Ethical Concerns in Novel Medicine

Medicine and ethics have a long history of connection. Medicine is a human attempt to reduce patients’ suffering and prevent harm, and ethics is a branch of philosophy seeking the basis of our actions and identifying good and bad as well as moral values and principles. Like all fields of knowledge and technologies, medicine has been developed increasingly in the last decades. Novel medicine is based on recent advances in science and technology. Alongside its beneficence, novel medicine and its future trends could have philosophical and ethical implications. Although bioethics has long been a field providing a framework for addressing ethical issues in medicine, we do believe that it is necessary to always update it to enable an efficient critical reflection on new ethical implications of novel medicine. In this chapter, first, we discuss the new approaches to bioethics and new turns in bioethics. Besides, we introduce some fields that are complementary to bioethics, such as meta-research, the philosophy of technology, and medicalization studies. Then, we scrutinize ethical issues in some pioneer fields of novel medicine. We do support philosophical bioethics rather than a philosophy-free approach. So, we investigate ethical issues in each field of novel medicine in light of philosophical reflections. As it is not possible to cover the entire ethical issues of all fields of novel medicine, this chapter aims to show how new insights in philosophical bioethics can enable us to investigate the philosophical and ethical implications of novel medicine through some examples from the most pioneering fields of novel medicine.