Procedural Bioethics and Content or Substantive Bioethics

Daniel Buchanan argued that bioethics has three main functions: identifying and defining existing ethical conflicts; providing systems or methods to think about new emerging ethical conflicts in the field of medicine; and helping scientists and physicians to make decisions1. More than 45 years after Buchanan′s article was published, the existence in hospitals of mechanisms such as healthcare ethics committees, institutional review boards for clinical research, and the increase in standard operating procedures, plans, and manuals for clinical research has increased significantly. In other words, there is a greater interest and demand for procedures, leaving aside questions related to the content and moral foundation of the decisions