“Narrowness” and “Broadness” of Bioethics: on some Middle-European and Mediterranean Initiatives

By the end of the 20th century, bioethics had been twice invented: first by the German theologian Fritz Jahr in 1926, and then by the American biologist Van Rensselaer Potter in 1970. These two versions of bioethics, however, have not been the only ones: what became a mainstream was a form of bioethics propagated by the Georgetown University Kennedy Institute of Ethics, narrowed-down to biomedical ethics. New initiatives and ideas appearing primarily in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century - in Spain, Italy, Croatia and elsewhere - guarantee a dynamic development coming back to the broad origins of bioethics as conceived by Jahr and Potter