[Can Happiness be "Produced"?].

Psychiatry und psychotherapy aim at relieving their patients from mental diseases and disturbances and at enabling them to feel happier than they would do otherwise. Thus, part of their raison d'être depends on the chance to achieve happiness by a systematic effort. A "pursuit of happiness" along this line has repeatedly met with skepticism.

[Organ transplantation. Questions in the interface of ethics and anthropology].

In the field of organ transplantation medical ethics is confronted with a number of problems where the particular difficulty lies in the fact that ethical and anthropological questions interpenetrate. This article discusses two of these problems in this interface both of which are highly controversial: the real or apparent contradiction between the dead-donor rule and the traditional definition of death and the real or apparent contradiction between the ethical desirability of harvesting organs from non-heart beating donors and the irreversibility of brain death.

Embryonic stem cell research and the argument of complicity.

While the argument of complicity is only rarely discussed in bioethics, it is of obvious relevance to the issue of imported embryonic stem cells in countries in which the derivation of stem cells from early human embryos is legally prohibited and/or morally rejected. Complicity means that making use of the results or products of an illegal or morally problematic activity is itself morally problematic, although generally to a lesser degree than the original activity. The question arises as to which conditions make the argument of complicity plausible, thus supporting attacks against legislation that aims to promote research based on 'fruits of a forbidden tree'.