For a planetary ethic
Author: Raul Marino Jr
Source: O Estado de S. Paulo, 08/04/2009
The facts and events that have unfolded in recent years within our borders have led us to better study the scarcely remembered sciences of ethics, morals and bioethics today.
Many speak of them on stands and in the visual and written media, but few explain their meaning to us, especially if they are used to improve and guide our collective coexistence, the behavior of governments, our politicians and our people in relation to It is the rest of the universe in this third millennium.
Ethics can be defined as a set of rules that regulate the behavior of a particular group of people, such as, for example, doctors, lawyers, psychologists, dentists, etc., and even politicians ...
It is normal for these groups to have their own code of ethics - which regulates their specific actions -, and their fundamental principle is respect for human dignity and sacredness as an active and autonomous subject, which allows us to understand and analyze life moral. These norms keep society together and, when they are loosened, the community and the Nation begin to disintegrate, needing to reinforce the laws. It is, therefore, a system of moral values, rights and duties that lead us to have character, but an ideal human character in our actions and ends.
Anthropology demonstrates that man is the only moral animal and that he is either ethical or not a man. Sociology, in turn, demonstrates that no man can be ethical or moral alone - he needs to live among his fellow men to be one. Alone, a man may not know who he is or where he is going, nor be responsible for his actions.
Morals, sometimes considered as science, are also an art: the art of living and how to live as a human being, within good customs and using your freedom well. But, more importantly, it has its laws: the laws for human happiness, promulgated in the Decalogue in just 10 lines and in the 8 lines of the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. Project that Hans Küng, one of the greatest theologians of today, called “World Ethics” or Planetary, which is so necessary in the moral chaos in which we live!
No philosophical treatise has managed to overcome it, consecrating morals as the aesthetics and science of the spirit, which teaches us what to do with our life, placed on us as a gift by the creator, and which teaches us to consider the disinterested love or agape as the foundation of all ethics and the knowledge of the truth as a manifestation of a natural and eternal law.
Immorality would be the violation of these laws or commandments, which reveal the true notion between good and bad and between right and wrong, the result of infinite wisdom and, therefore, Arbitrary. However, ethics and morality are not related to human disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, anthropology, sociology, political sciences, theology, religions and bioethics. . Bioethics focuses on ethical issues related to life, death, human health and environmental and ecological ethics and, as an epistemologically transdisciplinary science and part of Philosophy, allows man to recover his dignity as a person and his quality of life on the planet, within an anthropocosmic ecobiology.
The Casa Branca itself has a specialized committee of ethicists, bioethicists, philosophers and neuroscientists, to advise them on the ethical and moral dilemmas faced by that government. We can catalog more than 200 institutes of ethics and bioethics operating in that country, citing among the most prominent the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and Bioethics, financed by millions of the Kennedy family; the Edmond Safra Institute of Ethics, from Harvard University, as a donation from the well-known banker, whose list of publications and innumerable research would tire the eyes of Internet users; the Hastings Institutes of Ethics and many others, among dozens in Canada and Europe.
Ask us now how many such institutions exist in our country. We prefer not to answer. Fleeing the insurmountable bureaucracy of government agencies, we have been looking for private universities and colleges and other institutions that have the space to bring together in this institution a powerful team of specialized thinkers spread across our educational institutions - but still isolated.
Among several consultants, a leading banker told us that he was not interested in social issues ... And is the government? From the various faculties we receive only evasions, with no answer. It seems to us that ethics and morals are very uncomfortable and frowned upon in Brazil. Almost all universities have removed them from their curriculum, even those from higher education courses such as Medicine, Law, Engineering and many others, considering them only as philosophical or philanthropic curiosities.
They are considered anathema, especially by some politicians, just looking at what has resulted from their so-dising Ethics Committees and their Parliamentary Committees of Inquiry in the judgment of widespread corruption , since there is no academic reference or obedience to such disciplines, considered essential in the rest of the world.
It is sad to see what this could represent in the future for Brazil if we examine ourselves today as a biopsy of an ethical, moral and bioethical world in which we live: or we will be ethical and moral in this millennium that begins or we will be nothing!
Raul Marino Jr., emeritus full professor of Neurosurgery and associate professor of Medical Ethics and Bioethics at the Faculdade Medicina da USP, is the author of the books A Religion do Cerebro and Global Bioethics
