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Copyright

Henk ten Have

Published On

2025-03-28

Page Range

pp. 1–28

Language

  • English

Print Length

28 pages

1. Introduction

Color, Healthcare and Bioethics

Chapter of: Color, Healthcare and Bioethics(pp. 1–28)
Whereas colors are all around us and we directly experience them, and often enjoy the world as colored, they do not receive much attention in medical and care activities, and even less in ethical analyses. Usually, color is regarded as something secondary and trivial. As a subjective impression it is less important than objective observations and findings. Nonetheless, as discussed in this book, color has played and continues to play an important role in healthcare, not only in diagnostic but also therapeutic endeavours. The same is true for ethics. It used to be clearly demarcated from aesthetics, relegating color to the domain of emotions, feelings, intuitions and subjective experiences while ethics is characterized by rational arguments and deliberation. In present-day bioethical debate this distinction can no longer be upheld since in practice colors (particularly black and white) are associated with moral appreciations and interpretations which influence ethical judgments before they are rationally articulated. This chapter briefly summarizes the contents of the subsequent chapters.

Contributors

Henk ten Have

(author)
Emeritus Professor at Duquesne University
Research professor at the Faculty of Bioethics at Anahuac University Network
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3224-7943

Henk ten Have has been Director of the Center for Healthcare Ethics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, USA (2010–2019). He studied medicine and philosophy in the Netherlands and worked as professor in the Faculty of Medicine of the Universities of Maastricht and Nijmegen. From 2003 until 2010 he has joined UNESCO in Paris as Director of the Division of Ethics of Science and Technology. Since 2019 he is Emeritus Professor, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA, and since 2021 Research Professor at the Faculty of Bioethics in the Universidad Anahuac Mexico. He is editor of the International Journal of Ethics Education, and Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. His recent book publications are Global Bioethics; An Introduction (2016), Vulnerability: Challenging Bioethics (2016), Global Education in Bioethics (2018), Wounded Planet. How Declining Biodiversity Endangers Health and How Bioethics Can Help (2019), Dictionary of Global Bioethics (with Maria do Céu Patrão Neves, 2021), Bioethics, Healthcare and the Soul (with Renzo Pegoraro, 2022), Bizarre Bioethics—Ghosts, Monsters and Pilgrims (2022) and The Covi d-19 Pandemic and Global Bioethics (2022). He has edited the Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics (2016) and Global Education in Bioethics (2018).