Bioethics and their safeguards in Singapore : an evolutionary psychological view.

Abstract

As Singapore invests more and more heavily on the life science industries, bioethics has become increasingly important as guidance for health workers, researchers, and companies; at the meantime, it has also posed a number of solved and unsolved dilemmas for legislation and public policies. In order to understand better the current bioethical issues and predict the possible future problems, this study proposed an evolutionary psychological approach as the theoretical framework for society-level analyses, and used this framework to find out the mechanism of the evolution of bioethics as a cultural meme. The mechanism proposed was then applied to the analysis of bioethical issues and policies in Singapore. To test the validity of the approach, a survey on public opinions of euthanasia was conducted. The result proved that at the society level, the evolutionary psychological approach is useful to predict possible outcomes of bioethical decisions and lead to efficient public policy and legislation. Finally, a postulation from society to individual was made to tackle possible moral crisis during the economic downturn.