eBook

Bioethics around the globe

Myser, Catherine

2011

Overview

Contemporary bioethics, now roughly 40 years old as a discipline, originated in the United States with a primarily Anglo-American cultural ethos. It continues to be professionalized and institutionalized as a maturing discipline at the intersections of philosophy, medicine, law, social sciences, and humanities. Increasingly bioethics—along with its foundational values, concepts and principals—has been exported to other countries, not only in the developed West, but also in developing and/or Eastern countries. Bioethics thus continues to undergo intriguing transformations as it is globalized and adapted to local cultures. These processes have occurred rapidly in the last two decades, with relatively little reflection and examination. This book takes a critical, empirical look at bioethics around the globe, examining how it is being transformed—at both local and global levels—in this process of cross-cultural exporting and importing. This book offers the first comparative anthropology and sociology of globalizing bioethics in the field, exploring the global dissemination, local adaptations, cultural meanings and social functions of bioethics theories, practices and institutions and comparing developed and developing countries. The book considers a full range of countries on every inhabited continent. Topics include government agendas such as nationalism and nation building; agendas of powerful, associated professions (e.g., medicine, law); theological and political agendas such as “culture wars”; agendas of entrepreneurial economies of profit; and other cultural and ideological agendas consciously or unconsciously advanced or contested by bioethics work in particular countries based on their unique history, politics and culture.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: Bioethics / Bioethics -- Developing countries / Developing Countries / Globalization / Internationality / Moral Philosophy
• ISBN: 0195386094, 9780195386097