Intellectual Property & Your Health Series - The significance of public attitudes

Shidonna Raven
May 20
2 min read

Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,

Before you go to the Doctor!

The significance of public attitudes

Since its inception the field of bioethics has been populated by specialists from a number of different disciplines, including primarily philosophers, lawyers, and theologians. In the last decade of the 20th century, however, the contributions of social scientists to bioethical research became particularly important. Work of this type involved surveys of public attitudes to advances in the life sciences, including xenotransplantation and genetic modification. Programs for facilitating public understanding of these advances were developed, leading to the establishment of “public understanding” and later “public engagement,” or “participation,” as distinct topics of study in bioethics and the social sciences.

These topics have been important from both a practical and a theoretical point of view. In order to formulate sound public policies on issues such as human cloning, for example, it is important to be able to predict how such technology, were it to become widely available, would affect the public’s decision making about reproduction. At the same time, research on public attitudes may reveal that some bioethical principles, such as the principle of autonomy, may not be suitable for some societies, particularly those with cultures that are not particularly individualistic. For these societies, something like a “principle of solidarity” may have greater relevance. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume that one of these principles must apply to the exclusion of the other—it is possible for a society to value both autonomy and solidarity.