Bioethics

The bioethics was used to describe that an ethic can incorporate our obligations, not just to other humans but to the biosphere as a whole. It is used commonly on the narrower sense of the study of ethical issues arising from biological and medical sciences. The essay on the introduction to bioethics has a discussion about the different opinions and arguments that relate to bioethics. One of the arguments is about ethical relativism, which sometimes is known as cultural relativism. This one says that it is not individual attitudes that determine what is right or wrong but the attitudes of the culture in which one lives. This ethical relativism maintains that a statement, a racist one, means a normal thing in other culture. When people from two different cultures disagree about an ethical issue, the according to the ethical relativist there can be no resolution of the disagreement. An alternative for this is that the distinctive property of ethical judgments is that they are universalizable. This means that is something is said or an ethical judgment is made it has to be stated in universal terms and applied to all relevantly similar situations. I.e. The effect would be the same as saying that everyone should do what is in my interest, because there would be no one except me who matches that description. The authors says to explain this, that the effect of saying that an ethical judgment must be universalizable for hypothetical as well as actual circumstances is that whenever I make an ethical judgment, I can be challenged to put myself in the position of the parties affected, and see if I would still be able to accept that judgment.
The ethics are always taking sides, with the rightness or wrongness of our actions will be. Adding that an action is right if it leads to a greater surplus of happiness over misery than any possible alternative, and wrong if it does not. This is put to all ethical dilemmas, so that we can predict what the consequences of our action... [continues]

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