Foreword [Bioethics : responsibilities and norms for those involved in health care]

Abstract

The worthwhileness or otherwise of a National Dialogue or similar talk-shop can be measured in terms of both inputs and outputs. The publication of the proceedings of the National Dialogue on Bioethics (the term was used in its looser sense) held as one of the keynote acts promoted by the Ministry for Social Policy, instituted in Malta after the 1987 general elections, provides an occasion for reviewing the inputs with the advantage of some hindsight. Two features, I think, emerge clearly from the record of the bringing together of health care professionals with both a few foreign experts and the local public at large to discuss matters of common ethical and moral concern. The first is the considerable sense of malaise and confusion expressed about the way in which things had waffled along over the previous years. The simultaneous occurrence of major advances in the biomedicaf field (especially in the field of what has been called "procreative engineering") and the pluralisation of cultural values in the same territorial space have provoked an outburst of bioethical discussion throughout the world. Here, in Malta, medical praxis seems to have evolved in a manner increasingly adrift and apart from the reflection of our traditional moral mentors; and to have resulted in making client reactions ever numb and dumb.