What Is Bioethics?
It’s known that bioethics is a discipline born in the early seventies and still insufficiently mature with regard to its identity and its epistemological status.[CLXXVIII] Agazzi studies this theme when he proposes his reflections about the promotion of a shared bioethics (cf.
Agazzi 2011).3.1 The Definition of Bioethics
With his usual intellectual stringency, the author offers a definition of bioethics before he analyzes the characteristics of the discipline: “Bioethics is the study of moral problems that arise in the context of the biomedical sciences and their applications” (Agazzi 2011).
It seems to me that it is a good definition, for the fact of being very concise and at the same time enough informative and explicit.
However, I consider it appropriate to clarify that in referring to “moral issues,” I do not think he means that the bioethics has a “negative” nature, which pays attention only to the “problems.” In fact, while bioethics addresses the ethical problems, it should also be used in a positive and proactive way to foster the respect for human life and human dignity, as well as the responsible stewardship of the natural environment that surrounds us.
We will see later how, according to Agazzi, bioethics, like all ethics, must be based on the promotion and protection of values or purposes that deserve to be pursued for themselves. I think then that the term “moral problems” should be understood in an open way, as they are referred to in the “moral dimension” in the field of life sciences. We speak of “moral problems”, therefore, in the sense of “moral issues”.
The expression “biomedical sciences” may seem to reduce the scope of the analysis strictly to the medical practices. Agazzi, however, also addresses issues relating to, for example, respect of animals and other living beings, which means that he doesn’t intend to reduce bioethics to medical bioethics.
3.2 The Characteristics of Bioethics
Our author presents some of the characteristics of bioethics, starting with its interdisciplinarity.
It is a characteristic perhaps more “chatted about” than understood. In fact, I think it’s still a task of bioethicists to investigate what it means and to understand how to apply it in a methodologically rigorous and effective way.
For Agazzi, the interdisciplinary nature of bioethics is not reduced to the confluence of different disciplines in the analysis of its various issues:
[...] the interdisciplinary nature of the treatment of bioethical issues arises from the fact that to discuss and search for a correct solution of each particular problem in a very specific field, you have to take into account the views and insights of different disciplines [...] The contribution bioethics has made to the culture of our time is that these ‘points of view’ [medical, biological, but also psychological, economic, legal, religious, and moral at the end] are not something optional and almost annoying that ‘accompanies’ reflection... On the contrary, these various considerations weigh (and have the right to weigh) considerably in decision making (Agazzi 2011).
Perhaps here we can recall the concept of “system,” so dear to Agazzi (cf. for example Agazzi 2008): bioethics could be seen as a complex system composed of many interconnected parts, while seen at the same time as a subsystem of the global system of culture and society in which it participates along with other disciplines.
Another feature of bioethics is its moral specificity. It seems to me that it is important to note that Agazzi underlines the strictly moral dimension of bioethics. Often bioethics is conceived and presented as a mere “procedure,” a methodology of analysis and discernment for a purely deontological or legal kind of decisionmaking. Agazzi strongly affirms that bioethics is also called to operate a discernment of certain behaviors in order to understand if they are allowed, prohibited or due.
In this regard, he reminds us that even if the “prohibitive” feature is often present in bioethics (as in any ethics), it is not its principal dimension (and here we see his understanding of bioethics as a discipline which is also propositive, as I mentioned a bit earlier).
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