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Bioethics
By: King Josiah P. Serwe

Lorraine Y. Libranda
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What Is Bioethics?
Ethics is a philosophical discipline pertaining to notions of good and bad,
right and wrong—our moral life in community. Bioethics is the application of
ethics to the field of medicine and healthcare. Ethicists and bioethicists ask
relevant questions more than provide sure and certain answers.

Bioethics is commonly understood to refer to the ethical implications and

applications of the health-related life sciences. These implications can run
the entire length of the bench-to-bedside “translational pipeline.” Dilemmas
can arise for the basic scientist who wants to develop synthetic embryos to
better study embryonic and fetal development, but is not sure just how real
the embryos can be without running into moral limits on their later
destruction. How much should the scientist worry about their potential uses?
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 Ethics involves the set of rules that society have agreed about living with
other people for minimums, which are human rights.

 Bioethics is a branch of ethics, which is the interdisciplinary study of

problems created by biological and medical progress (micro and macrosocial
level), and its impact in society and value system, both for now and for the
future.

 Bioethics concerns for ethical questions involve in human understanding of

life. It born by necessity of a critic reflection about ethical conflicts, which are
caused by progressing in life science and medicine. Technological and
medical tools have an important role in society and it has to manage.

 It is important know that bioethics does not defend a particular moral attitude
nor offer determinant and definitive answers, but it searches a grounded,
critic and argued reflection centered in the singularity of a concrete situation.
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What are Bioethical Issues?

 Bioethics is concerned with questions about basic human values

such as the rights to life and health, and the rightness or wrongness
of certain developments in healthcare institutions, life technology,
medicine, the health professions and about society's responsibility
for the life and health of its members. Bioethics involves issues
relating to the beginning and end of human life, all the way from
issues relating to in-vitro fertilization and abortion to euthanasia and
palliative care.
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History of Bioethics
 The word ‘bioethics,’ coined in the early 1970s, congealed into a narrow
definition following contested consideration of alternative meanings. 7
Wisconsin cancer researcher, Van Rensselaer Potter had urged using
the term to signify ethical analysis of health, well-being, and global
survival understood as a webbed function of human beings
interconnected with their environments. Instead, early bioethicists
favored the more constricted concept, and by extension the more
constricted remit, suggested by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. This
designation tended to limit ethical evaluation to moral dilemmas
affecting human beings in medicalized settings.
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The Four Principles of Bioethics

 Bioethicists often refer to the four basic principles of

health care ethics when evaluating the merits and
difficulties of medical procedures. Ideally, for a
medical practice to be considered "ethical", it must
respect all four of these principles: autonomy, justice,
beneficence, and non-maleficence. The use of
reproductive technology raises questions in each of
these areas.
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1. Autonomy

 Requires that the patient have autonomy of thought, intention,

and action when making decisions regarding health care
procedures. Therefore, the decision-making process must be
free of coercion or coaxing. In order for a patient to make a
fully informed decision, she/he must understand all risks and
benefits of the procedure and the likelihood of
success. Because ARTs are highly technical and may involve
high emotions, it is difficult to expect patients to be operating
under fully-informed consent.
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2. Justice

 The idea that the burdens and benefits of new or experimental treatments
must be distributed equally among all groups in
society. Requires that procedures uphold the spirit of existing laws and are
fair to all players involved. The health care provider must consider four main
areas when evaluating justice: fair distribution of scarce resources,
competing needs, rights and obligations, and potential conflicts with
established legislation. Reproductive technologies create ethical dilemmas
because treatment is not equally available to all people.
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3. Beneficence

 Requires that the procedure be provided with the

intent of doing good for the patient
involved. Demands that health care providers
develop and maintain skills and knowledge,
continually update training, consider individual
circumstances of all patients, and strive for net
benefit.
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4. Non-maleficence

 Requires that a procedure does not harm the patient involved or

others in society. Infertility specialists operate under the assumption
that they are doing no harm or at least minimizing harm by pursuing
the greater good. However, because assistive reproductive
technologies have limited success rates under overall outcomes, the
emotional state of the patient may be impacted negatively. In some
cases, it is difficult for doctors to successfully apply the do no harm
principle.
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The Importance of Bioethics

 The importance of bioethics to our culture today is reflected in

different parts of our society such as healthcare, research and our
society in general. Bioethics in healthcare brought about awareness
to health workers of the medical practice as well as enriching the
ability of health workers to further understand the patient as a person.
Highlighting the ethical side of bioethics, health workers were now
able to follow an ethical code when working with patients which was
once a problem. Ethical problems had a clear connection to problems
in health care, so by the emergence of bioethics, the healthcare of our
country has been significantly improved.
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The Purpose of Bioethics
 Bioethics entails the objective appraisal of how our values, desires, and actions affect
others, including animals and the environment. Medical bioethics focuses on issues, such
as euthanasia, surrogate parenting, and genetic engineering, involving human health and
well-being. These and other issues have been deliberated by the World Council of Churches
and other groups. Increasingly, bioethical considerations are part of their discussions on
remedying many social and environmental problems.

 A healthy humanity is concerned about its humanity itself–its compassion for its own kind
and other sentient beings. It has respect for all life, because it realizes that when it damages
the environment, it harms itself. Bioethics, in this context, is a field of self-investigation and
enlightened self-interest, and it therefore provides a foundation for meaningful human lives.

 Bioethics offers a multi-layered, rational appraisal of our place in the world and how best we
can live for the good of the planet’s life community. It mandates equal and fair consideration
for human rights, animal rights, and the environment. It includes a temporal principle of
transgenerational equity–having concern for the well-being of future generations and a
respectful understanding of the wisdom and folly of our ancestors. We should forget neither
our history nor the maxim, “We do not own the land, we borrow it from our children.”
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Example of Bioethics
 Hospitals

It is quite often the case that doctors and nurses have to make
decisions that literally determine life and death. Of particular
significance is the case of patients who are terminally ill (patients
whose illnesses cannot be cured and will inevitably lead to an
otherwise premature death). Also important is the question of how
organ donor lists should be prioritized. What should the committee do?
Should they give priority to the wealthy and move them to the top of
the list if their donations in the future could buy crucial equipment in
the hospital that could potentially save many more lives?
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For the case of terminally ill patients, a doctor might be in a

situation where they have to order a particularly large dose of
morphine so that they can relieve the excruciating pain that the
patient is going through. However, the doctor also knows that
the dosage could also potentially kill the patient. According to
the law, this isn’t illegal mercy killing, or euthanasia in technical
terms, so long as the doctor has not shown that he or she has
the intention to kill. However, that doesn’t mean that everyone
will consider it an ethically and morally sound decision.
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 Pharmaceuticals

Whenever a pharmaceutical company wants to get a new drug

approved by the FDA for use in human beings, the FDA requires that
they first put the drug through a clinical trial. In the clinical trials, half of
the subjects are given the actual drug and the other half is given a
placebo, usually sugar pills, during the clinical trial. A given subject
won’t know whether they’re receiving a placebo or the actual drug. The
half that gets the actual drug may or may not be cured. However, if the
illness the drug is being used to treat is especially serious, then the half
that is given the placebo may suffer due to lack of treatment, or even
die. This brings in a lot of moral questionability of the whole idea of a
clinical trial.