Bioethics

Bioethics Now

Jeffrey Spike explains the place of medical ethics within bioethics and in relation to philosophy.

What I want to do in this brief introduction is (1) help define what bioethics is, (2) identify its major aspects, and (3) clarify its relationship to philosophy. To this aim I will outline how bioethics has developed three distinct branches in its short history, and discuss the different groups of professionals who have been the primary contributors to the field.

By most accounts of its history, bioethics is about thirty years old now. That’s old enough to be treated as a respectable adult, even if it pales next to the 2,400+ years of Western philosophy as a whole.

There has been both ethics and philosophy of science for far longer than thirty years, so it is important to understand just what happened thirty years ago to justify the claim that bioethics is only thirty years old.

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