Smart Technology (CH5308701) Amalia Rizki Fauziah (M10806824)-Master Student

The Challenges of Bioethics Nowadays

Ethics whether theoretical or applied begins with a conception of humanity. This is
especially true for bioethics in which the problems range from the manipulation of the
biological design of human life to life-and-death decisions that affect most of human beings.
It is something related with government policy in relation to life-and-death decisions, genetic
research, assisted reproductive technologies, and so on. Bioethics is a philosophical discipline
involving social, legal, cultural, epidemiological, and ethical issues arising due to advance in
healthcare and life science research. Actually, it can be understood in a broader or narrower
way. Following the broader way, bioethics includes not only philosophical study of the ethics
of medicine, but also such areas as medical law, medical anthropology, medical sociology,
health politics, health economics and even some areas of medicine itself. While on the
narrower way, bioethics is only an area of philosophical inquiry. Due to unrestricted research
in science and technology there are some ethical issues of human rights violation and
discrimination between individuals, races, and socioeconomic status of countries have arisen
leading to injustice [1].
Since there is a lack of medical options to treat or prevent a lot of the disorders, so
gene tests are used. We should be aware that the more we get inside to the genetic code, the
more responsible we are to human beings who should benefit from the scientific knowledge
and not to be exploited. The proper use of biological material collected for genetic research
need to be thoroughly defined according to ethical principles agreed by both scientists and
patients. Genetic data and tools offer enormous potential benefits to humankind but pose
significant risks as well. Patients who undergo gene testing face significant risks of insurance
status. Additionally, the psychological impact of testing can be devastating and genetic
information is shared; all these risks can also impact the family members as well. The current
lack of availability of medical options for most of these diseases, uncertainties surrounding
test interpretation, the potential for provoking anxiety, and the risks of discrimination and
social stigmatization are other things that could outweigh the benefits of testing. Clinicians,
researchers and the society need to ensure fairness in the use of genetic information by
insurers, employers, courts, schools, adoption agencies, the military, and others. We need to
have guidelines on who should have access to personal genetic information, how will it be
used and who owns and controls genetic information. Privacy and confidentiality of genetic
information is something that have to be kept well. Besides various clinical issues, we need to
provide facilities to educate the doctors and other health service providers, patients, and the
general public in genetic capabilities, scientific limitations, and social risks.
Commercialization of products including property rights (patents, copyrights, and trade
secrets) and accessibility of data and materials are the other grey parts of this area.
The principles and practice of bioethics are lack of guidelines, which create confusion
regarding to the implementation. Institutions need to be aware of and consider standard
internationally approved guideline of the bioethics principles. The broader view of bioethics
fosters some unfortunate mistakes that many are already easy to make. Taking medical law to
be part of bioethics encourages the common confusion between law and ethics, terms that are
neither synonymous nor coextensive. Viewing such areas as medical anthropology or medical
sociology as part of bioethics encourages the mistake of confusing descriptions with
prescriptions. To say that bioethics should be construed in the narrow way is not to deny the
importance of the sciences, social sciences, and law to bioethics. These disciplines are clearly
required to practical ethics. One cannot reach an informed conclusion about what should be
done in some practical case if one does not have all the relevant information about the way
things should be. However, a problem arises when scientists, social scientists, and lawyers
slip from doing what they are meant to do. There is a parallel problem for philosophers who
work in the area of practical ethics. Because this area requires knowledge of science, social

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Smart Technology (CH5308701) Amalia Rizki Fauziah (M10806824)-Master Student

