Alzheimer?s Disease and the Conflict between Ethics, Morality and Politics

Abstract

My position is that the distinction between ethics, morality and politics lies in the supposition that human persons, as they go about their daily lives, are required to face certain purposes, each of a different nature. The first purpose is to preserve the integrity of each human subject, as both a biological individual and a human person. Gustavo Bueno relates such a perspective to ethical norms and virtues. Following Spinoza, "strength of character" stands as the fundamental ethical virtue (incidentally, the Greek root "ethos" means "character"); this is understood as "firmness" when applied to oneself and as "generosity" when applied to others [3]. Aiming to transform ill patients into healthy individuals and thereby contribute to restoring their firmness, the sound practice of medicine is an inherently ethical activity guided by the virtue of generosity. Unethical behaviors, on the contrary, threaten personal integrity and the biological individual, and include murder, mutilation, abuse, torture, defamation, injury and any other behavior geared toward undermining another person's strength. Equally unethical is any behavior which works against one's own self, such as drug abuse, careless eating and health habits and suicide. Basic assumptions dictate that biological and personal integrity must be respected and enhanced regardless of sex, age, religion, ethnicity, language, etc. With this in mind, ethical norms strive to be universal and distributive, since they are fully distributed in every human individual. Ethical norms may come into conflict with each other, as occurs when the prohibition against killing may be overridden in cases of self-defense. In such cases, the ethical rule to defend one's own

El valor de la autonomía en la intervención familiar

“…Estos conflictos podrían considerarse como contradicciones referidas a los mismos sujetos en tanto se ven, a la vez, obligados por deberes opuestos, ya que en efecto las normas éticas solo pueden abrirse camino en el seno de las normas morales: el individuo solo se conforma como tal en el seno de la familia, del clan, la clase social, de la nación, etc. Se puede decir entonces que las normas jurídicas, en numerosos casos, tiene como objetivo canalizar y resolver (en la medida de lo posible) los conflictos entre normas morales y éticas (Bueno, 1996;Alvargonzález, 2013;Lozano Vicente, 2015).…”

On the Structure of Bioethics as a Pragmatic Discipline

“… This section draws on an argument that I have already developed elsewhere when discussing certain bioethical problems raised by Alzheimer's disease (Alvargonzález ).…”

Towards a non-ethics-based consensual public policy on abortion

“…In capital punishment, war, political intelligence and state‐regulated overpopulation measures, the individual's life, privacy and desire to reproduce (which are regarded as various forms of ethical good by numerous ethical theories) clash with the state's interest, and certain policies are forced to set (ethical) good and evil to the side. The conflict between ethics and politics cannot be discarded a priori , even among ethical approaches not centered on the individual; the controversial relationship between certain religious communitarian ethics and the modern secular states may well serve as an illustration (Alvargonzález, ).…”