Does Steve Biko have more to offer medical ethics than his death?

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dc.contributor.authorPoole, Samuel Cedric Herbert Bazil
dc.date.accessioned2015-09-07T09:18:35Z
dc.date.available2015-09-07T09:18:35Z
dc.date.issued2015
dc.descriptionSubmitted in partial fulfilment of the degree of MSc (Med) in Bioethics and Health Law, Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics, University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg, 25 January 2015
dc.description.abstractSince his death at the hands of the South African security police on 12 September 1977, much has been written in medical, legal and other literature about Steve Biko. This dissertation explores the medical literature and finds that the vast majority of authors, when writing about Biko, refer primarily to his death, the role of the medical profession in the events leading up to his death, and the ethical issues regarding dual loyalties that arise from studying those issues. In my research question I ask: Does Steve Biko have more to offer medical ethics than his death? In exploring Steve Biko’s writings as collected together in I Write What I Like, I find an underlying thinking which guided Biko’s philosophy. I show that this underlying philosophy is nothing other than the philosophy which underlies ubuntu and I explore how ubuntu should influence our medical ethical thinking and suggest that this could be Biko’s real contribution to medical ethics, namely an ethic that takes seriously the contribution that African moral thinking has to make in the field of medical ethics, a contribution that does nothing less than give to medical ethics a more human face, a contribution which Biko himself believed was what Africa was still to give to the world, a more human face. I critically review the writings and philosophy of Steve Biko and identify key notions or conceptions that are of relevance to medical ethics and then explore the impact and relevance of these key notions and conceptions to the fundamental bioethical issues of autonomy, dignity and confidentiality. I defend the normative claim that integrating Biko’s and other salient African ethical conceptions into our predominantly Western bioethical thinking is a moral requirement.en_ZA
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10539/18503
dc.language.isoenen_ZA
dc.subject.meshEthics, Medical
dc.titleDoes Steve Biko have more to offer medical ethics than his death?en_ZA
dc.typeThesisen_ZA
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