Abstract
Global bioethics is a challenging prospect that raises controversial concerns and international ethical debates. This entry examines to what extent hermeneutics may be relevant to face the challenges raised by this prospect. The entry sketches in the first part a short historical review of philosophical hermeneutics and its offshoots and in the second part reviews and discusses firstly the main arguments stressing its relevance to bioethics, especially clinical and medical ethics, and secondly the limits this philosophical approach faces when it attempts to come to grips with the challenges raised by the global bioethics prospect. A review of a possible overcoming of these challenges by merging hermeneutics with the critical theory in a “reconstructive” ethics approach is presented as an expanded hermeneutics perspective relevant to a global bioethics endeavor.
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Benaroyo, L. (2015). Hermeneutics. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05544-2_224-1
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