Uma concepção de bioética na perspectiva evolucionista

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira Júnior, Alfredo [UNESP]
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://www.ibb.unesp.br/Home/Departamentos/Educacao/Simbio-Logias/uma_concepcao_de_bioetica.pdf; http://hdl.handle.net/11449/140672
• topic: Bioethics; Consciousness; Evolution; Hedonism; Magnanimity; Bioética; Consciência; Evolução; Hedonismo; Magnanimidade

James Mark Baldwin possibly was the first thinker to explicitly defend a role for consciousness in the Darwinian evolutionary process. When choosing actions with a pleasurable outcome, instead of actions with a painful result - and then contributing for the generation of habits that influence the frequency of distribution of genes in a population - every living being participates in the directioning of the evolutionary process. This proposal has an important consequence for Bioethics, as long as this discipline can be viewed in the broad sense of an "Ethics of Life". When making his/her conscious decisions, every living being, itself a result of the evolutionary process, influences the process. However, this looping is not sufficient to define a bioethical consciousness. Such a modality of consciousness requires more than hedonic choices; it requires intentional actions directed towards admirable goals, tracing a continuity and coherence of the conscious subject in time, which would correspond to what Aristotle called "the virtue of Magnanimity".