Abstract

Principlism, the account of Bioethics proposed by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in their work Principles of Biomedical Ethics, is presented by the authors as a guide to the practice of biomedical Ethics resulting from the determination of four basic moral principles that are part of the common morality, understood, in its turn, as a set of universally shared moral beliefs. In spite of the appeal of the proposal, some objections can be made. This paper seeks to introduce the following question: what authority does the common morality confer to Principlism? Because, if Principlism does not pretend the background of the authority of the common morality, in what way does Principlism contribute to Bioethics?