Abstract

Bioethics has been a very disputable field of applied ethics in the past years, which is caused by the frequency with which the term bioethics is used and, primarily, by the importance of the questions solved and increasing public interest. Many contemporary ethical and moral problems are based and rest upon conflicts stemming in bioethics. In the presented article, I will focus on the principle of humanity as a part of one of the most complex fields of bioethics. I will use ethics of social consequences as a theoretical point of research into biomedical problems regarding euthanasia and the relationship between the physician and the patient, which will be used as a tool for solving practical moral problems and dilemmas within medical ethics (as ethics of social consequences comes from the situational approach) as well. The determining morality criterion and basic point of my assessment are social consequences of acting (other consequences – purpose, motive, decision making – are transformed into them).