Bioethics: Methods and Principles

The course is organized along four main thematic lines: 1) a critical investigation of the origins of the discipline, an investigation aimed at tracing its genealogy, its fundamental questions, meaning, and major assumptions; 2) the course will address the study of the theoretical status of bioethics, through the examination and comparison between theoretical deontological positions/attitudes and consequential theoretical positions/attitudes, and the examination of the main conceptual dilemmas that bioethical disputes bring out: pluralism and disagreement, autonomy and responsibility, paternalism and antipaternalism. 3) Bioethics will be addressed, at the third level, from the point of view of the method: from the principle-based approach to the method of cases, through the analysis of the main fallacies, the course will try to define the boundaries of discipline, and to suggest the main criteria to justify argumentative claims in the bioethics field. The fourth line of argument refers to bioethics in the most proper and philosophical sense of applied ethics, namely practical: in this sense bioethics is applied to particular problems, and an attempt is made to establish what is right or necessary to do in relation to particular situations. The cases considered will specifically concern four bioethical topics, three of them classics - abortion, end-of-life dilemmas and organ donation's ethics - and one more related to the latest generation of bioethics, namely artificial intelligence.