What is bioethics?
The term incorporates two words: ethics, which deals with the moral dimensions of decisions, policy and conductwhat we should or should not do, and bio which means “life” and refers to living things. Bioethics generally refers to moral decisions related to human life issues in medicine and biotechnology.
The following essay was delivered as a talk to the grade 12 and 13 students of Morrow Park High School in Toronto in May 2002. Ethics is the discipline dealing with what is good and bad, and with moral duty and obligation. It is of paramount importance, however, to realize at the outset, that the subject now commonly known as “bioethics” is entirely different from traditional medical ethics and from Catholic medical ethics. Traditional medical ethics, which originated with the Greek Hippocrates 2400 years ago, focuses on the physician’s duty to the individual patient, whose life and welfare are sacred. Catholic medical ethics has the same focus and is grounded in the ethical principles of the Moral Law, which is a combination of natural law philosophical ethics, Divine Revelation, and the teachings of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Bioethics, better identified as secular bioethics, on the contrary, is focused on the utilitarian principle of achieving the largest possible amoun
Dianne N. Irving, M.A., Ph.D. Tenth Annual Conference: Life and Learning X (in press) University Faculty For Life Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. June 3, 2000 “A small error in the beginning leads to a multitude of errors in the end.” Thomas Aquinas, De Ente Et Essentia Aristotle, De Coelo I. INTRODUCTION There is a strange phenomenon I have encountered over the last several years which I hope to at least identify with this essay. It is the apparent belief that bioethics is somehow the same as, or to be equated with, ethics per se, or at least with medical ethics per se. I have even heard it referred to as Roman Catholic medical ethics per se. Repeatedly, when I ask a group to define “bioethics,” I usually get the same sort of response. I hope with this essay to disenfranchise people of this belief. Contrary to “popular opinion,” bioethics, as predominantly practiced today — especially as embedded in formal governmental regulations, state laws and a myriad of other documents,
Bioethics is the application of ethics to the field of medicine. Ethicists ask two questions: “What is the right or good thing to do?” and “What are our obligations to one another?” Bioethicists ask these questions in the context of modern medicine and draw on a plurality of traditions, both secular and religious, to help society understand and keep pace with how advances in science and medical technology can change the way we experience the meaning of health and illness and, ultimately, the way we live. Bioethics is multidisciplinary. It blends law, philosophy, insights from the humanities and medicine to bear on the the complex interaction of human life, science, and technology. Although its questions are as old as humankind, the origins of bioethics as a field are more recent and difficult to capture in a single view. When the term “bioethics” was first coined in 1971 (some say by University of Wisconsin professor Van Rensselaer Potter; others, by fellows of the Kennedy Institute in
