Suchergebnisse

Within the last twenty or so years a lot has changed in bioethics that is worthy of a serious re-writing of its history. Namely, up to the end of the 20th century Anglo-American "biomedical ethics" (often borrowing the name "bioethics" coined by V. R. Potter but deliberately ignoring Potter's concept), launched from Georgetown University and narrowed down to four principles, was a globally predominant doctrine, propagated by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, its students, financial resources, and political power. Up to then, most of Europe had been very slowly accepting the notion of "bioethics", perceiving it correctly as an unnecessary American "import", while attempts to Europeanise the idea by revising the set of principles had not proven to be particularly successful. With the discovery of the work of Fritz Jahr in 1997, however, European bioethics regained its lost genealogy and found the courage to claim respect for values other than the American ones. Within the bioethics defined by the Jahrian "Imperative", a place could have been found not only for the colourful, philosophical, religious and cultural legacy of Europe, but also for the newly evaluated Potter's work. This "fusion", a substantial and methodological deepening and broadening of the discipline, soon revealed its attractiveness to Latin-American and Asian centres and individuals also. Today we can talk with certainty about the end of "bioethics in Europe" and the beginning of "European bioethics" with all the complexity and interdependence of its variations – Mediterranean, German, French, Central and Eastern European, and others. By finding similarities among them, we might eliminate fear from "insurmountable" moral relativism, but also avoid the mistake of understanding global bioethics as a list of national bioethics. For the sake of constructing a more "universal bioethics", this paper finds the ideas of Fritz Jahr, Van Rensselaer Potter, Diego Gracia Guillén, and integrative bioethics as promoted by several Southeast-European authors, as ...