Conclusion: Critical Remarks

Taken as a field bioethics has its own history, one inextricably linked with advances in medical science in the West. As scientific and technical mastery have grown, medical researchers and physicians have been confronted with new ethical questions. At the same time, in an increasingly secularized world, religion has proved unable to be a reference for all and to answer these questions satisfactorily. Construction of an ethical framework, of a new norm of operational responsibility for contemporary society, became an indispensable task. Thus emerged ethics, and particularly bioethics, which concern us here: constructs derived naturally from the precepts of collective rationality, as distinguished by its internal logic and its autonomous moral justification, through which, to paraphrase Rawls, overlapping consensus can be reached.