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Toward a Better Bioethics

Commentary on “Forbidding Science: Some Beginning Reflections”

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Abstract

It has been argued that bioethicists too often tend to represent the interests of scientists and not of the broader polity. Indeed, bioethicists seem predisposed to discard the voices and viewpoints of all but the cognoscenti. Focusing particularly on human pluripotent stem cell research, this commentary explores a variety of characterizations of bioethics and bioethicists in relation to forbidding science. Rather than proselytizing or prohibiting, bioethicists should work in partnership with scientists and publics to craft scientifically well-informed and morally sophisticated debates about forbidding science.

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Notes

  1. Bush’s position was something of a compromise; on moral (religious) grounds regarding the sanctity of life and worries about complicity, Bush opposed federal funding to create or to study newly created human embryonic stem cell lines, but he did not ban the research altogether. While non-federal funding sources were not constrained by his Executive Order, the intention was to limit federal involvement in human embryonic stem cell research. The standard political and bioethical response to Bush’s restriction was to promote a radically pro-research perspective, according to which limits on research should be rare or nonexistent. A minority of commentators (e.g., Baylis and Downie 2005; Baylis and Robert 2006) attempted to moderate extreme views by promoting well-justified human embryonic stem cell research, as against promoting all human embryonic stem cell research all the time, but on scientific and secular ethical grounds. For a sober and compelling assessment of the national context in the United States for debates about human pluripotent stem cell research, see Zwanziger (2008).

  2. See also the introduction to a special issue of this journal on the ethics of communicating science (Garrett and Bird 2000).

  3. For arguments about environmental ethics in situ that dovetail with mine about bioethics in situ, see Nelson (2008).

  4. To the extent that the President’s Council on Bioethics, under Leon Kass, took the science seriously while simultaneously stimulating—or attempting to stimulate—a broad ethical conversation about moral values and human well-being, Kass should be considered a fledgling moral architect. We would all do well to learn from his efforts, even and perhaps especially where we disagree with his specific conclusions.

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Acknowledgments

My research is supported by the Center for Biology and Society, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University, as well as by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. I am grateful to Jenny Dyck Brian and the editors for valuable feedback on drafts of this commentary.

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  1. Center for Biology and Society and School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Box 874501, Tempe, AZ, 85287-4501, USA

    Jason Scott Robert

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Correspondence to Jason Scott Robert.

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Robert, J.S. Toward a Better Bioethics. Sci Eng Ethics 15, 283–291 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9134-5

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