Biomedicine, health care policy, and the adequacy of ethical theory

Laurence Mccullough

pp. 169-175

in: William B. Bondeson, Tristram Engelhardt, Stuart Spicker, Joseph M. White Jr (eds), New knowledge in the biomedical sciences, Berlin, Springer, 1982

Abstract

In the preceding essay Arthur Caplan [2] raises a series of criticisms of recent attempts to apply ethical theory to moral problems concerning emerging biomedical technologies and health care policy concerned with the funding and allocation of those technologies: He begins his criticism with a review of the "ethics backlash", the response of some within the scientific and medical communities to debate concerning the ethical dimensions of their enterprise. Since that debate resulted, in the latter portion of the last decade, in a series of federal regulations concerning the conduct of biomedical research involving human subjects, it is not surprising that the backlash was quite severe. While it now seems to have subsided, that backlash was not without its effect, for it called into question the adequacy of ethical theory to the complexity of the ethical problems posed by revolutionary advances in biomedicine. Caplan's criticisms, then, focus on questions concerning the adequacy of ethical theory to advances in biomedicine and the challenge of those advances for health care policy.

Cited authors

Caplan Arthur