Notes

• [*]
  Professor of Bioethics, Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Facoltà di Filosofia, Palazzo Arese Borromeo, via Borromeo, 20031 Cesano Maderno (Milano), Italy.
• [1]
  It may be argued that, apart from any consideration of its intrinsic merits, the philosophical perspective of ‘principlism’ has contributed much to the creation of such a common ground in American bioethics. This basic paradigm was originally set out by T.L. Beauchamp and J.F. Childress in their Principles of Biomedical Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979 (the latest edition, the fifth, was published in 2001).
• [2]
  H.T. Engelhardt, Jr., Manuale di Bioetica, Milan: Il Saggiatore 1999. The title is in fact identical to that of E. Sgreccia, Manuale di Bioetica, Milan: Vita e Pensiero 1999, 2 vol., which is the most famous and important of Catholic manuals.
• [3]
  This was particularly the case for the document on the human embryo (Comitato Nazionale per la Bioetica, Identità e statuto dell’embrione umano, Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Dipartimento per l’informazione e l’editoria, 1996) that gave rise to several debates both in the newspapers and in academic journals.
• [4]
  This is argued, for example, by M. Mori, “La bioetica: che cos’è, quand’è nata, e perché. Osservazioni per un chiarimento della “natura” della bioetica e del dibattito italiano in materia”, Bioetica, 1993, n°1, pp. 115-143.
• [5]
  See, for example, A. Fiori, E. Sgreccia, “La bioetica contesa”, Medicina e Morale, 1994, n°44, pp. 861-864.
• [6]
  The story is told by D. Neri, Bioetica in laboratorio. Cellule staminali, clonazione e salute umana, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2001, pp. 131-137.