Bioethics in the context of "Autonomy"

Applied ethics is the practical aspect of moral considerations. It is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and leadership. For example, bioethics is concerned with identifying the best approach to moral issues in the life sciences, such as euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with ecological issues such as the responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Business ethics includes the duties of whistleblowers to the public and to their employers.

Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose and meaning of science as a human endeavour. Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of scientific practice, and overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, logic, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and the concept of truth. Philosophy of science is both a theoretical and empirical discipline, relying on philosophical theorising as well as meta-studies of scientific practice. Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than the philosophy of science.

Many of the central problems concerned with the philosophy of science lack contemporary consensus, including whether science can infer truth about unobservable entities and whether inductive reasoning can be justified as yielding definite scientific knowledge. Philosophers of science also consider philosophical problems within particular sciences (such as biology, physics and social sciences such as economics and psychology). Some philosophers of science also use contemporary results in science to reach conclusions about philosophy itself.

Solidarity or solidarism is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity of groups or classes. True solidarity means moving beyond individual identities and single issue politics. Still, solidarity does not reject individuals and sees individuals as the basis of society. It refers to the ties in a society that bind people together as one. The term is generally employed in sociology and the other social sciences, as well as in philosophy and bioethics. It is a significant concept in Catholic social teaching and in Christian democratic political ideology. Although closely related to the concept of charity, solidarity aspires to change whole systems, not merely to help individuals.

Solidarity is also one of six principles of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, and International Human Solidarity Day is recognized each year on December 20 as an international observance. Solidarity is not mentioned in the European Convention on Human Rights nor in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights and therefore has lesser legal meaning when compared to basic rights.

Primary care ethics is the study of the everyday decisions that primary care clinicians make, such as: how long to spend with a particular patient, how to reconcile their own values and those of their patients, when and where to refer or investigate, how to respect confidentiality when dealing with patients, relatives and third parties. All these decisions involve values as well as facts and are therefore ethical issues. These issues may also involve other workers in primary healthcare, such as receptionists and managers.

Primary care ethics is not a discipline; it is a notional field of study which is simultaneously an aspect of primary health care and applied ethics. De Zulueta argues that primary care ethics has ‘a definitive place on the ‘bioethics map’, represented by a substantial body of empirical research, literary texts and critical discourse (2, 9, 10). The substantial body of research referred to by De Zulueta (9) has a tendency to be issue-specific, such as to do with rationing(11), confidentiality, medical reports, or relationships with relatives.

Primum non nocere (Classical Latin: [ˈpriːmũː noːn nɔˈkeːrɛ]) is a Latin phrase that means "first, do no harm". The phrase is sometimes recorded as primum nil nocere.

Non-maleficence, which is derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. Another way to state it is that, "given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good." It reminds healthcare personnel to consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit.

A model organism is a non-human species that is extensively studied to understand particular biological phenomena, with the expectation that discoveries made in the model organism will provide insight into the workings of other organisms. Model organisms are widely used to research human disease when human experimentation would be unfeasible or unethical. This strategy is made possible by the common descent of all living organisms, and the conservation of metabolic and developmental pathways and genetic material over the course of evolution.

Research using animal models has been central to most of the achievements of modern medicine. It has contributed most of the basic knowledge in fields such as human physiology and biochemistry, and has played significant roles in fields such as neuroscience and infectious disease. The results have included the near-eradication of polio and the development of organ transplantation, and have benefited both humans and animals. From 1910 to 1927, Thomas Hunt Morgan's work with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster identified chromosomes as the vector of inheritance for genes, and Eric Kandel wrote that Morgan's discoveries "helped transform biology into an experimental science". Research in model organisms led to further medical advances, such as the production of the diphtheria antitoxin and the 1922 discovery of insulin and its use in treating diabetes, which had previously meant death. Modern general anaesthetics such as halothane were also developed through studies on model organisms, and are necessary for modern, complex surgical operations. Other 20th-century medical advances and treatments that relied on research performed in animals include organ transplant techniques, the heart-lung machine, antibiotics, and the whooping cough vaccine.