Bioethics: Regulations and Guidelines

Updated Study Notes

• Ethical guidelines and regulations are important.
• The Nuremberg Code was established in 1947.
• The Declaration of Helsinki is a document by the World Medical Association from 2024.
• The Belmont Report was published in 1979.
• Operational guidelines exist for ethics committees reviewing biomedical research from the WHO in 2000.
• Standards and operational guidelines are available for ethical review of health research with human participants, from the WHO in 2011.
• The WHO has published basic concepts for the construction of research ethics committees infrastructure in 2009.
• International ethical guidelines exist for biomedical research involving human subjects since 2002 (CIOMS).

Ethics and Bioethics

• The good perfects a being, aligning with its nature (truth and beauty), producing satisfaction and utility.
• Evil opposes the good, indicating a defect, lack, or deprivation of a due good, causing suffering and pain.
• Instinct is an innate, stable, and automatic tendency derived from the fundamental needs of the animal world.
• Intelligence, along with free will, distinguishes humans, enabling access to reality and truth through logical operations.
• Will proceeds from an intrinsic principle with knowledge of the end, characterized by the freedom to choose appropriate means to achieve the intended purpose.
• Happiness is the fullness of satisfaction, fulfilling all aspirations and potential of a human being in a complete and stable manner.
• Moral relativism asserts that nothing is absolutely good or bad, implying actions can be both good and bad simultaneously.
• Humans are rational due to their intelligence and freedom, making them moral beings.
• Humans construct their lives and have freedom, while animals' lives are predetermined by instincts.
• All humans naturally seek happiness.
• Ethics concerns human acts dependent on intelligence and will, not involuntary actions.
• The morality of human actions is unrelated to human qualities like intelligence or physical strength.
• Ethics is practical and normative, aiming to understand, follow the path to, and establish guidelines for behavior to achieve happiness.
• The reality of human beings cannot be changed by personal or collective decisions.

Additional Concepts of Goodness, Essence, Happiness and Nature

• Goodness, objectively, perfects a being by aligning with its nature, implying fullness and truth/beauty; subjectively, it provides satisfaction and utility.
• Essence, metaphysically, limits being, forming the concrete entity.
• Being and essence explain the unity and multiplicity of reality.
• Happiness is full satisfaction of human appetites, potential, and desires; complete happiness is conceived in relation to an afterlife because the condition of "stable" impedes complete happiness in this life.
• Nature, from Latin "natura" and Greek "physis", describes what arises, grows, and develops orderly.
• All movements or tendencies have a purpose, a meaning, and a finality, which can be natural or artificial.
• Animals are determined by natural laws, while humans know and understand what they know, picking what they deem best.
• A human's ultimate purpose is to seek the good, orienting actions toward a full life.
• Acting immorally well stems from fallible intelligence or insufficient will to follow reason's dictates.
• Human essence is rationality, distinguishing humans as intelligent and free.
• Natural law consists of principles reason discovers from human tendencies toward their ends, the primary one being "seek good and avoid evil".
• Natural law is universal, evident, immutable, and obligatory, stemming from human nature and knowable by all.

Human Persona

• A subject refers to a human spirit undeterred in its actions and self-determined, thus to speak of subject is to speak of man.
• Spirit is the rational soul and subject to spiritual acts of willing and understanding.
• Dignity is the quality of a subject deserving appropriate treatment, based on the immeasurable worth of the human soul.
• A tendency involves a natural movement or inclination toward an end that appears good.
• Will is the constant tendency toward an object proposed by intellectual knowledge.
• Determinism assumes every current/future act depends on preceding acts/circumstances, denying freedom's existence.
• Freedom involves the natural ability to act one way or another, or not at all, with responsibility for one's actions, enabling humans to make unforced decisions.
• Being a subject implies freedom, responsibility, and being undetermined in action; agency arises from one's own actions.
• Dignity resides in the essentially rational condition that transcends the material and tends to the good.
• A person is an individual substance sharing human nature with others, yet independent.
• Tendency is a natural pursuit of an end, directing human beings to specific goals.
• Will is the movement toward an object proposed by intellectual knowledge and a balanced inclination between good and evil.
• Determinism denies freedom, asserting everything is pre-established by distinct phenomena.
• Having the possibility to freely choose means deciding how to determine oneself from the point choice arises.

Moral Experience

• Experience is something someone has felt, known, or witnessed, understood philosophically as spontaneous, practical, and concrete knowledge of reality.
• Moral experience is an awareness of the morality of one's own actions based on a moral feeling about those actions.
• Intuition is the intimate and instantaneous perception of an idea or truth accepted as self-evident. It is the immediate "first impression" of reality without reasoning.
• Feeling is an emotional state caused by sense-perceptible causes with a commotion in sensitivity arising.
• Rationality is the human quality defined by the ability to understand and derive universal concepts from particulars.
• Judgment is the affirmation or negation of a reality through comparing previously known concepts.

