Integrative bioethics is a predominantly Croatian school of thought whose proponents claim to have initiated an innovative and recognizably European concept of bioethics capable of dealing with the most pressing issues of our time. In this paper, a critical overview of the integrative bioethics project is undertaken to show that it is, in fact, a poorly articulated and arguably pseudoscientific enterprise fundamentally incapable of dealing with practical challenges. The first section provides the basic outline of integrative bioethics: its historical development, (...) major proponents, geographical context and philosophical foundations. The second section considers its main theoretical shortcomings: the absence of normativity, collapse into ethical relativism and frequent intratheoretical inconsistencies. The third section addresses the issue of typically pseudoscientific features of integrative bioethics: verbose language, constant self- glorification and isolation from mainstream science. The fourth and concluding section of the paper argues that integrative bioethics––regarding its quality, reception and identity––does not merit the “European bioethics” label and is better described as a blind alley of European bioethics. (shrink)

The advocates of Integrative Bioethics have insisted that this recently emerging project aspires to become a new stage of bioethical development, surpassing both biomedically oriented bioethics and global bioethics. We claim in this paper that if the project wants to successfully replace the two existing paradigms, it at least needs to properly address and surmount the lack of common moral vocabulary problem. This problem points to a semantic incommensurability due to cross-language communication in moral terms. This paper proceeds as follows. (...) In the first part, we provide an overview of Integrative Bioethics and its conceptual building blocks: mutlidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. In the second part, we disclose the problem of semantic incommensurability. The third part gives an overview of various positions on the understanding of interdisciplinarity and integration in interdisciplinary communication, and corresponding attempts at solving the lack of common moral vocabulary problem. Here we lean mostly on Holbrook’s three theses regarding the character of interdisciplinary communication. Finally, in the fourth part, we discuss a particular bioethical case—that of euthanasia—to demonstrate the challenge semantic incommensurability poses to dialogues in Integrative Bioethics. We conclude that Integrative Bioethics does not offer a methodological toolset that would warrant optimism in its advocates’ predictions of surpassing current modes of doing bioethics. Since Integrative Bioethics leaves controversial methodological questions unresolved on almost all counts and shows no attempts at overcoming the critical stumbling points, we argue for its rejection. (shrink)