The soul of a new machine: bioethicists in the bureaucracy.

In a recent issue of The Lancet, the historian Roger Cooter predicted that the field of bioethics will soon die of self-inflicted wounds. “Conspiring against it,” he wrote, “is exposure of the funding of some of its US centres by pharmaceutical companies; exclusion of alternative perspectives from the social sciences; retention of narrow analytical notions of ethics in the face of popular expression and academic respect for the place of emotions; divisions within the discipline (including one over its origins and meaning); and collusion with, and appropriation by, clinical medicine.” Cooter’s prognosis? “Hardly wet behind the ears, bioethics seems destined for a short lifespan.” 1 To anyone in the United States this prediction will sound bizarre. It is hard to imagine an academic field with a faster and more robust growth. Bioethics is spreading like kudzu, colonizing new areas even where it is unfamiliar, unexpected, and unwelcome. It is generating new centers, new journals, new courses, new commissions, new funding sources, and, perhaps most visibly, a newly politicized presence in American public life. Americans can hardly open a newspaper or watch television without encountering a so-called bioethics expert. The field has a vitality and energy that often leads outsiders to shake their heads in disbelief. It used to be the case that philosophers envied and resented the wealth and public profile of bioethics, while bioethicists envied and resented the academic prestige of philosophy. No more. American bioethicists hardly even pay attention to philosophers anymore, much less envy them. These days I worry about submitting papers to philosophy journals and book anthologies because I fear that nobody in bioethics will read them. Yet there does seem to be a widespread feeling, even among those in the field, that bioethics may be growing in the wrong direction. Bioethics generates a fair amount of resentment, especially outside the United States, where it is sometimes seen as a kind of belligerent, self-absorbed, American academic imperialism. (As if to confirm the prejudices of many non-Americans, University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan responded to Cooter’s article by writing, “We in the USA are familiar with the sad state of British University life, as cut after cut has decimated the ranks of the professoriate. But, have things really degenerated to the point where this sort of intellectual tripe can be printed as scholarly analysis in The Lancet?” 2 ) Not all of this resentment of bioethics is ill founded. The problems and divisions that Cooter cites as fatal to bioethics have been pointed out many times before, usually by bioethicists themselves. In fact, many people working in and around bioethics wince if someone calls them a “bioethicist.” Some resist the aura of professionalism and