Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2017
Abstract
Understanding bioethical inquiry as ecosystem aligns that thinking about health conceptually close to public health ethics. Despite having roots in decades-long, culturally-diverse, and disciplinarily-broad concerns about the relationships of human beings to environment as manifest in the work of Fritz Jahr and Van Rensselaer Potter, medical "mainstream" bioethics has maintained a relatively narrow focus on individual health. The practical instantiations of bioethics are inconsistent both with the term's own historical international contexts and the ecosystemic nature of health, a concept of systems that includes both cultural and biological interactions. Following a growing number of international calls for such change in bioethics, this paper argues that a reinvigoration of bioethics demands transdisciplinary intersections of ecology, value, and health - as a bridge connecting across to the identified projects of public health ethics.
Keywords
bioethics, ecosystem, environment, genealogy, interdependent, Jahr, Potter, public health ethics, transdisciplinary
Publication Title
Jahr
Rights
© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)
Recommended Citation
Whitehouse, Peter J., "The Ecosystem of Bioethics: Building Bridges to Public Health" (2017). Faculty Scholarship. 47.
https://commons.case.edu/facultyworks/47