2012-06-11
20 分钟This is bioethics bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Bioethics Bytes is made in association with Oxford's Uhiro Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by grant from the Wellcome Trust.
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Imagine the following.
You could either finance medical treatment that restored hearing to 50 people who'd lost hearing in just one ear, or you could pay the same amount to treat an entirely deaf person so that this one person could hear perfectly.
Which would you choose to help?
The 50 or the one?
In this series, we've mainly focused on dilemmas and debates involving individual doctors and patients.
Jonathan Wolf is a political theorist, and he believes that traditional bioethics misses a vital the distribution of resources.
Joe Wolfe, welcome to bioethics Bytes.
Well, thank you for having me.
The topic we're going to talk about is political bioethics in a sense, that's a new subject.
Could you just say what it is and how it relates to traditional bioethics?
Traditional bioethics has focused on what goes on in the hospital or in the GP surgery.
A whole series of doctor's dilemmas, as they've been called.
What should we tell the patient?
What can we release to the patient's family?
What should we do with the patient's organs after surgery?