What is Bioethics?

Bioethics concerns itself with addressing ethical issues in healthcare, medicine, research,
biotechnology, and the environment.  Typically these issues are addressed from many different
disciplines. People contribute to the bioethics discussion drawing on expertise and methods from the
sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.  Professionals working in the field of bioethics include
philosophers, scientists, health administrators, lawyers, theologians, anthropologists, disability
advocates, and social workers. People may teach, do research, treat patients in the clinical setting or
work to change laws or public policy. The issues of bioethics are at the intersection between
medicine, law, public policy, religion, and science. Each field contributes important insights,
resources and methodologies and efforts to think about or make changes to practices and policies
that raise ethical concerns are often strongest when they draw on resources across disciplines. The
Showcase submission formats include some commonly used formats to present bioethics-related
proposals or findings.
Examples of topic areas that have been the focus of bioethics for a long time are organ donation and
transplantation, genetic research, death and dying, and environmental concerns.  New
developments in science and technology have focused attention on topics such as assisted
reproductive technologies, neuroethics (ethical issues around brain imaging and testing), and
nanotechnologies (using small particles to deliver medicine or other medical treatments).
Key ethical concerns in bioethics often involve big questions such as:
 What should I do? How should I act?
 How should I treat others? What are my obligations or responsibilities toward others?
 What type of person should I be? What does it mean to be a good doctor or a good nurse or
a good bench scientist?
Big moral considerations in bioethics often revolve around questions about:
 Whether one ought to act to maximize the best outcomes or ought to act to uphold important
moral rules and duties?  Or how to do both?
 Are we required only not to harm others or must we also act in ways that benefit them or
make their lives better?
 What should be done when we think policies or law are unethical because they don’t treat
people fairly or equally? What does it mean to treat people fairly?
 How could we design access to a scarce resource such that all people have a fair or maybe
an equal opportunity to obtain that scarce resource, e.g., organ allocation policies?
 How and when should we share information about a medical treatment to best permit others
make informed and voluntary decisions about what is done or not done to their bodies?  What
resources are needed to support people in making these decisions?
 When can minors make their own health care decisions? Who should decide if a minor
child’s opinions about a medical treatment for them differs from that of his/her parent(s)?
Some issues about which bioethics concerns itself:
 Physician patient relationship
 Death and dying
 Resource Allocation
 Assisted reproductive techniques and their use
 Genetic testing and screening
 Sexuality and gender
 Environmental  ethics
 Clinical research ethics
 Disability issues
 Consent, vulnerability, and/or coercion
 Mental health illness, treatments, and care for patients
 Ethical treatment of research subjects in clinical trials
 Ethical treatment of animals

Examples of topic areas that have been the focus of bioethics for a long time are organ
donation and transplantation, genetic research, death and dying, and environmental concerns.
Bioethics, branch of applied ethics that studies the philosophical, social, and legal issues
arising in medicine and the life sciences. It is chiefly concerned with human life and well-being,
though it sometimes also treats ethical questions relating to the nonhuman biological
environment.
Bioethical Issues in Health Care Management. ... By applying the principles of ethics to the
field of medicine, bioethics aims to investigate and study how health care decisions are made.
It is a core component of ensuring that medical practices and procedures benefit society as a
whole.
They learn how to analyze a situation or issue and find the underlying ethical issues involved.
They learn how to discern what is right and wrong in the decisions that need to be made in
medicine and health care and how to express that understanding to others.
 Bioethicists often refer to the four basic principles of health care ethics when evaluating the
merits and difficulties of medical procedures. Ideally, for a medical practice to be considered
"ethical", it must respect all four of these principles: autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-
maleficence.

Terms in this set (5)

 Beneficence. The duty to act to benefit others.
 Veracity. The duty to communicate truthfully. EXAMPLE. ...
 Justice. The duty to distribute resources or care equally, regardless of personal
attributes. EXAMPLE. ...
 Autonomy. Respecting the right of others to make their own decisions. ...
 Nonmaleficence. (aka: Fidelity)
What is the difference between bioethics and medical ethics?
Bioethics is generally more to do with theoretical ethical issues and concepts surrounding
all biomedical technologies, such as cloning, stem cell therapy, xenotransplantation and the
use of animals in research. Medical Ethics is more specific and focuses on
the medical treatment of humans in particular.

