Ad
related to: what is the difference between applied ethics and bioethics educationOnline Bachelor's Programs in Early Childhood, Elementary, Special Ed. and More. Choose From 40+ Education Programs. Flexible and Convenient Format.
- Early Childhood Education
Content Curriculum That Focuses on
Teaching From Birth Through Grade 3
- About GCU
Discover GCU's Flexible, Accredited
and Affordable Online Programs
- Early Childhood Education
Search results
- Applied Ethics involves the analysis of specific controversial moral issues such as abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, pollution, etc. Bioethics is a field within applied ethics that focuses on ethical issues that relate to biology and biological systems.
aese.psu.edu › teachag › curriculum
People also ask
What is the difference between applied ethics and bioethics?
What is bioethics?
What is the ethical question in bioethics?
What is bioethics education?
Applied Ethics involves the analysis of specific controversial moral issues such as abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, pollution, etc. Bioethics is a field within applied ethics that focuses on ethical issues that relate to biology and biological systems.
Bioethics is the multi-disciplinary study of, and response, to these moral and ethical questions. Bioethical questions often involve overlapping concerns from diverse fields of study including life sciences, biotechnology, public health, medicine, public policy, law, philosophy and theology.
- Overview
- Definition and development
- The health care context
- Traditional philosophical questions
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. (Such questions are studied primarily in the independent fields of environmental ethics [see environmentalism] and animal rights.)
(Read Peter Singer’s Britannica entry on ethics.)
The range of issues considered to fall within the purview of bioethics varies depending on how broadly the field is defined. In one common usage, bioethics is more or less equivalent to medical ethics, or biomedical ethics. The term medical ethics itself has been challenged, however, in light of the growing interest in issues dealing with health care professions other than medicine, in particular nursing. The professionalization of nursing and the perception of nurses as ethically accountable in their own right have led to the development of a distinct field known as nursing ethics. Accordingly, health care ethics has come into use as a more inclusive term. Bioethics, however, is broader than this, because some of the issues it encompasses concern not so much the practice of health care as the conduct and results of research in the life sciences, especially in areas such as cloning and gene therapy (see clone and genetic engineering), stem cell research, xenotransplantation (animal-to-human transplantation), and human longevity.
Although bioethics—and indeed the whole field of applied ethics as currently understood—is a fairly recent phenomenon, there have been discussions of moral issues in medicine since ancient times. Examples include the corpus of the Greek physician Hippocrates (460–377 bc), after whom the Hippocratic oath is named (though Hippocrates himself was not its author); the Republic of Plato (428/27–348/47 bc), which advocates selective human breeding in anticipation of later programs of eugenics; the Summa contra gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274), which briefly discusses the permissibility of abortion; and the Lectures on Ethics of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), which contains arguments against the sale of human body parts.
The issues studied in bioethics can be grouped into several categories. One category concerns the relationship between doctor and patient, including issues that arise from conflicts between a doctor’s duty to promote the health of his patient and the patient’s right to self-determination or autonomy, a right that in the medical context is usually taken to encompass a right to be fully informed about one’s condition and a right to be consulted about the course of one’s treatment. Is a doctor obliged to tell a patient that he is terminally ill if there is good reason to believe that doing so would hasten the patient’s death? If a patient with a life-threatening illness refuses treatment, should his wishes be respected? Should patients always be permitted to refuse the use of extraordinary life-support measures? These questions become more complicated when the patient is incapable of making rational decisions in his own interest, as in the case of infants and children, patients suffering from disabling psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia or degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer disease, and patients who are in a vegetative state (see coma).
Are you a student? Get Britannica Premium for only 24.95 - a 67% discount!
Another category of issues concerns a host of philosophical questions about the definition and significance of life and death, the nature of personhood and identity, and the extent of human freedom and individual responsibility. At what point should a fatally injured or terminally ill patient be considered dead? When his vital functions—e.g., heartbeat and breathing—have ceased? When the brain stem has ceased to function? Should the presence of deep coma be sufficient to establish death? These and similar questions were given new urgency in the 1960s, when the increased demand for human organs and tissues for use in transplant operations forced medical ethicists to establish guidelines for determining when it is permissible to remove organs from a potential donor.
At about the same time, the development of safer techniques of surgical abortion and the growing acceptability of abortion as a method of birth control prompted increasing debate about the moral status of the human fetus. In philosophical discussion, this debate was framed in terms of the notion of a “person,” understood as any being whose interests are deserving of special moral concern. The central issue was whether—and, if so, at what stage—the fetus is a person in the moral sense. In slightly different terms, the issue was whether the class of persons is coextensive with the class of human beings—whether all and only human beings are persons, or whether instead there can be human beings who are not persons or persons who are not human beings (the latter category, according to some, includes some of the higher animals and hypothetical creatures such as intelligent Martians). These questions were raised anew in later decades in response to the development of drugs, such as RU-486 (mifepristone), that induce abortion up to several weeks after conception and to the use of stem cells taken from human embryos in research on the treatment of conditions such as parkinsonism (Parkinson disease) and injuries of the central nervous system.
A closely related set of issues concerns the nature of personal identity. Recent advances in techniques of cloning, which enabled the successful cloning of animals such as sheep and rabbits, have renewed discussion of the traditional philosophical question of what, if anything, makes a particular human being the unique person he is. Is a person just the sum of the information encoded in his genes? If so, is the patient who has undergone gene therapy a different person from the one he was before—i.e., has he become someone else? If a human being were to be cloned, in what sense would he be a copy of his “parent”? Would he and his parent be the same person? If multiple human beings were cloned from the same parent, would they and their parent all be the same person?
The attempt to understand personal identity in terms of genetic information also raised anew the philosophical problems of free will and determinism. To what extent, if any, is human personality or character genetically rather than environmentally determined? Are there genetic bases for certain types of behaviour, as there seem to be for certain types of diseases (e.g., Tay-Sachs disease)? If so, what kinds of behaviour are so influenced, and to what extent are they also influenced by environmental factors? If behaviour is at least partly genetically determined, should individuals always be held fully responsible for what they do?
Bioethics is the field that explores ethical issues and analyzes advances in health-related sciences, like biology or chemistry, and medicine. It brings together the ideas of philosophers, physicians, lawyers, scientists, and public health professionals.
The “bio” puts the ethical question into a particular context. Bioethics is commonly understood to refer to the ethical implications and applications of the health-related life sciences. These implications can run the entire length of the bench-to-bedside “translational pipeline.”. Dilemmas can arise for the basic scientist who wants to ...
Nov 25, 2020 · 1. What is Moral Theory? What is Bioethics? 1.1 Varying Accounts of Moral Theory. 1.2 The Pursuits of Bioethics. 2. What is the Nature of Applied Ethics? 2.1 Problems with the “Applied Model” of Applied Ethics. 2.2 Applied Ethics and Disagreement on Theory. 2.3 Applied Ethics and Rule Application. 2.4 Toulmin on the Tyranny of Principles. 3.
Oct 28, 2021 · In this context, bioethics education should promote the ethical transformation of learners without imposing any particular belief on them, but by identifying, recognizing, and respecting social, cultural, and religious differences.
