Abstract
This essay aimed to analyze the need for new professional excellence guided by collective deliberation, debating the ethics applied to health issues in the Brazilian and Spanish experiences. The practical functioning of the bioethics committees in Spain is making progress in constituting the deliberative method as collective participation in professional decisions, discussing the importance of deliberative democracy to build new ethical civility. In Brazil, after the first decades of the construction of the Unified Health System, the professionals’ participation has widened, primarily in the health councils and, with CNS resolution No. 196/96, also in the ethics committees for research involving human subjects, improving new affirmative, organization and collective commitment actions aiming to expand responsibility in the construction and execution of public policies. Ethical deliberation becomes a central feature: professional decisions that were paternalistic and private in act have gradually expanded to collective and socially active deliberation, suggesting the need for a new professional excellence, beyond the merely technical and clinical–individual one. Brazilian bioethics takes on a leading role in the transformation of professional excellence guided by critical solidarity and commitment to public-social matters in deliberation collectives that take the population's quality of life into account.
Keywords
bioethics; deliberation; professional excellence; deliberative democracy; critical solidarity