There are four pillars of medical ethics which are defined as follows:
 Autonomy – respect for the patient's right to self-determination.
 Beneficence – the duty to 'do good'
 Non-Maleficence – the duty to 'not do bad'
 Justice – to treat all people equally and equitably.

What is bioethics in religion?
Christian Bioethics is a non-ecumenical, interdenominational journal, exploring the Christian
faiths with regard to the meaning of human life, sexuality, suffering, illness, and death within the
context of medicine and health care.
What is the role of bioethics in our life today?
Bioethics concerns for ethical questions involve in human understanding of life. It born by
necessity of a critic reflection about ethical conflicts, which are caused by progressing
in life science and medicine. ... The balance between purposes that give benefits or damage is
produced by utilitarian ethics.
According to this understanding, “ethics” leans towards decisions based upon individual
character, and the more subjective understanding of right and wrong by individuals – whereas
“morals” emphasises the widely-shared communal or societal norms about right and wrong.
1. Introduction: The Challenge of Environmental
Ethics
Suppose putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or destroying some individual
members of overpopulated indigenous species is necessary for the protection of the integrity
of a certain ecosystem. Will these actions be morally permissible or even required? Is it
morally acceptable for farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn
techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining company which has performed
open pit mining in some previously unspoiled area. Does the company have a moral
obligation to restore the landform and surface ecology? And what is the value of a humanly
restored environment compared with the originally natural environment? It is often said to be
morally wrong for human beings to pollute and destroy parts of the natural environment and
to consume a huge proportion of the planet’s natural resources. If that is wrong, is it simply
because a sustainable environment is essential to (present and future) human well-being? Or
is such behaviour also wrong because the natural environment and/or its various contents
have certain values in their own right so that these values ought to be respected and protected
in any case? These are among the questions investigated by environmental ethics. Some of
them are specific questions faced by individuals in particular circumstances, while others are
more global questions faced by groups and communities. Yet others are more abstract
questions concerning the value and moral standing of the natural environment and its non-
human components.
In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between instrumental
value and intrinsic value (in the sense of “non-instrumental value”) has been of considerable
importance. The former is the value of things as means to further some other ends, whereas
the latter is the value of things as ends in themselves regardless of whether they are also
useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have instrumental value for bats
who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits is a means to survival for the bats. However, it
is not widely agreed that fruits have value as ends in themselves. We can likewise think of a
person who teaches others as having instrumental value for those who want to acquire
knowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is normally said that a person, as a person,
has intrinsic value, i.e., value in his or her own right independently of his or her prospects for
serving the ends of others. For another example, a certain wild plant may have instrumental
value because it provides the ingredients for some medicine or as an aesthetic object for
human observers. But if the plant also has some value in itself independently of its prospects
for furthering some other ends such as human health, or the pleasure from aesthetic
experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the intrinsically valuable is that
which is good as an end in itself, it is commonly agreed that something’s possession of
intrinsic value generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the part of moral agents to protect
it or at least refrain from damaging it (see O’Neil 1992 and Jamieson 2002 for detailed
accounts of intrinsic value).
Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-
centered in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might
call anthropocentric in a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of
intrinsic value to human beings than to any non-human things such that the protection or
promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of non-human things turns out to
be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a weak sense). For
example, Aristotle (Politics, Bk. 1, Ch. 8) maintains that “nature has made all things
specifically for the sake of man” and that the value of non-human things in nature is merely
instrumental. Generally, anthropocentric positions find it problematic to articulate what is
wrong with the cruel treatment of non-human animals, except to the extent that such
treatment may lead to bad consequences for human beings. Immanuel Kant (“Duties to
Animals and Spirits”, in Lectures on Ethics), for instance, suggests that cruelty towards a dog
might encourage a person to develop a character which would be desensitized to cruelty
towards humans. From this standpoint, cruelty towards non-human animals would be
instrumentally, rather than intrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often recognizes
some non-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) environmental
devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-being of human beings now and in the
future, since our well-being is essentially dependent on a sustainable environment (see
Passmore 1974; Bookchin 1990; Norton et al. (eds.) 1995).
