Ethics of peace and bioethics.

Abstract

Does a connection exist between the ethics of peace and bioethics? The paper moves from this question and analyses at first the issues list that involve so much tightly the ethics of peace and the bioethics. The big challenges and the dangers for the realisation of peace in our time and the concrete appointment for the bioethics are underlined along three fundamental ways: 1. the respect of the fundamental human rights; 2. the global social justice; 3. the exploitation of the environment.

Bioethics, as far as it is concerned, is conceived as ethics of life and for life and, as discipline, in dialogue with different knowledges interested to the problem of human life and the biosphere. Bioethics can give an objective contribution in delineating some ethical co-ordinates that can allow or at least help and fortify the recovery of fundamental values to guarantee peace, the restoration of the conditions of dialogue for peace whereas they have been lost, the prevention of the war, the effective activity of education to solidarity that recognise the other like another myself even if in the phenomenal differences. In such direction person-centred bioethics, founded on a specific ontology and anthropology, is able to help to build a “culture of peace”, centred on the value of life and the integral good of the person, away from gratuitous ingenuity and paralysed scepticism.

In the last section of the paper, the attention has turned to delineate the points of contact and comparison between the ethics of peace and the medical ethics, because the border between two areas is not impassable, on the contrary these fields are superimposable. It is underlined that medical ethics and the bioethics can be tools of promotion of peace, or rather the physician, the bio-engineer - for the intrinsic nature of their profession - are for peace, really in virtue of the fact that they are indeed men of science to serve the man himself.

Finally, the paper show that the medicine can contribute only not to the construction of peace, above all in the prevention - for instance with respect to the situations of war and emergency in situations of disasters and in denying the use of the same medical science for wrong purposes and abuses of the knowledges - but also in optics of a new “oath” that goes over the Hippocratic Oath, that protect so much as the healthy man that sick one. The wide perspective is not only to re-humanise the whole healthcare system, but also to guarantee a real healthcare justice. Both focal points are important for the construction of an egalitarian and pacific social network.