Bioethics and Communicative Ethics

Abstract

This paper concerns the newly raised questions of medical ethics in the application of high technologies, including biotechnology. I address the limitations in applying the principle-based argumentation that has been popular thus far in bioethical discussions. I also suggest that we shift the discussion of medical ethics from the level of the ethics of institutions or the ethics of convention to the level of so-called “post-conventional ethics”, the communicative ethics. In encountering the threat to life and the environment in the contemporary era of science and technology, justice is not enough. We need to reconstruct bioethics (including medical ethics) based on mutual respect and co-responsibility between equal moral subjects above the level of institutions and functional social systems.