ABSTRACT
Bioethics is rapidly becoming a dominant ethical paradigm in academic and institutional settings. It emerged in the mid-twentieth century from within biomedicine as medical practitioners, theologians, philosophers and lawyers confronted and analysed the ethical implications of new technologies and research agendas, like organ transplantation, artificial respiration and gene therapy (Wolpe 2003: vii). What this work shared was an underlying conviction that new medical technologies held the possibility of transforming moral order in ways for which society was unprepared (Stevens 2000: xi). Originally a medical ethics concerned with the health of the living body and patient autonomy, it now encompasses a widening range of domains outside of what would appear to be a medical context. The bioethical emphasis on life is now seen as compatible with the life sciences, biological sciences, engineering, environmental and social sciences. Described as a ‘moral science’, bioethics combines ‘diverse humanistic knowledge’ with biological science in order to determine priorities for the ‘acceptable survival’ of the human species (Potter 1988: 43-45). Furthermore, through its rapid institutionalisation, bioethics has achieved historically unprecedented legitimacy as a form of ethical thought (Stevens 2000: 2). It is not primarily thought of as a philosophical or speculative ethics,
but rather as a practical ethics concerned with how good outcomes can be achieved in particular situations (Allmark 2006: 69). Described as a ‘moral science’, bioethics combines ‘diverse humanistic knowledge’ with biological science in order to determine priorities for the ‘acceptable survival’ of the human species (Potter 1988: 43-45). The emergence of new areas of medical, scientific and technological developments has led to the creation of subfields in bioethics, such as genethics (which arose in response to the Human Genome Project), nanoethics and synthetic bioethics, which is arising in response to the new field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology aims to create new forms of life that will produce beneficial products for humans, such as medical therapies and biofuels (Parens et al. 2008). In this regard, it is significant to note that because of the ad hoc quality of bioethical elaborations there is a lack of unification among bioethicists,
something that has been described as the ‘Balkanisation’ of bioethics (Kagawa 2009: 11).26
