Bioetica

E thics CPD article 3: S haping bioethics: environmental bioethics

Shaping bioethics: environmental bioethics
a
Knapp van Bogaert D, PhD, D Phil
Ogunbanjo GA, MBBS, FCFP(SA), M Fam Med, FACRRM, FACTM, FAFP(SA), FWACP (Fam Med)
a
Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics, Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Clinical Medicine, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
b
Department of FamilyMedicine and Primary Health Care, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Limpopo (Medunsa Campus), Pretoria
Correspondence: Prof D Knapp van Bogaert, e-mail: Donna.VanBogaert@wits.ac.za
Keywords: bioethics, environmental bioethics, education, medicine
b

Abstract
Bioethics is the study of the ethical and moral implications of new biological discoveries and biomedical advances. Thisarticle covers the historical perspective of the development of bioethics during the 1960s in the USA. It further discusses
environmental bioethics within the context and discourse of climate change. The authors highlight the importance of
environmental bioethics education, if we are to save the earth from the negative consequences of climate change and
degradation. They conclude by stating thatenvironmental bioethics provides the venue in which we can explore reasons
and methods of understanding the human impact on our planet, and provides us with a different way of exploring ethical
responsibilities.
SA Fam Pract 2010;52(6)(Supplement 1):S9-S12

Introduction

older and established religion-based ways of viewing life
and death. The promise of technology became for many
the new andabsolute authority. However, no technology
has only benign consequences.6 In 1979, academics Tom
Beauchamp and James Childress of the Kennedy Institute
of Ethics, published the first edition of their book “Principles
of Biomedical Ethics”. 7 This book, the first contemporary
major ethics text to focus on ethics in medical practice,
followed the Belmont Report commissioned in 1978 as a
studyconcerning the protection of human participants in
research.

Bioethics, in one sense of the term, was part of a social
movement in the USA. As Jonsen1 notes, “dating the time
and place when any social movement begins is perilous and
near impossible”. Yet, we can trace the first use of the term.
“Bioethics” was coined in 1970 by Van Rensselaer Potter
II, an oncologist working in the USstate of Wisconsin.2
Reflecting on his clinical practice, he identified links
between biology, ecology, medicine, and human values. Van
Renselaer Potter asserts that we, as humans, for the survival
of our species, should rethink the ways in which we live and
value the environment.3 His views, although applauded in
Europe, were not taken seriously by mainstream USA. This
was mainly because VanRenselaer Potter, working in a
Midwestern cancer research centre, was not connected to
great systems of power and money.4

Beauchamp and Childress’s approach is a framework
for resolving ethical problems that trouble health care
practitioners. Their approach is principle based; through
a process of balancing or adjusting the principles of
autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence andjustice,
these authors argue, health care dilemmas may likely be
resolved.7 Their way of framing ethical problems in health
care became known as the “Georgetown Approach”,
and the four principles (autonomy, non-maleficence,
beneficence and justice) spread globally and were often
called the “Georgetown Mantra”.8

At about the same time, at Georgetown University in
Washington DC, André Hellegersborrowed the term.5 He
developed bioethics as a method of inquiry that could serve
to inform US public policy issues concerning medicine
and the life sciences. Locating bioethics in a science of
survival, a method of policy formulation, or as a social
movement all correspond to the socio-political milieu of
the USA during the 1960s. Particularly during that time a
shift to participative...