acatech member and ethicist Alena Buyx on medical ethics issues in hospitals, research and politics

Munich, 15 October 2024
We encounter ethical issues in many different areas of life. And one particularly sensitive area is health. Former Chair of the German Ethics Council Alena Buyx spoke about difficult decisions at the sickbed, the ethical implications of the latest research findings and the challenges of medical ethics policy advice at acatech am Dienstag on 8 October. The virtual event was once again organised in cooperation with vhs.wissen live and reached over 600 participants across Germany.
Security of supply is one of the key challenges of our time, said acatech President Jan Wörner in his welcoming address. This applies not only to energy and resources, but also to the field of medicine. Triage, access to life-sustaining measures, drug shortages – these are keywords that have repeatedly been at the centre of controversial public debates since the coronavirus pandemic.
acatech member Alena Buyx, Professor of Ethics in Medicine and Health Technologies at the Technical University of Munich and until recently Chair of the German Ethics Council, played a key role in some of these debates herself. Her lecture on 8 October at acatech am Dienstag was entitled ‘What is medical ethics – and how does it work?’. The medical ethicist began by presenting cases from her own field of work – cases that were the starting point for her and her colleagues to derive ethical principles from and develop recommendations. Especially when there is no legal regulation yet, it becomes relevant to work together on an interdisciplinary basis and to incorporate aspects of law and philosophy. In such cases, the first step is to consider ethical principles such as human dignity, self-determination, solidarity and others. According to Alena Buyx, the resulting case law can be described as ‘coagulated ethics’.
Using examples from clinical ethics advice (advice ‘at the sickbed’), research advice (so-called ‘embedded ethics’, for example during the development of medical technology) and medical ethics policy advice (using the example of vaccination prioritisation during the coronavirus pandemic), Alena Buyx then provided insights into how medical ethics deals with challenges in extremely sensitive areas of life.