PHIL 235 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Bioethics, Fetus, Zygote

• School: Concordia University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 235
• Professor: Curtis Sommerlatte

Document Summary

At first, the subjects that appear as terms in the bioethical field appear given on a universal and distributive scale, constituting the specific scope of "ethics". Ethics is thus "universal" because each and every individual of the human species makes up its reference, and there can be no discrimination based on sex, age, religion, race, or any other. But it is an abstract universality because precisely it has to put in parentheses, that is, make abstraction of those constitutive and distinctive contents of every real human being (sex, language, culture ). This situation configures the proper space of morality. Moral norms protect and protect the lives of individuals while these individuals are made up of social groups. Moral norms (according to the etymological meaning of the term, mores, the customs of each people) cannot be universal because human groups are different, given on a historical-cultural scale and often in mutual conflict.