Two new fields of research on ethical issues in medicine have emerged in recent decades. These are the fields of bioethics, health and human rights. In this critical review of these fields, the author argues that bioethics, in part because it has been so widely understood, suffers from quality control problems. The author argues
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also that the field of health and human rights is redundant because it does nothing that none of the bioethics of law could do.
Ethical issues in medicine and the life sciences are the subject of not one, but two relatively new academic disciplines: 'bioethics' and 'health and human rights'. Although moral questions about the ethics of medicine and related fields have been asked for as long as people have been asking questions about ethics, it is only in the last few decades that new fields have emerged specifically devoted to these issues. The development of these fields has stimulated further interest in important moral questions in medicine and biology.