Forty years later: the scope of bioethics revisited.
Two discrete conceptions of bioethics emerged in the 1970s: a holistic model that would "embrace within its scope long-range environmental concerns" versus a notion of bioethics that "would deal with concrete medical dilemmas." Although the latter has been the dominant perspective, Irina Pollard's new book Bioscience Ethics reintroduces a more global perspective of bioethics. This essay provides a cursory review of the different conceptions of bioethics and where Pollard's book fits in the controversy. It concludes by considering how some progress has been made to find a middle path that interprets bioethics more broadly as "the ethics of the life sciences and health care."
Ross
Lainie Friedman
LF
Departments of Medicine, Pediatrics, and Surgery, the College, and the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, University of Chicago, Chicago IL 60637, USA. lross@uchicago.edu
D001675:Bioethics; D006801:Humans; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D014481:United States