THE ROLE OF BIOETHICS IN CREATING POSTMOD ERN MEDICINE AND THE INFLUENCE OF POSTMODERN MEDICINE ON BIOETHICS

The focal point of the whole article is the author's statement I that it was not only ethics that brought down the fall of madam medicine, b ut that its substitute, postmodern medicine, will be the cause of equa lly radical changes in bioethics. In the first part of the article, th e author gives arguments supporting the thesis that bioethics has decr eased the field of action of modern medicine. The issues of abortion, euthanasia, heart transplants, refusal to receive blood by Jehovia's W itnesses, manipulation with genes, require ethical and other evaluatio ns which remain outside the limits of narrow medical values. In such a nd similar cases, bioethics shows that evaluatory judgement is necessa ry, for even if one knows medicine well, one cannot claim to know what to do in each and every medical case. Therefore, concludes the author , modern medicine will be replaced by postmodern medicine which will b e based on the presumption that for any communication and every decisi on-making act in medicine, one should draw upon a set of beliefs and v alues, and furthermore, that these beliefs and values should come from the world outside medicine. This will also be the cause of radical ch anges within bioethics.