Bioethics and public health: epistemological convergences

Jose Roque Junges, Elma Lourdes Campos Pavone Zoboli

This is a theoretical discussion about the epistemological statute of bioethics based on its convergences with public health, linked as scientific areas that came from the context of the second epistemological rupture, which questioned the critique to common sense inherent in modern science. The reapproximation with common sense in the second rupture means considering the determinants of environment and subjectivity in the methodology. Emerging from the second rupture, public health and bioethics include the social and subjective determinants in their analysis, with an enlarged and complex vision of human health and human actions involving environment, life and health. This requires a transdisciplinary focus in their approaches. What is the meaning of these premises for the epistemological statute of bioethics in its convergence with public health? As ethics, bioethics needs to be critical, but not aprioristic. The criticism of bioethics needs to come from the facticity of the social determinants expressed by the health iniquities. The only way to integrate criticism and facticity is hermeneutics, interpreting the significances constructed in the reality and become critical therefrom. This is the epistemological statute appropriate to bioethics in its convergence with public health.