2015, Vol.16, No.2

Journal of the Korea Bioethics Association 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.55

pISSN : 1598-0324
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kba

In this thesis I focus on the fact that the bio and life related conception changes from being an essential and inevitable issue to an issue of which its denotation can be decided by the discourse of scientific knowledge. I stress that with the production of the scientific knowledge and its accumulation there is increasing uncertainty surrounding bio and life related issues. And furthermore I persue the differences between scientific judgment and normative ethical judgment in dealing with the problems of uncertainty due to the increase of science and technologies that meddle with phenomena of life. Based on this, my object is to ponder upon how we can approach this uncertainty as researchers who work in separate fields of science. Through the ELSI program which I participated in the 2000’s, I felt strongly that there is need to surpass simply monitoring or evaluating laboratories, conducting joint researches, etc, and move towards questioning the direction in which we aim to foster science and scientists. With the awareness of this pressing problem on my mind and with hopes of an alternative ELSI model, I purport to make proposals on the importance of the principle of prevention, the role of the narrative in bioethics, the need for institutionalization of humanities education in science fields, and the new partnership between bioscience and social science.

The advance of nucleases technology in the past decade has enabled researchers to edit the genomes of various types of cells and organisms. Newly developed clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/Cas9(CRISPR associated 9) system is much easier to handle and thus is being used in many laboratories worldwide instead of conventional genetic engineering technique. A series of papers on mammalian embryos and human embryonic stem cells edited by CRISPR/Cas9 system has been published, which has evoked concerns that the editing of human embryo genome is very near. While groups of scientists insisted to call for a moratorium, Chinese scientists published world first paper on the editing of the human embryo genome in April this year, which generated fierce debate. Therefore, this paper will consider ethical implication of the genome editing experiment already done on the human embryo, and will suggest that the immediate response of bioethics community is required to establish the ethics of human embryo genome editing.

The debate between Tom Beauchamp and James Childress (hereafter, BC) and Bernard Gert, demonstrates that the field of biomedical ethics has been paying more attention to common morality. This is because many believe common morality is an effective justification for a biomedical ethics theory within a pluralistic society. Despite common morality receiving much attention, a constructive process has not been undertaken for searching for such a theory. In this paper, we reconstruct a biomedical ethics theory of common morality in a pluralist society. We explicate BC and Gert's theories of common morality, and use our critical response to reconstruct a theory of common morality that works within biomedical ethics. According to our analysis, if both theories are appropriately revised, BC's theory of common morality is not only compatible with Gert's, but also the two theories can be integrated to become a biomedical ethics theory of common morality. We suggest a revised theory of common morality based on BC's theory and supported by Gert's. This is because BC's common morality is much more applicable within a pluralistic society and for practical application in biomedical ethics. We argue that a newly reconstructed theory of common morality should meet multiple justificatory method levels (i.e., empirical, conceptual, and normative justifications); that common morality’s scope should be restricted for universal justification and a firm foundation; and that this theory should be theoretically sophisticated. This reconstructed and revised theory of common morality will contribute to the theoretical and practical systemization of biomedical ethics in pluralistic society and set a boundary for reasonable pluralism, which permits reasonable moral disagreement in biomedical ethics.