Question

Which method in bioethics is the strongest? Explain.

Answer 1

The word "bioethics" was first used in English in 1970 by Potter in environmental ethics and the Hellegers in the medical ethics movement. It is quite common to see people quoting these sources as the origins of bioethics. People also may say bioethics started because of advances in life support systems, reproductive technologies and patient right movements. There are two ways to think of the term bioethics, one is as descriptive bioethics - the way people view life and their moral interactions and responsibilities with living organisms in life. The other is prescriptive bioethics - to tell others what is good or bad, what principles are most important; or to say something/someone has rights and therefore others have duties to them. Both these concepts have much older roots, which we can trace in religions and cultural patterns that may share some universal ideals. Descriptive bioethics is the strongest. There are several ways to observe or describe bioethics. Observations of culture and society are useful, but to avoid the dangers of mixing the descriptive and prescriptive elements of bioethics through the biased interpretation of subjective experiences, random surveys allow somewhat more quantification. Surveys provide another way to look at how people make bioethical decisions, in descriptive bioethics. This background gives us some tools to examine social systems, and people's thinking, needed to study cross-cultural ethics and to consider universal bioethics. We can also say that the ability to balance benefits and risks of choices is some indicator of bioethical maturity of a society, and of a person. There are various survey strategies. The first type is the use of fixed response questions. Recent survey strategies in attempt to look at reasoning more than just statistics which may shed more light on the factors which will affect policy development. There has been attention on qualitative survey approaches to look at factors used in decision-making, which can be useful to identify the range of factors that people use. Ideally they need to be combined with some quantitative measurement to discover which are the most common issues. However, by finding all the issues that people can think of, one can trace out key issues which are behind concerns.