Abstract

This chapter explores the emergence of bioethics as a distinctive form of moral philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of the public’s mounting unease with the applications and implications of “big” science and “rescue” medicine, it examines the birth of bioethics in the 1960s and the subsequent contributions of key thinkers such as K. Danner Clouser, Daniel Callahan, Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Robert M. Veatch, and H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. Then, with a focus on contemporary exchanges between recent ethical approaches, it considers how we might address some of the moral challenges facing medicine in the twenty-first century.

INTRODUCTION

As we have seen in previous chapters (4, 6, and 14) concerns about the ethics of clinical and research medicine began to surface in the 1960s. Revelations of abuse led to a call for public mechanisms to govern medical research involving human subjects. Surgical and pharmacological advances in the transplantation of vital organs generated new uncertainties about the definition and determination of death. And public unease mounted regarding the use of new technologies that often seemed to prolong life at the expense of dignity in dying. Medicine was becoming morally unsettled.