Conservationism and Bioethics

The lead article in this issue of the Hastings Center Report (July‐August 2017) explores the ideas underpinning the Precision Medicine Initiative, the effort announced by President Obama in 2015 to promote the development of treatments adjusted to genetic and other variations. Authors Maya Sabatello and Paul Appelbaum hold that the effort works by appealing to a sense of collective identity and shared commitment—an understanding that they call the “PMI nation.” But what are the moral implications of this idea? Sabatello and Appelbaum's question about the impact of an imagined community is an unusual way of exploring a set of values questions. In the second article, Johann Brännmark defends what is, at least in bioethics, an unusual philosophical framework for moral values. Brännmark starts by calling attention to large, never‐quite‐solved problems with the field's going way of understanding personhood and autonomy, and then argues that the body of tradition, law, and international governance known as the human‐rights framework offers a solution to those problems. And a supplement to this issue offers a set of essays on a topic outside the usual range for bioethics: the prospect of “de‐extinction”—that is, of using genetic and reproductive technologies to construct simulacra of extinct animals that might eventually be introduced into the wild.      

Bioethics and Addiction

Bioethicists have sometimes regarded the opioid epidemic as a problem with obvious answers and thus no need for the field's conceptual analysis. Yet, as three essays in the July-August 2020 issue of the Hastings Center Report demonstrate, the opioid crisis contains a knot of distinctions and puzzles to be sorted out. Travis N. Rieder examines, for example, what is fundamentally driving the crisis—access to the drugs or large societal problems such as poverty and joblessness. The role of choice in addiction, the effects of moral condemnation on approaches to addiction, and what treatment should look like are among the puzzles Hanna Pickard explores, while Daniel S. Goldberg focuses on the common and harmful conflation of the public health problems of substance misuse and pain. These philosophical and bioethical questions point in widely different directions, lying both inside and outside bioethics. They point toward systemic societal factors that determine health and well-being yet have seemed outside bioethics' largely clinical boundaries. And they point toward a deeper look at the very idea of autonomy—an examination of a topic clearly within bioethics yet occurring at the fringes of its usual constructs.     

Bioethics and history

Standard bioethics textbooks present the field to students and non-experts as a form of "applied ethics." This ahistoric and rationalistic presentation is similar to that used in philosophy of science textbooks until three decades ago. Thomas Kuhn famously critiqued this self-conception of the philosophy of science, persuading the field that it would become deeper, richer, and more philosophical, if it integrated the history of science, especially the history of scientific change, into its self-conception. This essay urges a similar reconceptualization for bioethics, arguing that the analysis of moral change ought to be integral to bioethics (and to ethics generally). It proceeds by suggesting the sterility of the ahistoric, rationalist applied ethics model of bioethics embraced by standard bioethics textbooks. It also suggests the fecundity of alternative conceptions of the bioethics that focus on the history of successful and failed attempts to negotiate moral change, and the history of multifaceted relations between moral philosophy and practical ethics.     

Theology and Bioethics

Theologians are often criticized for having little distinctive or important to say on bioethical issues. Such a critique overlooks, however, the protective dispositive, and directive ways in which faith can inform reason.     

Bioethics in the law

The role of law in bioethics is clear. Laws are enforcement tools: they govern which conditions qualify an individual for disability benefits, or what oversight is necessary for clinical trial protocols, or how patent applications for medical devices should be regulated. I initially studied the law in order to enhance my work in bioethics, but in examining how the law works, I have become convinced that the converse opportunity also exists: there are many areas of law that would benefit from greater input from those in the bioethics community.     

Bioethics and the contemporary Jewish community

David Novak takes up the methodological issue of how substantive religious perspectives can be communicated in a pluralistic society. Novak notes that while "secularism" was historically welcomed by the Jewish community, Jewish thinkers now likewise face the challenge of speaking out of a tradition to a secular audience. Novak holds up Jewish-Christian dialogue as a model for constructing a public philosophy.     

Bioethics and the rituals of media

Popular media may make short shrift of complex ideas and moral deliberations, but it can also serve bioethics well. Bioethics should embrace the ritual function of the media in bringing issues to public attention and in reinforcing bioethics as a field.     

Bioethics,conflicts of interest, & the limits of transparency

The movement in bioethics toward disclosure of financial conflicts of interest is well and good, most of the time. But in some cases, disclosure is not only unnecessary but destructive. When bioethicists advance arguments whose premises and logical moves are open to scrutiny, disclosure—far from clearing the air of bias—introduces bias.