Bioethik - Medizin - Politik. Bioethics - Medicine - Politics

Medicine and Politics are powers, systems, machines. They have their own logic and powers, almost irresistible for human individuals. In a democratic state, only the law can defend the individual's interests against these social forces.

But the human individual itself is not an ideal being: selfishness and the overpowering of the weaker by the stronger also shape the relations between us individuals. Therefore, the mechanisms of democracy-majority rule, formal legality, social equality-also need control and limitation.

The principles of the control and limitation of power, however, are the issue of ethics. Ethics has to defend the natural authority given to human beings beyond all the necessities of social forces, systems, and machines. That natural authority, opposed to all the artificial mechanisms of our collective life, is the real theme of bioethics.