1. Bioethics

Chapter 1 draws on Van Rensselaer Potter’s vision to present bioethics as a unified and transdisciplinary approach. Through the example of Arthur Galston’s involvement in the development of Agent Orange, this chapter demonstrates how ethical reflection must be embedded in scientific practice from the start. We adopt an ethico-onto-epistemological approach, emphasizing that ethics, knowledge, and our understanding of reality are deeply intertwined. Drawing on philosophy of science (e.g. Kuhn’s paradigms) and feminist epistemology, it challenges the idea of science as value-free and highlights the importance of diversity in knowledge production. The chapter also explores major branches of ethics, including metaethics and applied ethics, and contrasts ethical naturalism with non-naturalism. It introduces thought experiments as a method of philosophical reasoning, while also discussing experimental philosophy’s efforts to test intuitions empirically. Finally, it presents empirical and embedded bioethics as practical approaches for integrating ethics into real scientific contexts, showing how bioethics can—and should—be grounded in both philosophical reasoning and everyday research practice.