s family and can be managed or resolved by bioethics mediation using the conceptual tool of a principled resolution

The intellectual and moral integrity of bioethics: response to commentaries on A case study in unethical transgressive bioethics: \u27Letter of concern from bioethicists\u27 about the prenatal administration of dexamethasone .

In our target article we showed that the Letter of Concern (LoC) fails to meet accepted standards for presenting empirical data for the purpose of supplementing a normative claim and for argument-based normative ethics. The LoC fails to meet the standards of evidence-based reasoning by making false claims, failing to reference data that undermine its key premises, and misrepresenting and misinterpreting the scientific publications it selectively references. The LoC fails to meet the standards of argument-based reasoning by treating as settled matters what are, instead, ongoing controversies, offering “mere opinion” as a substitute for argument, and making contradictory claims. The LoC is methodologically defective and thus a case study in unethical transgressive bioethics. Not withdrawing the LoC will damage the field of bioethics, making this case study in unethical transgressive bioethics important for the entire field

Foreword: Urban Bioethics

On February 26, 1997, the Fordham University School of Law hosted the Sixth Annual Stein Center Symposium on Contemporary Urban Challenges, entitled Urban Bioethics: A Symposium on Health Care, Poverty, and Autonomy. The Foreword introduces Articles in this Symposium issue and discusses two central themes of the various Articles: socioeconomic framing of bioethical and healthcare issues, and the challenge of the moral consensus

Patient Autonomy in Talmudic Context: The Patient’s ‘‘I Must Eat’’ on Yom Kippur in the Light of Contemporary Bioethics

In contemporary bioethics, the autonomy of the patient has assumed considerable importance. Progressing from a more limited notion of informed consent, shared decision making calls upon patients to voice the desires and preferences of their authentic self, engaging in choice among alternatives as a way to exercise deeply held values. One influential opinion in Jewish bioethics holds that Jewish law, in contradistinction to secular bioethics, limits the patient's exercise of autonomy only in those instances in which treatment choices are sensitive to preferences. Here, we analyze a discussion in the Mishna, a foundational text of rabbinic Judaism, regarding patient autonomy in the setting of religiously mandated fasting, and commentaries in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, finding both a more expansive notion of such autonomy and a potential metaphysical grounding for it in the importance of patient self-knowledge