When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of philosophy in the early
1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditional anthropocentrism. In the first place, it
questioned the assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on
earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments for assigning
intrinsic value to the natural environment and its non-human contents. It should be noted,
however, that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new, non-
anthropocentric theories. Instead, they advocate what may be
called enlightened anthropocentrism (or, perhaps more appropriately
called, prudential anthropocentrism). Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we
have towards the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants.
The practical purpose of environmental ethics, they maintain, is to provide moral grounds for
social policies aimed at protecting the earth’s environment and remedying environmental
degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for that practical
purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of
policy-making, than non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the latter to
provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the non-human environment has
intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Light and Katz 1996). Furthermore, some
prudential anthropocentrists may hold what might be called cynical anthropocentrism, which
says that we have a higher-level anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-
to-day thinking. Suppose that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends to act more benignly
towards the non-human environment on which human well-being depends. This would
provide reason for encouraging non-anthropocentric thinking, even to those who find the
idea of non-anthropocentric intrinsic value hard to swallow. In order for such a strategy to be
effective one may need to hide one’s cynical anthropocentrism from others and even from
oneself. The position can be structurally compared to some indirect form
of consequentialism and may attract parallel critiques (see Henry Sidgwick on utilitarianism
and esoteric morality, and Bernard Williams on indirect utilitarianism).
2. The Early Development of Environmental Ethics
Although nature was the focus of much nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy,
contemporary environmental ethics only emerged as an academic discipline in the 1970s.
The questioning and rethinking of the relationship of human beings with the natural
environment over the last thirty years reflected an already widespread perception in the
1960s that the late twentieth century faced a human population explosion as well as a serious
environmental crisis. Among the accessible work that drew attention to a sense of crisis was
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1963), which consisted of a number of essays earlier
published in the New Yorker magazine detailing how pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and
deildrin concentrated through the food web. Commercial farming practices aimed at
maximizing crop yields and profits, Carson speculates, are capable of impacting
simultaneously on environmental and public health.
In a much cited essay (White 1967) on the historical roots of the environmental crisis,
historian Lynn White argued that the main strands of Judeo-Christian thinking had
encouraged the overexploitation of nature by maintaining the superiority of humans over all
other forms of life on earth, and by depicting all of nature as created for the use of humans.
White’s thesis was widely discussed in theology, history, and has been subject to some
sociological testing as well as being regularly discussed by philosophers (see Whitney 1993,
Attfield 2001). Central to the rationale for his thesis were the works of the Church Fathers
and The Bible itself, supporting the anthropocentric perspective that humans are the only
things that matter on Earth. Consequently, they may utilize and consume everything else to
their advantage without any injustice. For example, Genesis 1: 27–8 states: “God created
man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the
earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the air, and
over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Likewise, Thomas Aquinas (Summa
Contra Gentiles, Bk. 3, Pt 2, Ch 112) argued that non-human animals are “ordered to man’s
use”. According to White, the Judeo-Christian idea that humans are created in the image of
the transcendent supernatural God, who is radically separate from nature, also by extension
radically separates humans themselves from nature. This ideology further opened the way for
untrammeled exploitation of nature. Modern Western science itself, White argued, was “cast
in the matrix of Christian theology” so that it too inherited the “orthodox Christian arrogance
toward nature” (White 1967: 1207). Clearly, without technology and science, the
environmental extremes to which we are now exposed would probably not be realized. The
point of White’s thesis, however, is that given the modern form of science and technology,
Judeo-Christianity itself provides the original deep-seated drive to unlimited exploitation of
nature. Nevertheless, White argued that some minority traditions within Christianity (e.g.,
the views of St. Francis) might provide an antidote to the “arrogance” of a mainstream
tradition steeped in anthropocentrism.
Around the same time, the Stanford ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich warned in The
Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968) that the growth of human population threatened the
viability of planetary life-support systems. The sense of environmental crisis stimulated by
those and other popular works was intensified by NASA’s production and wide
dissemination of a particularly potent image of earth from space taken at Christmas 1968 and
featured in the Scientific American in September 1970. Here, plain to see, was a living,
shining planet voyaging through space and shared by all of humanity, a precious vessel
vulnerable to pollution and to the overuse of its limited capacities. In 1972 a team of
researchers at MIT led by Dennis Meadows published the Limits to Growth study, a work
that summed up in many ways the emerging concerns of the previous decade and the sense
of vulnerability triggered by the view of the earth from space. In the commentary to the
study, the researchers wrote:
We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and enduring state of
equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be
founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national and world levels.