science, and sometimes law. Practical philosophers have to familiarize themselves with
scholarly discussions in these disciplines. This is unavoidable as long as the philosopher does
not imply to be doing science, social science, or law but only reporting its findings. More
specifically, bioethics suffers from some serious quality control problems. There are some
cases that must be conceded where the analytic tools of the philosopher can actually help in
assessing the evidence. In these cases, the philosopher does more than simply report.
Nevertheless, philosophers are not advised to masquerade as scientists, social scientists, or
even lawyers.
These problems of disciplinary quality are worsened by a number of factors. Firstly,
because the discipline of bioethics is currently understood in the broader way, it is filled with
people who have slipped from their area of medical, scientific, or other non‐philosophical
expertise into moral philosophy. Given that the discipline is so populated with such people
who do not see that many of the rest are not doing moral philosophy so well. Secondly, there
has been a proliferation of courses, diplomas, and degrees in bioethics. As these courses are
often aimed at those without philosophical training and lack the rigour and often duration of
other courses of study, there are more and more people with formal but poor bioethics
education. Thirdly, the bioethics literature is also of very uneven quality. There is some
outstanding work being done, but there are also an unusually large number of poor quality
bioethics publications.
According to the health and human rights view, the moral defects of medical practice
and more generally human life are to be rectified through the promotion of human rights.
Morality refers to beliefs about right and wrong actions and morally good and bad persons or
character. Ethics is the study of morality using the tools and methods of philosophy.
Bioethics is applied ethics focused on health care, medical science, and medical technology.
In bioethics, five moral principles have been extremely influential and particularly relevant:
(1) autonomy (autonomous persons should be allowed to exercise their capacity for self-
determination); (2) non-maleficence (we should not cause unnecessary harm to others); (3)
beneficence (we should do good to others and prevent or remove harm); (4) utility (we should
produce the most favorable balance of good over bad for all concerned); and (5) justice (we
should treat equals equally) [2]. Discussion about moral rights is part of what ethics or
bioethics involves, but these disciplines need not restrict themselves to this one moral
concept. Unlike the human rights approach, those who do bioethics need not commit the error
of mistaking the part for the whole. Rights are part of ethics, but they are not all there is to
ethics. Thus, those doing ethics or bioethics can and do employ whatever moral concepts are
relevant to some issue.
Law and morality are neither the same thing nor are they coextensive. The law can be
morally defective, and moral rights can fail to be incorporated into law or be incorporated
only inadequately. The outcome of this is that legal rights, like law in general, are inadequate
to the task of resolving moral dilemmas or rectifying the moral defects of medical practice.
Whereas there are disciplinary standards in most disciplines, there are no such standards in
bioethics. Much of what goes on in bioethics is undisciplined. Others claim that bioethics is
a new field, which has not yet established standards. It is not clear how the field's becoming
older and more established would prevent the disciplinary slip from occurring nor we can
expect future bioethicists to be sufficiently expert in all the component disciplines. Even if
disciplinary training in bioethics broadens it is not a guarantee to create bioethics experts.
The objection here is that bioethics is too much of an academic exercise and too little
a mechanism for social change. There are a few ways to respond to this. The first is to note
that bioethics can be coupled with activism. The second response is to question whether
activism is really a desirable feature in a field of academic work or not. The primary purpose
of academic work is to enlighten. Some may choose to enlist such enlightenment for political

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Smart Technology (CH5308701) Amalia Rizki Fauziah (M10806824)-Master Student

or moral purposes in order to bring about positive change. A third response takes the second
one a step further. Activism in  an academic field may actually undermine the academic
enterprise. It is prone to join popular moral discourse in employing rights claims as a
substitute for moral argument. In other words, instead of doing the difficult academic work of
determining whether some action is right or wrong, there will be the temptation simply to
ascribe either a right to perform that action or a right against others acting in this way.
The ethical and technical scope of bioethics is wide. Bioethical questions and
deliberations now fall to non-expert and expert alike to patients, families, and others as well
as to philosophers, health care professionals, lawyers, judges, scientists, clergy, and public
policy specialists. Though the heart of bioethics is moral philosophy, fully informed bioethics
cannot be done without a good understanding of the relevant non-moral facts and issues,
especially the medical, scientific, technological, and legal ones. Many issues in bioethics
have both a moral and legal dimension, and it is important not to confuse the two. Sometimes
the question at hand is a moral one. Sometimes the question is about legality. And sometimes
the discussion concerns both.

REFERENCES
[1] S. van Hooft, Life Death and Subjectivity. 2004.
[2] V. Lewis, Bioethics: Principles, Issues, and Cases, vol. 27, no. 2. 2011.

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