Bioethics And Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The ethics of scientific technologies and medical practices have always been controversial, and society as a whole has largely decided that a modicum of collective control of science and medicine should be enforced. Debates about this control have come to be generally called bioethical debates, but clarity requires distinctions between three distinct sub debates. The first is clinical bioethics, which is the microapplication of government and institutional policy to the evaluation of the ethics of human experimentation and the treatment of patients in hospitals. For example, every university that conducts research on humans has an institutional review board that applies government ethics policy to individual research proposals, and every hospital must have a bioethicist (or equivalent) on call to resolve ethical dilemmas. A second is regulatory bioethics, wherein groups of professionals make ethical recommendations to government officials on issues outside those considered by clinical ethics. Most influential in this category have been various government bioethics commissions over the years, which have made ethical recommendations to elected and unelected government officials about issues such as reproductive cloning, the definition of death, and the treatment of the subjects of medical research. A third category is cultural bioethics. Here, the debate is not necessarily about policies that should be enacted, but rather about how the society should morally evaluate developments in science and medicine. For example, there is a bioethics debate that takes place in the media over whether genetically enhancing children should be considered morally licit.

These three bioethical debates are differently political. Clinical ethics is fairly apolitical, in that the ethics required by the government has not been challenged by any group.

Regulatory bioethics has until recently been fairly apolitical, largely because people with views not in concert with scientific or medical interests were marginalized from participation in these forums. For example, it has been claimed that not a single member of U.S. president Bill Clinton’s federal bioethics commission was opposed to the destruction of embryos, which certainly required making sure that not all views available in society were represented in the commission. With the advent of the George W. Bush administration, a different group of scholars were put in charge of the federal bioethics commission, more of whom were opposed to destroying embryos. The result is that what was once a fairly technocratic enterprise of advising the bureaucratic state from a “neutral” ethical perspective became challenged by social movements in the public sphere, particularly on beginning and end-of-life issues. For instance, the appointment of the commissioners to these once obscure commissions has been the subject of press releases, petitions, and challenges.

Cultural bioethics was always political in the broader sense of debate in the public sphere that results in consensus formation. While the issues at stake and the professions involved in shaping this debate have changed since the 1960s, its “politicization” has been constant. For example, whether reproductive cloning is moral is political, and all sorts of social movements, interest groups, and academics are involved in trying to convince the public to accept one position or another.

Bioethical debate is not old enough for consensus to have developed on terminology. However, most scholars would say that there are bioethical issues (e.g., reproductive cloning) that can be the subject of political activity, such as campaigns to enact legislation, but that bioethics and bioethical debate refer to the activity of professionals, not ordinary citizens. Moreover, while members of many different professions participate in the three distinct bioethical debates, there is widely acknowledged to be a distinct and dominant profession named bioethics, made up of bioethicists who exclusively participate in these debates. The general ethical approach of the bioethics profession—in contrast to other professions in the debate, such as theology—is to embody liberal democratic procedural ideals. Typically bioethicists claim to not be trying to promote their own values in these debates, but rather are trying to help patients clarify their own values (clinical ethics), or to clarify and utilize what they take to be the common moral principles of Western civilization (regulatory ethics.) Unlike other experts whose expertise is thought to give them an appropriate voice in politics, like climatologists, the very notion that there are ethical experts has always been controversial.

Bibliography:

Brown, Mark B. “Three Ways to Politicize Bioethics.” American Journal of Bioethics 9, no. 2 (2009): 43–54.
Callahan, Daniel. “Bioethics and the Culture Wars.” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 14 (2005): 424–431.
Dzur, Albert W., and Daniel Levin. “The ‘Nation’s Conscience’: Assessing Bioethics Commissions as Public Forums.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14, no. 4 (2004): 333–360.
Engelhardt, H.Tristram, Jr. “Bioethics as Politics: A Critical Reassessment.” In The Ethics of Bioethics: Mapping the Moral Landscape, edited by Lisa A. Eckenwiler and Felicia G. Cohn, 118–133. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Evans, John H. Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Kass, Leon R. “Reflections on Public Bioethics: A View from the Trenches.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15, no. 3 (2005): 221–250.