(Meadows et al. 1972: 195)
The call for a “basic change of values” in connection to the environment (a call that could be
interpreted in terms of either instrumental or intrinsic values) reflected a need for the
development of environmental ethics as a new sub-discipline of philosophy.
The new field emerged almost simultaneously in three countries—the United States,
Australia, and Norway. In the first two of these countries, direction and inspiration largely
came from the earlier twentieth century American literature of the environment. For instance,
the Scottish emigrant John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club and “father of American
conservation”) and subsequently the forester Aldo Leopold had advocated an appreciation
and conservation of things “natural, wild and free”. Their concerns were motivated by a
combination of ethical and aesthetic responses to nature as well as a rejection of crudely
economic approaches to the value of natural objects (a historical survey of the confrontation
between Muir’s reverentialism and the human-centred conservationism of Gifford Pinchot
(one of the major influences on the development of the US Forest Service) is provided in
Norton 1991; also see Cohen 1984 and Nash (ed) 1990). Leopold’s A Sand County
Almanac (1949), in particular, advocated the adoption of a “land ethic”:
That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and
respected is an extension of ethics. (Leopold 1949: vii–ix)
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic
community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (Leopold 1949: 224–5)
However, Leopold himself provided no systematic ethical theory or framework to support
these ethical ideas concerning the environment. His views therefore presented a challenge
and opportunity for moral theorists: could some ethical theory be devised to justify the
injunction to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biosphere?
The land ethic sketched by Leopold, attempting to extend our moral concern to cover the
natural environment and its non-human contents, was drawn on explicitly by the Australian
philosopher Richard Routley (later Sylvan). According to Routley (1973 (cf. Routley and
Routley 1980)), the anthropocentrism imbedded in what he called the “dominant western
view”, or “the western superethic”, is in effect “human chauvinism”. This view, he argued, is
just another form of class chauvinism, which is simply based on blind class “loyalty” or
prejudice, and unjustifiably discriminates against those outside the privileged class. Echoing
the plot of a popular movie some three years earlier (see Lo and Brennan 2013), Routley
speculates in his “last man” (and “last people”) arguments about a hypothetical situation in
which the last person, surviving a world catastrophe, acts to ensure the elimination of all
other living things and the last people set about destroying forests and ecosystems after their
demise. From the human-chauvinistic (or absolutely anthropocentric) perspective, the last
person would do nothing morally wrong, since his or her destructive act in question would
not cause any damage to the interest and well-being of humans, who would by then have
disappeared. Nevertheless, Routley points out that there is a moral intuition that the imagined
last acts would be morally wrong. An explanation for this judgment, he argued, is that those
non-human objects in the environment, whose destruction is ensured by the last person or
last people, have intrinsic value, a kind of value independent of their usefulness for humans.
From his critique, Routley concluded that the main approaches in traditional western moral
thinking were unable to allow the recognition that natural things have intrinsic value, and
that the tradition required overhaul of a significant kind.
Leopold’s idea that the “land” as a whole is an object of our moral concern also stimulated
writers to argue for certain moral obligations toward ecological wholes, such as species,
communities, and ecosystems, not just their individual constituents. The U.S.-based
theologian and environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III, for instance, argued that
species protection was a moral duty (Rolston 1975). It would be wrong, he maintained, to
eliminate a rare butterfly species simply to increase the monetary value of specimens already
held by collectors. Like Routley’s “last man” arguments, Rolston’s example is meant to draw
attention to a kind of action that seems morally dubious and yet is not clearly ruled out or
condemned by traditional anthropocentric ethical views. Species, Rolston went on to argue,
are intrinsically valuable and are usually more valuable than individual specimens, since the
loss of a species is a loss of genetic possibilities and the deliberate destruction of a species
would show disrespect for the very biological processes which make possible the emergence
of individual living things (also see Rolston 1989, Ch 10). Natural processes deserve respect,
according to Rolston’s quasi-religious perspective, because they constitute a nature (or God)
which is itself intrinsically valuable (or sacred).
