Translational research is now a critically important current in academic medicine. Researchers in all health-related fields are being encouraged not only to demonstrate the potential benefits of their research but also to help identify the steps through which their research might be ‘made practical’. This paper considers the prospects of a corresponding movement of ‘translational ethics’. Some of the advantages and disadvantages of focusing upon the translation of ethical scholarship are reviewed. While emphasising the difficulties of crossing the gap between (...) scholarship and practice, the paper concludes that a debate about the business of translation would be useful for medical ethics. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen the emergence of two new fields of inquiry into ethical issues in medicine. These are the fields of bioethics and of health and human rights. In this critical review of these fields, the author argues that bioethics, partly because it has been construed so broadly, suffers from quality control problems. The author also argues that the field of health and human rights is superfluous because it does nothing that cannot be done by either bioethics of the (...) law. (shrink)

Many people working in bioethics take pride in the subject’s embrace of a wide range of disciplines. This invites questions of what in particular is added by each. In this paper, I focus on the role of philosophy within the field: what, if anything, is its unique contribution to bioethics? I sketch out a claim that philosophy is central to bioethics because of its particular analytic abilities, and defend its place within bioethics from a range of sceptical attacks.