All posts tagged: individual–community relationship

Environmental Bioethics and the Problem of Interdependence

Environmental Bioethics and the Problem of Interdependence

I find myself bothered by the relationship between bioethics and public health ethics. Is it that the former focuses on individuals and the latter on communities? What is the relationship between the individual and their communities? Practically speaking, bioethics has been institutionalized in ways that emphasize individual (patient) integrity, while public health ethics has been institutionalized more recently to emphasize collective well-being and justice. Yet, from a philosophical—or, if you prefer, impractical—perspective, these distinctions seem to me importantly arbitrary, a fact I once illustrated by losing the attention of nearly every clinical bioethicist during an invited grand rounds. The emerging field of environmental bioethics is, in part, an effort to reconcile the individual with their communities by articulating a view of interdependence rather than mere interconnection. Of course, environmental bioethics is rough around its edges, providing footholds for all sorts of philosophical climbing. As part of a recent workshop on environmental bioethics in Geneva, several of us mapped the various lines of theory across the field. We imagined intersecting axes (that is, more than one …