ABSTRACT
The current bioethical debate can be characterized by two diverging tendencies. first, reductionist intervention with regard to the normative concepts used in the assessment of this problem (see also Huber 1994 and 2002) is faced with the unremitting differentiation of the description of ethical problems. Furthermore, this is accompanied by the further development of descriptive-hermeneutic methods in the field of ethics (to find the source of this concept in protestant theological ethics, compare with the model in fischer 2002). This gap between description and assessment, which, in theory, should be closed by an application-orientated ethics (see also Nida-Rümelin 1996), instead seems to be growing even wider. However, an awareness of the correlation between scientific knowledge and ethical assessment has increased in the last few years, particularly in the field of bioethics. Feminist critique on traditional ethical theoretical models has made it even more clear that ethics is very much contingent on its context. Nonetheless, efforts to find a contextsensitive appraisal in the field of ethics are at odds with attempts to establish a standardized normative concept. The almost extreme overuse of the term ‘human dignity’ in the current bioethical debate is the result of this attempt. At the same time, this illustrates the problem German-speaking ethicists and philosophers have had in forming new theories that seek to find an adequate and definitive basis for ethical judgements. This is to be understood as an attempt to integrate discrete societal values and application domains.
