En las ruinas de Babel: obstáculos en el camino de la elaboración de una lengua universal para la ética de la investigación

En la sección final de un artículo dedicado a la ética de la investigación internacional, publicado en el número de julio/agosto del Hastings Center Report, Alex London y Kevin Zollman postulan la necesidad de que las responsabilidades de investigacióninternacional en el campo de la medicina y la salud se asienten en un marco normativo más amplio, de justicia social, distributiva y rectificadora. De la misma manera, durante los últimos años y en toda una serie de publicaciones Thomas Pogge ha venido reclamando la necesidad de un enfoque basado en los derechos humanos en el ámbito de la investigación internaciona

Ethical endgames: Broad consent for narrow interests; Open consent for closed minds

The ongoing legal and bioethics debates on consent requirements for collecting, storing, and utilizing human biological material for purposes of basic and applied research—that is, genomic research biobanking—have already managed to pass through three ostensibly dissimilar stages</jats:p

Back to WHAT?:The role of research ethics in pandemic times

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic creates an unprecedented threatening situation worldwide with an urgent need for critical reflection and new knowledge production, but also a need for imminent action despite prevailing knowledge gaps and multilevel uncertainty. With regard to the role of research ethics in these pandemic times some argue in favor of exceptionalism, others, including the authors of this paper, emphasize the urgent need to remain committed to core ethical principles and fundamental human rights obligations all reflected in research regulations and guidelines carefully crafted over time. In this paper we disentangle some of the arguments put forward in the ongoing debate about Covid-19 human challenge studies (CHIs) and the concomitant role of health-related research ethics in pandemic times. We suggest it might be helpful to think through a lens differentiating between risk, strict uncertainty and ignorance. We provide some examples of lessons learned by harm done in the name of research in the past and discuss the relevance of this legacy in the current situation

Ética y responsabilidad: el pensamiento de la Grecia Clásica y sus lecciones sobre bioética contemporánea

La transmisión de la bioética suele utilizar ejemplos de casos reales, cuyo relato no siempre entusiasma o compromete a los profesionales de la salud. Esto es así debido a que al resumirlos y presentarlos de manera excesivamente documental se los priva del pathos situacional. Se propone por lo tanto el desarrollo de una metodología diferente, apoyada en la potencia de los diálogos platónicos y del valor literario de la tragedia griega. Estas ficciones universales tienen la ventaja de poner en marcha mecanismos como el de la catarsis y otros que han sido conceptualizados por Aristóteles en su Poética. La consideración de historias como el Edipo Rey, presenta además la posibilidad de analizar un tipo de responsabilidad diferente, la que proviene de aquellos actos no voluntarios pero que tienen efectos en la vida de las personas. Se proponen ejemplos situacionales con referencia al cine y a fuentes de la literatura clásica y contemporánea

Teaching old dogs new tricks: The role of analogies in bioethical analysis and argumentation concerning new technologies

New medical technologies provide us with new possibilities in health care and health care research. Depending on their degree of novelty, they may as well present us with a whole range of unforeseen normative challenges. Partly, this is due to a lack of appropriate norms to perceive and handle new technologies. This article investigates our ways of establishing such norms. We argue that in this respect analogies have at least two normative functions: they inform both our understanding and our conduct. Furthermore, as these functions are intertwined and can blur moral debates, a functional investigation of analogies can be a fruitful part of ethical analysis. We argue that although analogies can be conservative; because they bring old concepts to bear upon new ones, there are at least three ways in which they can be creative. First, understandings of new technologies are quite different from the analogies that established them, and come to be analogies themselves. That is, the concepts may turn out to be quite different from the analogies that established them. Second, analogies transpose similarities from one area into another, where they previously had no bearing. Third, analogies tend to have a figurative function, bringing in something new and different from the content of the analogies. We use research-biobanking as a practical example in our investigations