FOR 1209: Institute for Advanced Study in Bioethics

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The Research Unit intends to debate theoretical fundamentals for the justification of bioethical norms, drawing on philosophical metaethics, normative ethics, legal and political philosophy on the one hand, and a critical reassessment of crucial public disputes in biomedical ethics, biomedical law and biopolitics which have taken place during the last 30 years on the other. The project aims at (re-) consolidating these two branches of debate and at facilitating reciprocal learning processes, in order to achieve a theoretically reliable and normatively cogent way of addressing issues of medical ethics and biopolitics. In order to do so, the Research Unit intends to explore processes of emergence and justification of norms in medical ethics and biopolitics, and to provide a comparative analysis of the most important and most influential concepts of normative justification in these fields. Both in the perspectives of metaethics and applied reasoning, it will especially examine the importance and plausibility of anthropological, rights orientated (deontological), consequentialist and nature-based approaches for the formation of ethical, legal and political norms. The research project aims at a systematic merger of these lines of theory and hopes to achieve the cooperative development of an interactive map of its research field. Its focus will be on seven cross-linked sub-fields of study, which are conceived as different aspects of an integrative research perspective, five of which belong primarily to moral philosophy, the sixth and seventh extending the focus to legal philosophy and political theory: (1) the consequentialism debate reflected in modern bioethics, (2) happiness and well-being as foundations for moral norms?, (3) norm setting between nature and agency, (4) normative foundations of public health, (5) the normative meaning and function of time duration and time limits, (6) the ethics of law and its inclusion and exclusion of morals, (7) principles and procedures in the political regulation of moral dissents and moral conflicts in the field of biopolitics.