Those were the days: looking back at the future.

The central idea of this "article" is that certain developments such as extreme simplification, the politicisation of medical ethics, the "normative industry" and "empirethics", may seriously threaten the (future) practice of medical ethics. 25th of November 2025, Rotterdam, Europe THOSE WERE THE DAYS: LOOKING BACK AT THE FUTURE Nowadays, in 2025, there are no more conferences. There is, of course, no need for bioethicists to meet face to face anymore the information superhighway has put paid to that. At the beginning of the millennium the European Commission devoted all the biomed funds for research on biomedical ethics and ethical, legal and social sspects, to financing an electronic network to which all European bioethicists were linked. Good service: electronic publications, legislation, reports, the computers are still happily humming and everything is available to all participants. No more excuses. No more re-inventing the ethical wheel. There is of course the small problem that reading all the material is a more than full-time job. But then these are the days of summaries and mastering the art of selective reading. Meetings are, of course, held by videophone. Efficient! I do miss the dinners though. Far more interesting than the meetings, I often thought. Let me take you back to the optimistic nineties of the past century. From popular to popularisation Those were the days, my colleagues. Bioethics was popular. It was considered important. Optimism reigned. Many studied the field. People still believed in normative conclusions and policy statements based on those conclusions. Medical practice and research provided us with a new problem at an average of one a week. Many politicians suffered from bouts of severe ethicoholism, for which, thank God, there was no cure. Medical ethics was professionalised, saving it from the image of a hobby of a few "deviant" idiosyncratic ethicists. In the beginning "real" ethicists, the moral philosophers, were called upon. Simultaneously the call for multidisciplinarity became very strong. Those who worked with bioethicists were, after a few courses in ethics, also called bioethicists. (Very expensive courses, mind you. The knowledge acquired in a course was proportional to the enrolment fee. So they said.) By 2003 there were only two ethicists on the Board of the International Association of Bioethics. The rest were replaced by representatives of patient organisations and politicians. Bioethicists felt like the famous violinist in JJ Thomson's analogy: dependent for life support on someone else. And we all know about the moral obligations of the person providing the life support ... Some ethicists, especially the older ones looking forward to their retirement, prided themselves on their success. This was their raison d'etre: making themselves superfluous by teaching professionals how to tackle ethical issues. Others were sceptical and wondered whether, by their zeal to involve other disciplines, they had made the field look too easy. Popularisation led to too much simplification, which led to deprofessionalisation. Especially significant in an era in which ethical issues were considered important. The tragedy of post-modem society? (Or was post-modernism more a diagnosis than a therapy, and even as a diagnosis rather vague?) Anyway: societies and individuals were confused, that much was true. How eager we were to be understood by nonphilosophers. One of the problems was, in my view, that the experts in other disciplines, in particular the doctors, did expect us to know and understand the medical details of issues. (We tried, sometimes succeeded, sometimes pretended, pseudodoctors with theories on what a doctor should do, but without the actual responsibility.) There was not, however, always reciprocity. Doctors were not