Holm Søren, Williams-Jones Bryn
Cardiff Institute of Society, Health and Ethics, Schools of Law and Social Sciences, 53 Park Place, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, CF10 3AT, United Kingdom.
BMC Med Ethics. 2006 Sep 11;7:E10. doi: 10.1186/1472-6939-7-10.
There has been debate on whether a global or unified field of bioethics exists. If bioethics is a unified global field, or at the very least a closely shared way of thinking, then we should expect bioethicists to behave the same way in their academic activities anywhere in the world. This paper investigates whether there is a 'global bioethics' in the sense of a unified academic community.
To address this question, we study the web-linking patterns of bioethics institutions, the citation patterns of bioethics papers and the buying patterns of bioethics books.
All three analyses indicate that there are geographical and institutional differences in the academic behavior of bioethicists and bioethics institutions.
These exploratory studies support the position that there is no unified global field of bioethics. This is a problem if the only reason is parochialism. But these regional differences are probably of less concern if one notices that bioethics comes in many not always mutually understandable dialects.
关于是否存在一个全球统一的生物伦理领域一直存在争议。如果生物伦理是一个统一的全球领域，或者至少是一种紧密共享的思维方式，那么我们应该期望生物伦理学家在世界任何地方的学术活动中表现出相同的行为方式。本文探讨是否存在一个作为统一学术共同体意义上的“全球生物伦理”。
为解决这个问题，我们研究了生物伦理机构的网络链接模式、生物伦理论文的引用模式以及生物伦理书籍的购买模式。
所有这三项分析都表明，生物伦理学家和生物伦理机构的学术行为存在地域和机构差异。
这些探索性研究支持不存在统一的全球生物伦理领域这一观点。如果唯一的原因是狭隘主义，这就是一个问题。但如果人们注意到生物伦理有许多并非总是相互理解的变体，那么这些地区差异可能就不那么令人担忧了。
