Original scientific paper
THE ROLE OF BIOETHICS IN CREATING POSTMODERN MEDICINE AND THE INFLUENCE OF POSTMODERN MEDICINE ON BIOETHICS
Robert M. Veatch
; Georgetown University, Washington D. C.
Abstract
The focal point of the whole article is the author's statement
that it was not only ethics that brought down the fall of modern
medicine, but that its substitute, postmodern medicine, will be
the cause of equally radical changes in bioethics. In the first part
of the article, the author gives arguments supporting the thesis
that bioethics has decreased the field of action of modern medicine.
The issues of abortion, euthanasia, heart transplants, refusal
to receive blood by Jehovia's Witnesses, manipulation with
genes, require ethical and other evaluations which remain outside
the limits of narrow medical values. In such and similar cases,
bioethics shows that evaluatory judgement is necessary, for even
if one knows medicine well, one cannot claim to know what to do
in each and every medical case. Therefore, concludes the author,
modern medicine will be replaced by postmodern medicine which
will be based on the presumption that for any communication and
every decision-making act in medicine, one should draw upon a
set of beliefs and values, and furthermore, that these beliefs and
values should come from the world outside medicine. This will also
be the cause of radica I changes within bioethics.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
31920
URI
Publication date:
1.5.1996.
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