A Corrective for Bioethical Malaise: Revisiting the Cultural Influences That Shaped the Identity of Bioethics

Abstract

In this essay the author addresses three issues concerning the cultural influences that shaped modern bioethics: (1) the recurrent bioethics malaise that is traceable notably to an expanding reductionism in the methods and scope of bioethics; (2) how both the malaise that nestles in the community of bioethicists and the reductionism that is its cause distort the meaning of bioethics as it has been shaped by cultural factors; and (3) how a corrective might be achieved by taking seriously a consideration of three sorts of cultural forces that shaped bioethics from its origins. Those three cultural forces are: (1) the force of cultural conflict as analyzed by some intellectuals who launched a worldwide debate on “the two cultures” of science and humanities; (2) the culture of the 1960s that precipitated the rapid coalescence of the elements ingredient in a new and challenging area of inquiry known as bioethics; and (3) the expansive culture of Western intellectual inquiry since the Renaissance, which accounts for the diverse approaches to bioethics.