This is a biorethics bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warberton.

Bioethics is made an association with Oxford's Uroheiro Center for Practical Ethics and made possible by Grant from the Welcome Trust.

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imagine the following choice you could either finance medical treatment

that restored hearing to 50 people who'd lost hearing in just one ear, or you could pay the same

amount to treat an entirely deaf person so that this one person could hear perfectly.

Which would you choose?

To help the 50 or the one? In this series we've mainly focused on dilemmas and debates involving individual doctors and patients.

Jonathan Wolf is a political theorist and he believes that traditional bioethics misses a vital dimension, the distribution of resources.

Joe Wolf, welcome to bioethics bites.

Well, thank you for having me.

The topic we're going to talk about is political bioethics.

In a sense, that's a new subject.

Could you just say what it is and how it relates to traditional bioethics.

Traditional bioethics has focused on what goes on in the hospital or in the GP surgery.

A whole series of doctors dilemmmmas as they've been called.

What should we tell the patient? What can we release to the patient's family? What should we do with

the patient's organs after surgery? What should we do at the beginning of life? Should we save the baby

or not? What can we do at end of life? Can we legitimately engage in euthanasia? Those are all very

good questions, but they're all about the doctors relation

with the patient or sometimes with the patient's family. The type of thing I'm interested in,

...