Etyka lekarska, etyka medyczna i bioetyka. Próba metodologicznego rozróżnienia

Abstrakt

In everyday language, in popular science texts and in some research publications, the disciplines of medical ethics, meta-medical ethics and bioethics are used interchangeably. These three concepts are closely related, but each of the above-mentioned disciplines is autonomous. Medical ethics deals with an ethical reflection on the medical doctors’ practice, which is mostly therapeutic in nature, and which mostly confines itself to reacting to medical symptoms. Meta-medical ethics is such a reflection on medical practice that relies on complex methods and means, engages teams of doctors and is based on a vast repository of medical research, production resources as well as on the social and political background. It is predominantly causal in character.

Bioethics (sometimes justly referred to as biomedical ethics) came into being as a reaction to the rise of biomedicine, whose main function is body tuning. It reaches far beyond the traditional subject matter of the medical and the meta-medical practices – that is treatment in order to protect human health and life. It reaches the sphere of the processes that underlie human life and tries to influence these processes (biomedicine, life medicine, life processes medicine). It often happens that biomedicine relies on the top-notch advances in biotechnology. Hence, in the precise methodological sense, the subject matter of bioethics expands the realm of traditional medical human actions and practices. Consequently, the medical ethics retains its status, despite the rise of the meta-medical ethics, and the rise of bioethics changes nothing in the actual status of the former two disciplines. What they all share, however, is that they are irrevocable, and that they are based on the same values that underlie the moral evaluation of the relevant actions and practices.