Follwoing Robby the Robot

The Hastings Center Report, for those of you who don't know, is the first bioethics journal celebrating 40 years of publication (or could you say medical indoctrination?). The journal is really all about euthanasia covered with a bioethics blanket.

The Hastings Center Report asked young scholars to write about what the next generation of bioethicists should take up? There were 195 submissions and 4 of the best were published.

"Picking the essays we wanted to publish turned out to be surprisingly difficult", said Gregory Kaebnick, editor of the Hastings Center Report. "We not only wanted good essays; we also wanted to represent the range of topics that people had written about and the range of people writing them up. But it's a good problem to have, of course, and it gives us great confidence about the future of bioethics." Here we go. 1.) "Establishing A Duty Of Care For Pharmaceutical Companies" 2.) "A Role For Moral Vision In Public Health" 3.) "The Art Of Dying Well" 4.) "The Challenge Of Regenerative Medicine"

Wow! That sums up medical ethics. Let's take "The Art Of Dying Well". In his essay, the point that one of the most pressing bioethical concerns is to create a framework for teaching an aging population to prepare for death and support on another through the dying process. In the article, Lydia Dugdale from Yale School of Medicine says, "American society remains ill equipped for the experience of of dying. Among the reasons are advances in medical technology, that have obscured the distinction between death and life, physician difficulty in discussing end of life issues with their patients, and the secularization of Western culture, which has marginalized the role of religion in preparing people for death."

All of this sounds good but, just like "the secret's in the sauce", the implementation of these noble principles may be delivered by Robby the Robot, whose learning ethics from ?