Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2011

Publication Title

Conference Proceedings from Societas Ethica Annual Conference 2011, The Quest for Perfection. The Future of Medicine/Medicine of the Future

Abstract

This paper argues that the core principle of bioethics, autonomy, is rooted both in the 20th century history of the development of new medical technologies as in political liberalism transferred to medical practices, rendering the medical decision-making of patients a centerpiece of medical interventions. The paper shows how the ambiguity in the interpretation of autonomy reflects the ambivalence of bioethics towards making normative claims on the moral agents insofar as these go beyond the respect for a patient’s autonomy. In the second part, the paper analyzes the alternative approach of care ethics, which intends to emphasize both the vulnerability and dependency of the patient and the medical professions’ responsibility to care for the patient. However, neither ‘autonomy’ nor ‘care’ ethics approaches can address the social and institutional mediations of today’s health care ethics; the paper therefore concludes with a proposal to embrace a critical social-ethical approach to bioethics that is based on the tradition of human rights.

Comments

Author Posting. © Hille Haker, 2011. This conference proceeding is posted here by permission of the author for personal use, not for redistribution.Conference Proceedings from Societas Ethica Annual Conference 2011, The Quest for perfection. The Future of Medicine/Medicine of the future, August 25-28, 2011. Universita della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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