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Bioethics in Cultural Contexts

Reflections on Methods and Finitude

  • Book
  • © 2006

Overview

Editors:
  1. Christoph Rehmann-Sutter

    1. University of Basel, Switzerland

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  2. Marcus Düwell

    1. University of Utrecht, The Netherlands

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  3. Dietmar Mieth

    1. University of Tübingen, Germany

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  • Provides a critical overview on the existing range of methods in bioethics
  • Clarifies issues in interdisciplinary collaboration between ethics, social sciences and medicine in bioethics
  • The introduction of the idea of finitude into bioethics is thought-provoking
  • An essential contribution to bioethics after its anthropological and empirical turn

Part of the book series: International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine (LIME, volume 28)

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Table of contents (24 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages I-VII
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  2. INTRODUCTION

    1. INTRODUCTION

      • Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, Marcus Düwell, Dietmar Mieth
      Pages 1-10

  3. Fundamental Aspects

    1. Front Matter

      Pages I-VII
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    2. HISTORY AND FUTURE OF BIOETHICS

      • ALBERT R. JONSEN
      Pages 13-19

    3. THE NEED FOR ETHICAL EVALUATION IN BIOMEDICINE AND BIOPOLITICS

      • Dietmar Mieth
      Pages 21-43

    4. FINITUDE – A NEGLECTED PERSPECTIVE IN BIOETHICS

      • BEAT SITTER-LIVER
      Pages 45-57

    5. LIMITS OF BIOETHICS

      • Christoph Rehmann-Sutter
      Pages 59-79

    6. THE PROBLEM OF LIMITS OF LAW IN BIOETHICAL ISSUES

      • SILVANA CASTIGNONE
      Pages 81-90

  5. Culture and Society

    1. Front Matter

      Pages I-VII
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    2. THE PUBLIC ROLE OF BIOETHICS AND THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC

      • ADELA CORTINA
      Pages 165-174

    3. EXPERTS ON BIOETHICS IN BIOPOLITICS

      • SIGRID GRAUMANN
      Pages 175-185

    4. THE CONTRIBUTION OF MEDICAL HISTORY TO MEDICAL ETHICS The Case of Brain Death

      • CLAUDIA WIESEMANN
      Pages 187-196

    5. ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE A Dispute on Truth, Power or Money?

      • EVA KRIZOVA
      Pages 197-210

    6. DIMENSIONS OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY OF MEDICAL ETHICS

      • PAVEL TISHCHENKO
      Pages 211-227
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Keywords

About this book

CHRISTOPH REHMANN-SUTTER, MARCUS DÜWELL, DIETMAR MIETH When we placed “finitude”, “limits of human existence” as a motto over a round of discussion on biomedicine and bioethics (which led to this collection of essays) we did not know how far this would lead us into methodological quandaries. However, we felt intuitively that an interdisciplinary approach including social and cultural sciences would have an advantage over a solely disciplinary (philosophical or theological) analysis. Bioethics, if it is to have adequate discriminatory power, should include sensitivity to the cultural contexts of biomedicine, and also to the cultural contexts of bioethics itself. Context awareness, of course, is not foreign to philosophical or theological bioethics, for the simple reason that the issues tackled in the debates (as in other fields of ethics) could not be adequately understood outside their contexts. Moral issues are always accompanied by contexts. When we try to unpack them – which is necessary to make them accessible to ethical discussion – we are regularly confronted with the fact that in removing too much of the context we do not clarify an issue, but make it less comprehensible. The context – at least some essential parts of it – is intrinsic to the issue. Unpacking in ethics is therefore a different procedure. It does not mean peeling the context off, but rather identifying which contextual elements are essential for an understanding of the key moral aspects of the issue, and explaining how they establish its particular character.

Editors and Affiliations

  • University of Basel, Switzerland

    Christoph Rehmann-Sutter

  • University of Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Marcus Düwell

  • University of Tübingen, Germany

    Dietmar Mieth

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