Abstract

Technoscientific developments, especially those which operate on/with human beings, are contributing to their reconfiguration in some new, unprecedented ways. Ethics too is revising radically its own field, probing its own foundations. Sensitive to both movements, bioethics is at a difficult crossroads when much is demanded of it. This paper proposes to contribute to the elucidation of the role of philosophical ethics in the area of bioethics through a critical reading of three of our major contemporary philosophers who have been attempting to meet the challenges of (post)modernity.