Moral Value

• Moral value serves as the moral reference for our actions, gauging the morality of acts to be performed.
• Feeling bad after making a mistake stems from the culpability of conscience judging oneself.
• Hume distinguishes three functions related to morality, including pleasure from virtue and rejection of vice.
• Also the ability to discriminate between moral good and evil.
• Also a desire for good and aversion to evil.
• Moral intuition involves knowing things instantly and perceiving the obvious, colloquially known as a hunch.
• Doubts arise regarding whether to cut a line, an example of a moral conflict where you must either act or not against a perceived injustice.
• Moral struggles exist with whether to give up a seat, posing a moral dilemma related to courtesy and respect.
• Additional conflicts emerge with what action to take if someone occupies a parking spot for the disabled without authorization, posing whether to intervene in a situation of injustice.
• A moral judgment is the affirmation that "doing X is wrong."
• A deontological judgment is declaring that "X must be done."
• A moral conclusion states "Do X".

Characteristics of Moral Value

• Moral value being heteronomous means it serves as a measure for other values.
• Moral value being universal means that, even if the perception of good and bad stems from intimate experience, it is because of the human condition and, therefore, universal.
• Moral value being absolute means that the criterion of morality is absolute/unmodifiable and that must be adjusted.
• Moral value being obligatory means due to its absolute nature, moral value compels humans to fulfill it, setting a duty to fulfill good and avoid evil.

Prudence

• Goodness applies reason to discern the purpose of the human subject's spiritual nature, aiming at self-perfection.
• A quality is a subject's determination to act or undergo external modifications that do not directly affect human nature, and thus are not considered from a moral perspective.
• Skill is an acquired habit that excellently perfects a quality or the exercise of a technique.
• Existentialism presents a moral system where the value of action depends on its coherence with the individual's ideal of life.
• Moral formalism is a philosophical current relating action to its formal consonance or through a categorical imperative.
• A habit is an operative structure acquired by repetitive, conscious, and voluntary action.
• Prudence is that virtue by which intelligence properly guides reason to discern the proper moral paths, connecting intelligence and will while sustaining the rational practice of the will.
• Synderesis is the first principle of practical reason which, guided by principles of speculative reason, judges the human mode of operating, obliging humans to pursue good and avoid evil.

A Virtue

• A virtue is a voluntarily acquired habit orienting the subject toward its own end, coordinating faculties, passions, and skills to their rational purpose.
• Aristotelian virtues are intellectual, belonging to the essence, and ethical, referring to will, character, and customs.
• Intellectual virtues perfect intelligence in knowing the truth.
• Prudence stands as the foremost moral virtue.
• Forming criteria in prudence involves basing it on attention and respect for reality.
• The intellectual exercise of prudence involves discerning appropriate means for the end.
• A prudent person can put sound and suitable decisions into practice.

Justice

• Civic friendship involves selflessness, detachment from material possessions, and inner availability to meet another's needs and is the most authentic expression of fraternity.
• Fidelity is the virtue required by promising and committing to freely performing a deed with another.
• Gratitude, more than just an action, is a virtue of reciprocating received goodness.
• Justice teaches living freedom in community, ordering actions to others by recognizing their worth.
• Defines life in society and the quest for each common good among all.
• Moral sociologism is the approach to justifying the goodness or badness of actions based on conforming to social uses, customs, and trends.
• Utilitarianism is the philosophical approach placing good in the pragmatic search of happiness.
• Personal peace depends on achieving the highest number of people's happiness.
• Veracity compels one to honestly share all knowledge one possesses, respecting others' needs as proof of trust and essential to the common good.
• Justice means "give to each what is his."
• Justice implies giving each person what corresponds to them, not necessarily material.
• Justice is necessary for living in society to seek the good of all, ordering one's actions in relation to others.
• Legal justice refers to laws and norms that regulate social coexistence, safeguarding individual rights and duties.
• Distributive justice concerns the equitable distribution of goods and resources in society, ensuring everyone receives what corresponds to them based on needs and merit.
• Commutative justice refers to relationships of exchange between individuals, ensuring transactions are fair and equitable.

Fortitude

• Determination is the virtue of those who have fortitude and the ability to appreciate reality appropriately, deliberate reasonably on acts to perform, adhering to a correct hierarchy of values in order to do good.
• Hope is the root of fortitude, seen as confidence in good and realization of personal goodness.
• Fortitude involves persisting in voluntary effort to do good by mastering passions hindering attainment, affecting the subject's operative dimension.
• Laboriousness is virtue represented by aiming to maximize output in one's work, achieved by exercising fortitude, especially in personal and professional development.
• Bravery mustn't be confused with fearlessness, although the willingness to confront risk for protection must display virtue.
• Fortitude doesn't equate to rudeness or insensitivity, but rather a constant commitment to doing good through patience.
• Fortitude aids a fragile or weak will in achieving what one sets out to do.
• Fortitude hones the irascible appetite to support will by both addressing fears & modulating boldness as well.
• You must stay constant without giving up, unless that constancy is rooted in caprice, and not in a conviction rooted in conviction.
• In order to maintain fortitude, deception, exhaustion, and boredom must be avoided.