Bioethics

Methods of Bioethics

As traditionally conceived, bioethics is an interdisciplinary field with historic roots in medicine and philosophy. More recently, bioethics has been more broadly conceived to include health care ethics, animal ethics, and environmental ethics. For the purposes of this article, the scope of bioethics will be kept to the traditional sense of the term. In contemporary times bioethics has moved beyond the borders of medicine and philosophy to include allied health professions, including nursing and pharmacy, medical social work, occupational therapy, psychology, physical therapy, biomedical engineering, biostatistics, epidemiology, and audiology. In addition to the biological and biomedical sciences, other professions and academic disciplines that engage with bioethics include religion, law, education, history, sociology, economics, the medical humanities, and cultural studies, including gender, race, ethnicity, disability studies, and Deaf Studies. Given the wide range of disciplines conducting bioethical inquiry, there is no one methodology that predominates in theoretical or practical (applied) bioethics.

History of Bioethics and Deaf Bioethics

The history of modern bioethics begins with the emergence of research, treatment, and technologies that raised new questions about the issues of resource allocation, organ transplantation, research on vulnerable populations, informed consent, and moral status. In addition to these issues, bioethics was also shaped by public discussions of social policies on such matters as eugenics, reproduction, and human subject research. The confluence of social policy and coupled with the risk of harm to the individual raised social awareness of the critical need for scholars and professionals who could address the ethical issues and assumptions embedded within these policies and practices.

One of the first contemporary bioethics documents is the Declaration of Helsinki, a document setting out ethical principles for human subject research developed by the World Medical Association in 1964. This was generated partly in response to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi physicians who conducted research and medical experimentation on human subjects. A decade later, in 1974, the United States of America established the first public national commission to address bioethics issues, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. This commission was created in response to several different occurrences of ethical breaches in human subject research that came to light in the 1970s. This included the public exposure of the infamous United States Public Health Service syphilis study of African American men in Tuskegee, in which these men were not treated with penicillin for decades after this became the standard treatment for syphilis. Another landmark case that stirred public outrage was the medical experiments performed on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State Hospital, which included feeding live the hepatitis virus to healthy children, among other experimental protocols.

...