In the era of globalization, the author contributes to the theoretical deepening of bioethics and establishes new discursive criteria which generate a procedure that is able to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for rational discussion and making, morally and legally, correct decisions in the public space. He shows us how the inability of traditional ethics to generate moral norms generally accepted for governing techno-scientific action has made visible a very dangerous antinomy. The elucidation of this antinomy represents the consolidation of a procedural, deliberative and...

The first edition of Beauchamp and Childress' seminal book, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, appeared in 1979. That work has been the most universally accepted statement of bioethical principles. However, its proposal has not been exempt from criticism, which has led the authors to make several modifications, redefinitions and extensions to the theoretical and methodological scope of the principles in subsequent editions. The criticisms are mainly based on what Valdes has called "the problem of principlism," which could briefly be defined as the absence of one or more criteria for ranking the...