Organic bioethics is an approach to bioethics that treats the field as a living, continually evolving dialogue between ethical reflection and the wider social, cultural and institutional environments in which advances in the life sciences occur. Finnish scholar Heikki Saxén introduced the concept in his 2017 doctoral dissertation, A Cultural Giant: An interpretation of bioethics in light of its intellectual and cultural history [1].
Saxén argues that meaningful bioethical inquiry must remain both intellectually open-ended and socially inclusive—qualities he believes characterised the field’s early aspirations but later slipped from view.
