Moral philosophy in bioethics. Etsi ethos non daretur?

Medical facilities as moral worlds.

Bioethics is dominated by an emphasis on rule making and quandary solving. Teaching and research in ethics often focuses upon dramatic, controversial issues at the margins of life and death. Much less attention is given to the relationship between moral reflection and the ethos of place. Medical facilities, however, are moral worlds. To discuss the ethos of place is to focus on the character or...

Moral knowledge: some reflections on moral controversies, incompatible moral epistemologies, and the culture wars.

An authentic Christian bioethical account of abortion must take into consideration the conflicting epistemologies that separate Christian moral theology from secular moral philosophy. Moral epistemologies directed to the issue of abortion that fail to appreciate the orientation of morality to God will also fail adequately to appreciate the moral issues at stake. Christian accounts of the bioeth...

The care-based ethic of Nazi medicine and the moral importance of what we care about.

This article reports on an inquiry into ideas used to justify the shift of medical ethos in Germany prior to and during the Nazi era, specifically the principles of care advocated by Erwin Liek and Karl Kotschau, the era's most influential medical theorists, who argued that commitments to care of individual sick persons (Fursorge) had to give way to a preventive care that respects emerging need...

The quest for Mediterranean bioethics.

This thematic issue of the Journal of Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy is dedicated to the Mediterranean bioethics or as the title says to the quest for it. Recently, I came across an article written by a Croatian moral theologian and bioethicist Tonči Matulić entitled ‘‘Researching the Roots of Mediterranean Bioethicsthe Ethics of Virtue and Happiness as a condition sine qua non’’ (Matulić...

Nonreductive moral classification and the limits of philosophy.