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Bioethics: A Field in Transition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Ruth R. Faden
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Extract

Bioethics is clearly a field in transition, if not confusion. Bioethics began as a scholarly, reflective, academic enterprise. Increasingly, however, some in bioethics are not as interested in producing scholarship as they are in practicing bioethics by providing services to institutions and clients.

Bioethics also began as an interdisciplinary line of inquiry, with its major contributors all trained in some established discipline. We were and for the most part still are a field composed of theologians, philosophers, lawyers, physicians, nurses, and social scientists who work in bioethics. Today, however, some young people actually aspire to be bioethicists. Increasingly, they have the option of being trained directly in bioethics, without any other disciplinary background.

We are not the first field to find itself engaged in these kinds of transitions. In this short piece, I consider very briefly how two fields--health psychology and epidemiology- have approached similar branch points.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Summer 2004 , pp. 276 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2004

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References

Health psychology and epidemiology are not the only fields that have experienced similar transitions. The sociology and history of knowledge is replete with relevant examples, including examples of how established fields gave rise to new lines of inquiry and ultimately to whole new fields.Google Scholar
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