Spanish bioethics comes into maturity: personal reflections.
نویسنده
چکیده
The birth of bioethics in Spain—and the rest of Europe—has not necessarily been a replication of what happened in North America, despite the arguments made by a number of mainstream American authors. From a European perspective, this thesis looks incomplete at best, if not entirely erroneous. Let us see why. Spain has long served as a crossroads, a place of concurring civilizations from either the shores of the Mediterranean or from Europe. Spain’s most visible roots come from the language, law, and religion of Rome; the Arab legacy is also present, but in a more subtle way. After centuries of isolation marked by the chronic clash between the inquisitorial and liberal Spain, the last manifestation of which was the Civil War of 1936–39, Spain today is a European country that thinks within European categories. By common heritage, Spain is part of the Latin—or Mediterranean—Europe, together with Portugal, Italy, France, and Greece, with whom it shares a geography, history, cuisine, religion—and traditional ethics. Ethics, as we understand it today, was born on the shores of the Mediterranean. The first book to carry a title containing the word ‘‘ethics’’ was in fact Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Classic Greek ethics is not based on the idea of rights or duties. These traditions are modern and, in principle, alien to the Mediterranean culture of the past and present. Virtue versus vice instead are the central notions of the Mare Nostrum ethics, and along the 24 centuries that separate us from Aristotle,
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees
دوره 18 3 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2009