Ethics in Biomedical Lifeworlds

In medicine and life sciences, research results become immediately relevant to practice. Often, the mere provision of new options for action changes reality and requires decisions where previously there was no reason to think at all. New test procedures, prevention techniques and therapy options thus promote their own application. In practice moral problems turn out to be situations with complex ethical challenges.

We therefore understand ethics as a component of social processes of self-understanding in biomedical lifeworlds. Biomedical practices are studied in their social, epistemic and political contexts - with regard to their normative configurations. For this purpose, we combine philosophical-ethical, historical-epistemological and social-scientific methods in order to make the ethical challenges visible from different perspectives of action (such as those of physicians, patients and their families) and to examine them critically and argumentatively.