DIALOGICAL BIOETHICS: RETHINKING BIOETHICS TODAY FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIMA VAZ

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to seek the reunion of bioethics with the main ethical problems of the present time, based on the theoretical proposal presented by one of the most important Brazilian thinkers of the 20th century: Lima Vaz. From a phenomenology of contemporary ethics, in which the influences received from the conceptual bases of the 13th century and modernity are evidenced, among them the abandonment of philosophical reason, present in the Greek ideology of the 6th century BC, and the outbreak of Cartesian reason will prefigure as factors that affect metaphysical change, the human being would have lost the ability to understand the present time, launched inexorably in a permanent breakout of the new. This fact prevents the definition of fundamental values ​​- moral - to guarantee survival and implies the centralization of the subject as an end in itself. The result, according to Lima Vaz, is the generation of an ethical nihilism that promotes the existential vacuum, which directly impacts bioethics. The proposition of a Dialogic Bioethics, elaborated from Lima Vaz's suggestions, points to a resumption of an ethical path that starts from philosophical reason, from the understanding of the present time and from the determination of the dignity of life as an absolute value.