Educational eVorts in bioethics are prevalent, but little is known about their eYcacy. Although previous work indicates that courses in bioethics have a demonstrable eVect on medical students, it has not examined their eVect on health care professionals. In this report, we describe a study designed to investigate the eVect of bioethics education on health care professionals. At the Intensive Bi...

Many commentators today lament the politicization of bioethics, but some suggest distinguishing among different kinds of politicization. This essay pursues that idea with reference to three traditions of political thought: liberalism, communitarianism, and republicanism. After briefly discussing the concept of politicization itself, the essay examines how each of these political traditions mani...

Bioethics is an interdisciplinary field that accommodates a broad range of perspectives and disciplines. This inherent diversity sets a number of challenges for both teachers and students of bioethics, notably in respect to the appropriate aims and methods of bioethics education, standards and criteria for evaluating performance and disciplinary identity. The Interdisciplinary and Empirical Eth...

The past two decades have been witness to an "empirical turn" in bioethics. Whereas once this field of study concerned itself purely with theoretical analysis of ethical issues emerging in the design and delivery of health care, increasingly bioethics has embraced a range of empirical research methods from the social sciences and humanities. The emergence of "empirical bioethics" has, however, ...

Debates in bioethics have now become global. This is so not only because of the fact that advances in today’s biotechnology and life sciences are so rapid and wide ranging that it quickly spans the globe, but also because the different cultural traditions in the world need to find their solutions toward these challenges. Hence it is no longer adequate to limit the debates and discussions in bio...

Significant inequalities in health between and within countries have been measured over the past decades. Although these inequalities, as well as attempts to improve sub-standard health, raise profound issues of social justice and the right to health, those working in the field of bioethics have historically tended to devote greater attention to ethical issues raised by new, cutting-edge biotec...

In this article we analyze how the idea of virtue as an important element of human ethical action is slowly being lost. There are proposals both in ethics and in bioethics to rehabilitate virtue and to consider it as a very important element of human morality. In particular, in the health sector the rehabilitation of virtue, would imply greater focus on the ethical character of professionals an...

The South Korean government passed the Bioethics and Biosafety Act, known henceforth as the Bioethics Act,in 2003 and it took effect in 2005. South Korea?s Ministry of Health and Welfare proposed the law to the South Korean National Assembly to allow the progress of biotechnology and life sciences research in South Korea while protecting human research subjects with practices such as informed c...

In a recent issue of The Lancet, the historian Roger Cooter predicted that the field of bioethics will soon die of self-inflicted wounds. “Conspiring against it,” he wrote, “is exposure of the funding of some of its US centres by pharmaceutical companies; exclusion of alternative perspectives from the social sciences; retention of narrow analytical notions of ethics in the face of popular expre...

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...