Two kinds of globality: a comparison of Fritz Jahr and Van Rensselaer Potter's bioethics

Abstract

Today, it is widely accepted that the first to conceive the term and the discipline of bioethics (Bio-Ethik) was the German theologian and teacher Fritz Jahr (1895–1953) from the city of Halle. Without knowing Jahr's ideas, the American oncologist Van Rensselaer Potter (1911–2001) from Madison, Wisconsin, (re-)invented the notion of bioethics which, unlike in the case of Fritz Jahr, had a deep impact and spread all over the world. Although Jahr's bioethics somehow differed from that of Potter, they did share many crucial aspects, one of which was their globality. Without explicit reference to it, nevertheless, Fritz Jahr's “globality” was based upon his broad readings including Far-Eastern sources and thinkers, while Van Rensselaer Potter explicitly formed his global bioethics, in the late 1980s, as a reaction to the narrowing-down of his earlier ideas (to medical ethics, principlism and American pragmatism). In that way, Jahr and Potter, like on many other points, came to the same result via different motives and pathways.