Meanwhile, the work of Christopher Stone (a professor of law at the University of Southern
California) had become widely discussed. Stone (1972) proposed that trees and other natural
objects should have at least the same standing in law as corporations. This suggestion was
inspired by a particular case in which the Sierra Club had mounted a challenge against the
permit granted by the U.S. Forest Service to Walt Disney Enterprises for surveys preparatory
to the development of the Mineral King Valley, which was at the time a relatively remote
game refuge, but not designated as a national park or protected wilderness area. The Disney
proposal was to develop a major resort complex serving 14000 visitors daily to be accessed
by a purpose-built highway through Sequoia National Park. The Sierra Club, as a body with
a general concern for wilderness conservation, challenged the development on the grounds
that the valley should be kept in its original state for its own sake.
Stone reasoned that if trees, forests and mountains could be given standing in law then they
could be represented in their own right in the courts by groups such as the Sierra Club.
Moreover, like any other legal person, these natural things could become beneficiaries of
compensation if it could be shown that they had suffered compensatable injury through
human activity. When the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was determined by a
narrow majority that the Sierra Club did not meet the condition for bringing a case to court,
for the Club was unable and unwilling to prove the likelihood of injury to the interest of the
Club or its members. In a dissenting minority judgment, however, justices Douglas,
Blackmun and Brennan mentioned Stone’s argument: his proposal to give legal standing to
natural things, they said, would allow conservation interests, community needs and business
interests to be represented, debated and settled in court.
Reacting to Stone’s proposal, Joel Feinberg (1974) raised a serious problem. Only items that
have interests, Feinberg argued, can be regarded as having legal standing and, likewise,
moral standing. For it is interests which are capable of being represented in legal proceedings
and moral debates. This same point would also seem to apply to political debates. For
instance, the movement for “animal liberation”, which also emerged strongly in the 1970s,
can be thought of as a political movement aimed at representing the previously neglected
interests of some animals (see Regan and Singer (eds.) 1976, Clark 1977, and also the entry
on the moral status of animals). Granted that some animals have interests that can be
represented in this way, would it also make sense to speak of trees, forests, rivers, barnacles,
or termites as having interests of a morally relevant kind? This issue was hotly contested in
the years that followed. Meanwhile, John Passmore (1974) argued, like White, that the
Judeo-Christian tradition of thought about nature, despite being predominantly “despotic”,
contained resources for regarding humans as “stewards” or “perfectors” of God’s creation.
Skeptical of the prospects for any radically new ethic, Passmore cautioned that traditions of
thought could not be abruptly overhauled. Any change in attitudes to our natural
surroundings which stood the chance of widespread acceptance, he argued, would have to
resonate and have some continuities with the very tradition which had legitimized our
destructive practices. In sum, then, Leopold’s land ethic, the historical analyses of White and
Passmore, the pioneering work of Routley, Stone and Rolston, and the warnings of scientists,
had by the late 1970s focused the attention of philosophers and political theorists firmly on
the environment.
The confluence of ethical, political and legal debates about the environment, the emergence
of philosophies to underpin animal rights activism and the puzzles over whether an
environmental ethic would be something new rather than a modification or extension of
existing ethical theories were reflected in wider social and political movements. The rise of
environmental or “green” parties in Europe in the 1980s was accompanied by almost
immediate schisms between groups known as “realists” versus “fundamentalists” (see
Dobson 1990). The “realists” stood for reform environmentalism, working with business and
government to soften the impact of pollution and resource depletion especially on fragile
ecosystems or endangered species. The “fundies” argued for radical change, the setting of
stringent new priorities, and even the overthrow of capitalism and liberal individualism,
which were taken as the major ideological causes of anthropogenic environmental
devastation. It is not clear, however, that collectivist or communist countries do any better in
terms of their environmental record (see Dominick 1998).
Underlying these political disagreements was the distinction between “shallow” and “deep”
environmental movements, a distinction introduced in the early 1970s by another major
influence on contemporary environmental ethics, the Norwegian philosopher and climber
Arne Næss. Since the work of Næss has been significant in environmental politics, the
discussion of his position is given in a separate section below.