In this double seminar, Erasmus visitors Laurentiu Staicu and Emanuel-Mihail Socaciua discuss the rise of biomedical technology and some of the legal issues of moral bioenhancement
'The rise of postmedicine: some ethical concerns regarding biomedical technology'. Traditional medicine is bound by a moral duty to treat patients with compassion and to combine all medical interventions and treatments with caring as a fundamental attitude toward the patient. That's because the patient is seen as a person who needs help in recovering his or hers well-being, and any person should be treated with care and respect. However, what happens when patients are seen as medical puzzles which need to be solved rather than people in need? Can we treat a puzzle with care and compassion? The use of biomedical technology in medical treatments brought a spectacular increase in efficiency, but what are the moral costs of this increased efficiency? (Speaker: Laurentiu Staicu)
'How Drug Patents Might Lead to Disincentives for Moral Bioenhancement'. Biological moral enhancement (BME) and intellectual property (IP) might seem two entirely distinct areas. While BME refers to moral enhancement techniques which presuppose the use of biological means, the moral and legal debate surrounding IP tries to tackle the issue of whether ideas could/should be appropriated. In our paper we wish to link the two debates by exploring the consequences of the current IP and patent system in relation to the propensity of individuals to become morally enhanced through drugs or other pharmaceutical compounds. If artificial scarcity is one of the intended consequences of patents, we argue in favor of the following (weak) thesis: intellectual property rights provide noticeable disincentives for individual and voluntary moral bioenhancement.(Speaker: Emanuel-Mihail Socaciua)
