If bioethics poses the question of what action should be taken (by humanity) when faced with the use of biomedical sciences, it is both a reflection on the ethics of certain professional practices and an interrogation of humanity’s responsibility in relation to scientific “progress”. Thus, there is a meeting between the manner in which professionals, endowed with a degree of power over people thanks to technology, are able to control their behaviour and act properly, and the manner in which all of society, and by extension humanity, understands its relationship with technology.
Throughout history, medicine has gone from being a speculative knowledge to an art from and to an applied technology. In response to these shifts, and in a society where technoscience is at the heart of social organization, the interrogations of medicine originally carried out by academics began to be asked by consumer citizens.
To pose the question of bioethics teaching is, to a certain extent, to recognise the ambivalence, the two sides, of bioethics which is, for those regarding it from the perspective of biomedical ethics, an extension of other activities, or other professions, in traditional medical ethics, whilst for others, it is placed firmly within the struggle to re-balance the power held by those in the technoscience field.
No one would deny that bioethics, and by extension bioethics teaching, can be seen from both perspectives, nor that it justifies the development of professional ethics as much as it does social ethics…