Bioethics as Ideology: Conditional and Unconditional Values

For all its apparent debate bioethical discourse is in fact very narrow. The discussion that occurs is typically within limited parameters, rarely fundamental. Nor does it accommodate divergent perspectives with ease. The reason lies in its ideology and the political and economic perspectives that ideology promotes. Here the ideology of bioethics’ fundamental axioms is critiqued as arbitrary and exclusive rather than necessary and inclusive. The result unpacks the ideological and political underpinnings of bioethical thinking and suggests new avenues for a broader debate over fundamentals, and a different approach to bioethical debate.

Keywords:

• bioethics
• disability
• ideology
• normalcy
• Schiavo
• review

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to express his thanks both to the issue editor, Fabrice Jotterand, and to the peer reviewers for their detailed consideration and careful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. For the purpose of brevity and simplicity, narrative and casuistry are here conflated. There are important narrative accounts in the bioethics literature, though they are few. Those that exist typically describe the experiences of a disabled author (for example my own story in Koch, 1994, 176–198). This is simply the way it is, however, not the way it necessarily has to be. For an example of the use of non-authorial, personal narrative in bioethics see, for example, Koch, 1993, 218–224)

2. As a peer reviewer suggested, this article is incomplete without a closer look at the relation between politics and political argument, and bioethics. That, however, requires a different article that can tease out the relationship of the greater political discourse, laden with economic content, and the specific consideration of medical choices that is bioethics specific focus. A separate article on these issues is in progress.

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