One of the essential tasks of bioethics in morally pluralistic societies consists of fostering a public use of reason in its field of competence. This is the fundamental thesis of the present work. To deal with it I will try to answer two crucial questions: (a) What is moral pluralism and why does it demand fostering the use of public reason in moral issues in the sphere of bioethics and (b) What are the laboratories of bioethics in a pluralistic society?

Polemicists and disciplinary puritans commonly make a sharp distinction between the normative, “prescriptive,” philosophical work of bioethicists and the empirical, “descriptive” work of anthropologists and sociologists studying medicine, healthcare, and illness. Though few contemporary medical anthropologists and sociologists of health and illness subscribe to positivism, the legacy of positivist thought persists in some areas of the social sciences. It is still quite common for social scientists to insist that their work does not contain explicit normative analysis, offers no practical recommendations for social reform or policy making, and simply interprets social worlds.

Clinical ethics committees, with their typical threefold function of education, policy formation, and consultation, are present in nearly all U.S. hospitals today, and they are increasingly common in other healthcare settings such as long-term care and even home care. Ethics committees are at least as prevalent in Canadian hospitals as they are in U.S. hospitals, and their presence is growing in Europe, much of Asia, and Central and South America. Although ethics committees serve a variety of needs, their ultimate goal ought to be to promote ethical practices or, in other words, to engender the integration of ethics into the life of the medical center. Of the three primary functions of ethics committees, ethics consultation has historically been the most controversial and problematic, and consult services in many healthcare institutions have struggled to thrive.

Researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Nairobi, and Manitoba are collaborating on a project to develop an HIV vaccine based on the immunological protection mechanisms found in commercial sex workers from the Majengo slum in Nairobi. This group consists of educationally and economically disadvantaged women who resort to commercial sex work for a living. A clinic was established in the slum to study sexually transmitted diseases, which now includes HIV/AIDS. The clinic serves as a research facility for the collaborating researchers who have been using the women's blood, cervical, vaginal, and saliva samples for the ongoing studies. The clinic runs two HIV-integrated activities: HIV research and HIV care and treatment. For HIV negative participants, samples are collected and used for research and care after they give informed consent.

Okay, Professor Turner is not Rodney King. He is not responding to bioethicists and social scientists running amuck, setting automobiles aflame, and pelting each other with rocks and broken bottles. He does not come right out and ask, “Why can't we all just get along?” But in its academic way, Turner's essay is an effort to negotiate a truce in the interdisciplinary squabbles that plague bioethics, a plea to move bioethics beyond the “misleading” and “unhelpful” “demarcation of disciplinary goals” that leads to “dichotomous thinking” and “polemical accusations.”

In recent years, healthcare ethics, international law, and political philosophy have been moving closer together. The previously missing links are considerations of justice and their recognition through legal instruments. The most obvious example to date is the topic of benefit sharing.

In 2005 the new Governor of Puerto Rico appointed a panel of experts to evaluate the healthcare system of Puerto Rico and make recommendations. Among other things, the panel recommended the creation of an advisory board on bioethics for the commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Is consent necessary prior to the initiation of a specific clinical ethics consultation? This is not a question that has received much attention despite the fact that the issue of consent is one of the earliest considerations associated with bioethics. Perhaps this is because of how clinical ethics consultation, as a formidable clinical practice, came into being. Specifically, although the place and time of its conception is not readily identifiable, it is not unreasonable to say it was born on March 31, 1976, when the New Jersey Supreme Court stated, in its Quinlan decision, that consultation would be necessary with “the hospital ‘Ethics Committee’ or like body of the institution in which Karen is then hospitalized. [And i]f that consultative body agrees that there is no reasonable possibility of Karen's ever emerging from her present comatose condition [then her] life-support system may be withdrawn.”

The development of ethics case consultation over the past 30 years, initially in North America and recently in Western Europe, has primarily taken place in the secondary or tertiary healthcare settings. The predominant model for ethics consultation, in some countries overwhelmingly so, is a hospital-based clinical ethics committee. In the United States, accreditation boards suggest the ethics committee model as a way of meeting the ethics component of the accreditation requirement for payment by Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), and in some European countries, there are legislatory requirements or government recommendations for hospitals to have clinical ethics committees. There is no corresponding pressure for primary care services to have ethics committees or ethics consultants to advise clinicians, patients, and families on the difficult ethical decisions that arise in clinical practice.

Even the most scientifically reductionist view of the individual reveals that we are complex systems nested within complex systems. These interactions within and among systems are based and depend on numerous variables of our (internal and external) environment(s). If we define ethics as a system of moral decision making, then it becomes clear that these decisions ultimately affect the situation(s) of managing our activities and relationships with others in our environment (in essence, our being in the world). Given that ecology literally means “a study or system of wisdom and reasoning about the interrelation of organisms in their environment or place of inhabitance,” Owen Flanagan's description of ethics as “human ecology” takes on considerable relevance and importance.

These CQ Sources were compiled by Bette Anton.

Over the past 20 years, organ donations in Spain have soared from modest numbers to the highest rate in the world. In the brief span between 1998 and 2005, donation rates have increased from 14 per million population (p.m.p.) to 35.1 p.m.p. By way of comparison the number in the United States is 25.5 donations p.m.p.

This paper focuses on the topic of evaluation of clinical ethics consultation. The concept of evaluation seems to contain an internal tension: On the one hand, evaluation is seen (by some authors) as distorting the conceptual and normative content of the case(s) under scrutiny and, on the other, the evaluative act is the most important use of judgment and an inescapable part of everyday life (e.g., the decision to buy a certain car or eat certain food is based on our own evaluations). As such, we maintain that evaluation is essential.

In societies with an established system of rights, human dignity occupies the vertex of the moral statute. Freedom and equality are specific derivations of that higher value. Taking freedom and equality seriously necessarily means articulating a system of rights that places at its apex the value that unifies both: human dignity.

In the United States, health disparities have been framed by categories of race. Racial health disparities have been documented for cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and numerous other diseases and measures of health status. Although such disparities can be read as symptoms of disparities in healthcare access, pervasive social and economic inequities, and discrimination, some have suggested that the disparities might be due, at least in part, to biological differences based on race. Or, to be more precise, if race itself has no determined biological meaning, race may nonetheless be a proxy that collects a group of individuals who share certain physiological or genotypic features that affect health.

The most casual conversation about Latin American life, politics, or culture can turn into a shouting match just by innocently asking the table to define what Latin America is. Some will dismiss the term as an American (or French or Jesuit) construct that fails to capture the geographic and cultural complexities of the former Spanish colonies. Others will fervently argue that despite its imprecision—or perhaps because of it—this lexical wild card connotes an aspiration of brotherhood against colonialist threats past and present. When the dust settles, both sides will likely concede that the question is a beguiling one indeed.

On September 23, 2002, the Belgian law on euthanasia came into force. This makes Belgium the second country in the world (after the Netherlands) to have an act on euthanasia. Even though there is currently a legal regulation of euthanasia in Belgium, very little is known about how this legal regulation could be translated into care for patients who request euthanasia. Although euthanasia-related mortality rates in Belgium are low, ranging from 0.30% to 1.20%, it can be expected that caregivers will increasingly be confronted with euthanasia requests and will, therefore, be more involved in the care for these patients.

“Health and Human Rights,” edited by Doris Schroeder, welcomes contributions on all areas outlined below. Submitted papers are peer-reviewed (short discussion papers will be reviewed by at least one, full papers by at least two reviewers). To submit a paper or to discuss suitable topics, please e-mail Doris Schroeder at dschroeder@uclan.ac.uk.