Abstract

At present, people are confronted with ethical problems which were previously either entirely ignored by ethics, or, even if they were noticed, no serious attempts to solve them were undertaken. The role of medicine (as well as the impor tance of problems more or less closely related to it) in the lives of contemporary people increases. Doctors have the right to decide whether we can work in a specific profession, practise specific sports, the right to judge the sanity or insanity of people accused of committing a crime. These profound changes in the consciousness can be reduced to one basic phenomenon: the change of our attitude towards both life and death. Questions concerning the moral legitimacy of euthanasia, abortion, organ transplants are, in fact, questions about the end and the beginning of human life. At present, we have to deal with an entirely new attitude towards death and, ipso facto, to bioethical questions. What stand should ethics take in respect to this? Apparently, the very emergence of bioethics as a separate branch results from endeavours to rise up to this challenge. Bioethics, whether intentionally or not, is becoming a kind of ethical guidepost for people and institutions making decisions concerning life and death of other humans. As it turns out, in practice this bioethical guidepost can show the way more or less precisely: from formulating general ethical theories, which also solve bioethical problems, to statements on moral acceptability (or unacceptability) of certain actions in respect to specific persons. Philosophers should uphold generally accepted moral values and to make not only other people, but also themselves, aware, what consequences for the morality and society the increasing tendency to compromise morality in favour of the requirements of efficiency and efficacy can bring. It should be their own moral imperative to avoid compromises of such a kind. It seems, however, that even bioethics does not recognise these ultimate goals and mechanisms, focusing on the behaviour and moral responsibility of an individual, while overlooking larger social and cultural structures. To notice and adequately assess these goals, bioethics must neither be included into any institution, nor limit itself to strictly philosophical, theoretical speculations. In this context, interdisciplinarity appears as a requirement that bioethics sooner or later will have to fulfil.