Eudynamic bioethics

Abstract

Abstract A woman’s chronic pain is controlled to a stable score, yet her sleep, her work, her singing, and her partnership have narrowed around her condition. Each clinical decision was defensible; what failed is the existential composition around them. This article proposes eudynamia as the concept bioethics lacks: the distributed activity through which possibilities are composed across the conditions of a life so that securing one does not foreclose the others. Ernst Daniel August Bartels coined Eudynamie in § 55 of his Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Pathologie (1819) for a physiological capacity working as it should, then observed that its value changes with the capacities beside it. His relational biology identified the configurational problem but lacked an account of what a life-capacity is a capacity for. Phenomenology and 4E cognition supply the missing content, understanding life and cognition as distributed: embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded. Eudynamia is accordingly reconstructed as the work of keeping possibilities compossible across Person, Earth, Work, and Society, while dysdynamia names configurations in which local effectivity forecloses the wider life. Canguilhem’s biological normativity then distinguishes compossibility from coercive coherence, since eudynamic integration preserves the creative capacity to institute new norms. The framework is illustrated in integrative care, antimicrobial stewardship, and artificial intelligence. Bioethics has learned to ask whether each decision is right. It must also learn to ask what forms of life its right decisions, taken together, are making possible.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Medicine Health Care and Philosophy, 2026 · DOI ↗