Teaching Bioethics in the New Millennium: Holding Theories Accountable to Actual Practices and Real People

Abstract

Teaching bioethics in the new millennium requires its practitioners to confront a wide area of methodological alternatives. This essay chronicles the author's journey from the principlism of Beauchamp and Childress, through narrative and postmodern bioethics, to a complex feminist critique of postmodern bioethics that emphasizes functional human capabilities and the creation of structures that can facilitate free discussion of those capabilities and how best to realize them. Teaching bioethics concerns not only the acknowledgement of differences but also reminding ourselves of our samenesses. Sustained Habermasian democratic conversations might help us to escape the narrow confines of a postmodern bioethics of moral strangers for a richer world of moral friends.