title: Bioethics and conflicting ethical criteria.
abstract: Some of the major problematic issues in contemporary ethical discourse are highlighted in the field of bioethics. The need to incorporate new understandings and foundational shifts in essential criteria because of technological advances in the areas of medicine and human sciences increasingly challenges traditional and accepted notions of ethics. As the possibilities of technical progress increase, more and more pressure is put on traditional understandings of the human person, identity, and value. In the face of ethical relativism and emotivism, which are already widespread in social and political discourse, the immediacy of bioethics as a response to technology and its impact on human lives reinforces the need for ethics to become interdisciplinary, while attempting to provide some coherence to both the questions and the responses that contemporary life generates. In this paper, the author intends to sketch the outlines of some of these problems, and suggest one approach which might allow a certain methodical intelligibility to emerge which takes into account shifts in consciousness and the dependence on historically grounded perspective.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: George
mesh_terms: D001675:Bioethics; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003657:Decision Making; D026689:Ethical Analysis; D006801:Humans; D033183:Interdisciplinary Communication; D007400:Interprofessional Relations