History
The course development through the NET established by the four Higher Education Institutions (IES) shows the characteristic of sharing the responsibilities and attributions of IES. The idea of cooperation and integration has been present during the whole process of the program constitution and working. Each discipline is offered in the institutions of the respective coordinator professor. Organizing the offer of the disciplines this way has been making students having the feeling that they really belong to all four institutions, corroborated by the institutional reception represented by the use of the dependencies and especially the labs. The organization model of the program – in association - emphasizes the production manner that traits the academic modernity and that has been searched in all knowledge areas, the multi-institutional and multidisciplinary cooperation – powering the use of the existent material resources in the formation of the human resources and in the production of knowledge.
There is no doubt that the object of our academic work, Bioethics, Applied Ethics and Collective Health strongly helps the cooperation and the integration among the several knowledge areas and the transposition of the disciplinary and institutional frontiers. In a wider sense, the Bioethics is an Applied Ethics knowledge field that is simultaneously disciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. It refers to human practices on the living systems that have meaningful and irreversible effects on its identity and self-organization (or autopoiesis). It is disciplinary because there are courses, publications and events on Bioethics that are known in the whole world, including Brazil. It is multidisciplinary from the institutional point of view due to the existence – even in Brazil – of Committees, Councils and Commissions of Bioethics and Ethics in Research, in which the works are brought face to face and compare different points of view related to the professional/institutional identity of each member in their particular performance as member of such features. These features are especially for evaluation and control of morality of the researches and, in general, for the moral lawfulness of any activity that involves human beings, animals or any beloved and living beings. It is interdisciplinary as it establishes relations with contents and methods of other disciplines that are necessary in order to shape and establish its normative and theoretical acting field. Finally, it is transdisciplinary because it transits in many environments of knowledge, in which it finds materials for its acting as applied ethics.
The Bioethics has been consolidating since the seventies, as one of the main reconfigurations of contemporary morality, in secular and pluralist sense, in a globalized world in which there are universal and local, absolute and relative values and that inevitably conflict each other. However, they can converge if certain intelligibility and communication conditions are respected. This way, you can say that the Bioethics is a tool that provides the societies the capacity of facing the double challenge of conflict and the convergence that structure the social imaginary of the contemporary democracies. In the sociocultural aspect, the bioethics comes from the critical moral sensibility of the social movements of the 60’s, that question the traditional rules and values in the name of historicized and contextualized principles – technically known as values prima facie - dependent on the transformations from the contemporary social imaginary itself.
The Bioethics is a conceptual, normative and protective tool that is applied into the moral conflicts that emerge from the social, economic and scientific development – that are able to impact the collective and individual dimensions of the human life. The Bioethics leads exactly with the human actions and their consequences – good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unfair – when they reach the populations and impact on their life quality. This way, the Bioethics – as Ethics applied to the know-do of life Sciences – has wide interfaces with all the fields of knowledge. Nowadays, with the human actions even more exploited by the technosciences applied to the living systems (also known as biotechnoscience), with the strong impact on the health, the ethic dimension acquires urgency traits, as there is an increasing demand of support to the most diversified activities, especially in the research, health assistance and public health areas.
This way, the professional to be trained, independent of his or her original formation, will be able to perform activities that can be characterized as:
- consulting/assistance– (a) Integrating hospital commissions of bioethics – more and more frequently constituted; (b) supporting the public power in the formulation of public policies in the health area – it is even more necessary to identify the reflection on the moral questions involved in the resources distribution in the health area; or (c) participating on the debate about the indicators and criteria to be used in the construction of both efficient and effective public policies in the health area among other activities:
- in committees of ethics in research – the meaningful improvement of the activities of research and scientific production in the health area in Brazil is a parallel phenomenon to the development of a dense evaluation system of scientific researches, with the protagonism of the National Council of Health through its National Committee of Ethics in Research (CONEP). Nowadays, there are more than 500 committees spread throughout Brazil demanding an adequate preparation of human resources that are familiar with the bioethics instrumental in order to have competence enough for the critical evaluation of the research projects.
- of education, once the topics and competences associated to the Bioethics and Ethics in research are proposed in all the curricular guidelines of the graduation courses in health area – there is a known lack of experts in its contents in all the careers and in all the regions of the country.
- of research – in order to think about bioethics and ethics in research that are articulated with the Brazilian Health System – applied to the Brazilian and regional reality. Making questions explicit and developing studies on the morality of the technical-scientific advancement in the field of life sciences; developing researches according to the most diverse theoretical references in support to the activities of the Bioethics field are examples of contribution in the production of knowledge and opportunities for the consolidation of the Brazilian production in worldwide stage.
