The intersection of medical technology, medical practice and ethical principles has long been an important field of study but the rapid advance of medical technology has made it perhaps the most important field of study. Rapid advances in medical technology have been made in medicine and health but we should also be concerned with how health can be maintained in an ethical manner and in an ethical environment.  

As medical technology pushes the limits of what we humans can do, it also pushes the limits of our understanding of such discussions. Medicine today forces us to confront the nature of life and death in a manner that we are not normally accustomed to, but we have to get used to it because it’s only going to get worse.

The need for bioethics:  is bioethics really such a critical issue for society today?  Even if it didn’t exist and we had to invent it today, it would involve the application of ethical principles and arguments to medical and biological issues.  So what if anything is so special about these issues that requires its own field of ethical inquiry?

Although medical professionals are educated to handle medical triage situations which involve technical questions about who has the best chance of living, neither they nor other members of society are necessarily trained for ethical triage situations.  In our pluralistic society we are faced with a wonderful diversity of values and ethical ideals but we don’t seem able to tell which values need to be employed when and which ethical dilemmas need our most immediate attention.

One of the results seems to be that we are forced to deal with one crisis after another.  Our lack of sound reasoning and coherent values prevents us from engaging in the careful advanced deliberations that would make it easier for us to handle new situations.   Bioethics today is too much a matter of crisis management and not enough of reasoned discourse.

While the advancement of medical technology creates the most obvious source of problems in bioethics it is certainly not the only one.  In the not too distant past almost the entire medial ethics witch a doctor had to deal with were confined to the very personal relationship and interaction between doctor and patient. Whatever else existed in the field was minimal and of little general concern.

A special field of bioethics is needed because for better or worse the coming century will probably be best described as the biological century or even the biological age.  Not only will there be advances in medical science but also advances in many other fields that will likely have biological components.  We can’t hide our heads in the sand and pretend that difficult questions aren’t on their way.  Indeed, we already know about many of them - or at least their broad outlines.