Bioetica e antropologia in Alasdair MacIntyre. Dipendenza, vulnerabilità, disabilità = Bioethics and Anthropology in Alasdair MacIntyre: Dependence, Vulnerability, Disability

This article focuses on the anthropological preconditions and the social and political outcomes of the MacIntyrean approach to medical ethics. Here medicine is considered as a social practice characterized by the goods it pursues and by the required virtues. In liberals societies the practice of medicine degenerates into a relationship between two self-determining parts mediated by contract. To overcome this view, it is necessary to recover the sense of physical, psychological and rational human dependence. This changes the way we look at social and political relations, as social bonds are the conditions of possibility for the accomplishment of individual and social goods.