The intellectual challenge of doing bioethics in South Africa

Abstract

Contemporary bioethics is a complex and multidisciplinary combination of medicine, philosophy and law, made more difficult because few, if any, bioethicists are masters of all three disciplines. To further complicate matters, each discipline contains specialised subdisciplines and internal debates. Philosophy is used to illustrate this point. Given constraints of expertise on practising bioethicists in South Africa, a few modest proposals are suggested to make bioethics as a discipline more rigorous in its use of medicine, philosophy and law.