Both western and eastern civilizations have linked moral teaching with theology followed by philosophy. New-knowledge-seekers about natural world, were called 'natural philosophers'. There was a paradigm shift during industrial revolution in western world which culminated in modern science. The word "scientist" was coined during the 19th century. The paper examines whether natural philosophers ...

This chapter starts with presenting some historical facts that helped to develop bioethics in Brazil. Over the last 42 years, since the birth of the bioethics movement, the points of reference are usually the historical facts in the USA at the beginning of the 1970s (Van Rensselaer Potter and the Georgetown principlist paradigm); in Brazil we have only begun to talk about bioethics during the l...

The introduction to the Encyclopedia of Bioethics defines bioethics as “. . . the systematic study of human conduct in the area of life sciences and health care, insofar as this conduct is examined in the light of moral values and principles . . . “Bioethics encompasses medical ethics and extends beyond it. Medical ethics in the traditional sense deals with value-related problems that arise in ...

Bioethics and biolaw are two philosophical approaches that address social tension and conflict caused by emerging bioscientific and biomedical research and application. Both reflect their respective, yet different, heritages in Western law. Bioethics can be defined as "the research and practice, generally interdisciplinary in nature, which aims to clarify or resolve ethical questions raised by ...

BACKGROUND There has been debate on whether a global or unified field of bioethics exists. If bioethics is a unified global field, or at the very least a closely shared way of thinking, then we should expect bioethicists to behave the same way in their academic activities anywhere in the world. This paper investigates whether there is a 'global bioethics' in the sense of a unified academic comm...

The following article analyzes the process of conception, elaboration, and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights, and reflects on the lessons it might hold for public bioethics on the international level. The author was involved in the process at a variety of levels: he provided advice to the IBC on behalf of the President's Council of Bioethics; he served as the U...

of the Bioethics Examiner, saying she enjoyed our articles about larger policy questions, and suggesting that the field of bioethics has been conspicuously silent on the issues surrounding the recent agreement between state attorneys general and the tobacco industry. Now that President Clinton seems to have rejected that plan in favor of further negotiations, the debate will be rejoined. How ca...

The last four decades have seen the emergence and flourishing of the field of bioethics and its incorporation into wide-ranging aspects of society, from the clinic or laboratory through to public policy and the media. Yet considerable debate still exists over what bioethics is and how it should be done. In this paper I consider the question of what makes good bioethics. Drawing on historical an...

Contemporary bioethics research is often described as multi- or interdisciplinary. Disciplines are characterized, in part, by their methods. Thus, when bioethics research draws on a variety of methods, it crosses disciplinary boundaries. Yet each discipline has its own standard of rigor--so when multiple disciplinary perspectives are considered, what constitutes rigor? This question has receive...

BACKGROUND A review of literature published a decade ago noted a significant increase in empirical papers across nine bioethics journals. This study provides an update on the presence of empirical papers in the same nine journals. It first evaluates whether the empirical trend is continuing as noted in the previous study, and second, how it is changing, that is, what are the characteristics of ...