In a recent article on the current state of bioethics, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., analyzes the “moral pluralism in posttraditional Western societies” and the limits and capacities of bioethics (Engelhardt, [Journal of Medicine and Philososphy, 2011], 243-260). He argues that there are a variety of different bioethics and “we will never have secular moral agreement on any substantive bioethical issues”, as “we do not possess a single canonical morality that can guide us in our bioethical reflections” (Ibid., 243-244). This rightly observed moral and bioethical plurality calls for an explanation of the state of affairs. Why don’t we possess a single canonical morality? No doubt, this is a metaethical problem that concerns the foundations of ethics. Likewise, the questions of why there are a variety of bioethics and how they may be compared with each other and evaluated, are metabioethical questions that concern the foundations of bioethics. Do...

Dear colleagues and friends:

Welcome to the website! It has been my intention to offer an international website on the philosophy of medicine for a couple of years, as I have been offering such a site in German for many years already. But I was writing a book on the subject that took the past ten years or so and prevented me from doing other, equally important things. Now that the book is ready and is coming out in September, I have the time to devote myself to this long-standing project.

When I started working on philosophy of medicine in 1970 and launched in the late 1970s the journal Metamedicine, now known as Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, correspondence with colleagues overseas was sluggish. One had to wait several weeks for a reaction to a letter, CFP, or similar communication. Today the waiting game is over, replaced with real-time facilities – such as mailing lists, online forums, live video conferencing, etc. – made possible by the Internet. I invite you to...