A conceptual analysis is offered that differentiates four types of motivation for community involvement: egoism, altruism, collectivism, and principlism. Differentiation is based on identification of a unique ultimate goal for each motive. For egoism, the ultimate goal is to increase one’s own welfare; for altruism, it is to increase the welfare of another individual or individuals; for collect...

Introduction: Principlism, from Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, is the most widely accepted theory in biomedical ethics. It based on four principles: Beneficence, Non-maleficence, Autonomy Justice. These are part of a common moral serving general action guides to any clinician, including Family Doctor. The main purposes this review describe how Principlism can be applied daily practice refle...

Translational medicine is a rather new research area, as it was mentioned for the first time in 1996, in the PubMed publication index, while bearing as a motto “From bench to bedside”. Its complexity and novelty manage to raise a series of problems, in both medical and bioethical terms. The intricacy of translational medicine resides in the implication of several related research areas, such as...

Medical ethics is that branch of applied philosophy which considers issues of values raised by medical practice, and should not be equated with 'principlism'. Clarification of facts/values distinctions is an important part of this work. The notion that medical philosophy can flourish in the hands of medical 'generalists' without specialist philosophers, is misguided. Both must work together to ...

It has often been remarked that bioethics is a quintessentially American phenomenon. Broadly speaking, bioethics as a field has tended to enshrine the value of autonomy, it places individual rights above communal well-being, and it has adopted a largely permissive and optimistic view of emerging biotechnologies. In contrast to much European thinking at the intersection of ethics and medicine, A...