This Is Bioethics. Udo Schüklenk

3 BASICS OF BIOETHICS

      3.1 This chapter provides you with a brief history of bioethics and its scope. We will also look at how bioethicists contribute in ethical review committees to necessary ethics oversight, and in government appointed bioethics commissions to addressing practical policy issues. This matters, because it is at this intersection of policy and bioethics that academic ethicists sometimes wield genuine policy influence. Last but not least we will introduce some commonly used, yet typically flawed arguments, that you will come across frequently in public debates on matters concerning bioethics or biopolicy.

3.1 History and Scope of Bioethics

3.2 No account of the history of bioethics would be complete without mention of a biologist, Van Rensselaer Potter, who is typically – and quite wrongly – credited with coining the term ‘bioethics’ in 1971 (Jonsen 2014, 332). Potter wrote: ‘I propose the term Bioethics in order to emphasize the two most important ingredients in achieving the wisdom that is so desperately needed: biological knowledge and human values’ (Potter 1971, 2). It turns out¹ that the author who actually deserves credit for coining the term is a German Protestant pastor, Fritz Jahr. In 1927 he published an article called ‘Bio‐Ethics: A Review of the Ethical Relationships of Humans to Animals and Plants.’ In that article Jahr aimed to establish bioethics as a discipline as well as a moral principle (Sass 2007). Unlike Potter, Jahr’s work was quickly forgotten during the turbulence of the Second World War. Fast forward from 1927 to 1987. Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, the founding editors of the leading international journal Bioethics described their fledgling new enterprise in the first issue of the journal this way:

      Bioethics will publish articles on the ethical issues raised by medicine and the biological sciences. … The prefix ‘bio’ in our title, then, is used in a narrow sense to refer to the biological sciences, and especially, but not exclusively, the medical and health sciences. It is not being used in the wide sense in which we talk of ‘the biosphere’ to mean all living things, or anything which affects the ecology of our planet. ‘Ethics’ is at least a well‐established term. We understand it to mean the study of what we ought to do, and by ‘ought’ in this context we mean not prudential ‘ought’ of self‐interest, or even group interest, but rather reference to reason or considerations which can be defended from a universal or impartial perspective.

      (Kuhse and Singer 1987, iv)

      3.3 We will follow in this volume the understanding of ‘bioethics’ that Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer outlined in their journal editorial. For the purposes of this book we understand bioethics as a field of study inquiring into ethical issues arising in the biomedical and health sciences as far as they affect humans.

3.4 It is a legitimate question to ask whether bioethics should also cover ethical issues in our treatment of non‐human animals. Some of the most influential bioethicists² have written about the moral standing of animals³, not least the just quoted Peter Singer himself, and the morality of using sentient animals for medical research purposes as well as the production of food. We will be touching on this issue, albeit briefly, in the next chapter (Chapter