Presuppositions and models of participatory bioethical debate

Abstract

Participatory bioethical debate is a form of civic participation and a form of discourse. The article presents some paradigmatic examples of participatory debates, including bioethical debates. Then, different approaches and ways of understanding “debate” are also discussed, as well as “discussion”, “dialogue” and especially important in this context form of communication and form of interaction, which is “discourse”. Among the numerous examples of participatory bioethical debates which have been carried out in many Western countries over the last three decades, an interesting example of education which prepares people to participate in participatory bioethical debates is presented. The project prepared in the formula of diskurslernen («learning to participate in discourse and, at the same time, learning through discourse») deserves attention for the fact that it is a project preparing to participate both in civic participatory debates and in general to participate in the procedures of democratic opinion-forming and will-forming. Despite some misgivings as to whether participatory debates do not sometimes serve purposes other than their declared ones, their organization and popularization is something necessary both from the point of view of the discipline itself, which is bioethics, and above all from the point of view of the form of democracy to which it has come in its development in modern societies of the Western world.