10. Lošinjski dani bioetike - Hrvatsko filozofsko društvo

BIOETHICS AND FILM – CELLULOID UTOPIAS
AND ENVIRONMENTAL WORLDVIEWS
Film functions both as powerful artistic form and also as multi-layered
text, which transfers certain semantic-axiological contents to the audience.
These contents articulate different values, and ideological and worldview
“messages”. Many theoretical and critical analyses have shown that science
fiction movies are a kind of vision-holders of the perception and evaluation
of nature by the future society. These preoccupations are particularity
not only of SF films – in describing actual environmental problems
and dilemmas, there is quite a number of films that range from ecocentric
to anti-ecological worldviews. The paper analyzes connections between
bioethical problems and film industry by analyzing crucial topics in several
Hollywood blockbusters, with special emphasis on their presentations and
interpretations of nature, technology, race and gender.
MAJA ŽITINSKI
University of Dubrovnik, Croatia /
Sveučilište u Dubrovniku, Hrvatska
THE PROSPECTIVE OF THE VULNERABLE
Structurally, bioethics has been integrated with the application of ethics
to practices inadequate to ethical problems, raised by domestic violence,
neglect, or discriminative behaviour towards powerless, who sometimes
might even be unaware that they were being used in research. The truth
of any moral theory has to be tested by reference to the standard of what
we know because in ethics no appeal to observational truth conditions is
possible. The key problem of contemporary moral reflection lies in the assumption
that there is a separation between ethics and rationality, resulting
in incapacity to conceive ethics as a form or reasoned action. It is unacceptable
to shift the attention back to the excuses of the perpetrator as if his
or her claim could be reasonably justified. Every instance of such vice is
disagreeable because moral principles are those of reciprocity.
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