Social Bioethics: A Contribution of Bioethics to Social and Environmental Controversies

Summary: Latin America‘s context allows Bioethics to overcome its traditional structure, focused on relationships among individuals or between individuals and institutions, and in that way to allow for new dilemmas to show and new social subjects to appear, in order to evaluate and ethically judge their demands. Especially the needs of those subjects who were historically forgotten and oppressed. In the concrete case of environmental demands, there is a territorial setting and a social configuration of bioethics, which may resort to traditional conceptions, to contemporary complex epistemologies, and to an ethics of responsibility, on order to build a frame proper to the manifestation of those demands.