On the Politicization of Bioethics

There are bloggers out there whom I wish would post more often, largely because the quality of the posts is so high.  Stuart Rennie, over at Global Bioethics Blog, is one of them.  Rennie has a fascinating take on a review by Sally Satel of Swazey and Fox's excellent new contribution to the sociology of bioethics, Observing Bioethics.  Satel, Rennie says, states that bioethicists should avoid "getting involved more centrally in issues of global suffering and social justice," largely because of the risks of politicization.

Readers of MH Blog can probably sense my growing frustration with this particular claim, since it seems either incoherent or trivially true, and therefore does no real argumentative work.  Leigh Turner devoted an entire paper to assessing and rejecting this argument, contending that while fears of "politicization" of bioethics, public health, health policy, etc., may contain within them legitimate concerns (willful ignorance of evidence, refusal to entertain opposing views, etc.), it is those concerns that are at issue, rather then amorphous and absurd wishing that social endeavors were somehow apolitical.

Rennie puts it aptly, as usual:

The first problem concerns neutrality. Above all else, people working in bioethics formulate normative arguments in favor (or against) certain ethical positions, and not just offer a panorama of possibilities . . . The activity of conducting normative analysis and argument about (bio)ethical topics is already political.

As far as I am concerned, that train has sailed.  We have veritable mountains of conceptual and empirical evidence from domains as diverse as philosophy of language, philosophy of science, cognitive science, psychology, and many others to suggest that neutrality is something of a fiction, at times convenient, and at others, obstructive.  Why neutrality is a cherished ideal in American culture is rather an important question, I think, one tied into the social history and influence of the concept of objectivity.

But Rennie goes on to point out another problem in wishing bioethics to be apolitical:

the idea of a 'de-politicized' bioethics looks like a developed world fantasy, or luxury. Bioethics in other contexts has sometimes been a way of speaking truth to power in the domain of medicine, public health and health research, particularly against the background of corrupt Ministries of Health, dodgy pharmaceutical studies, and skyrocketing numbers of deaths from preventable and treatable diseases. When things get this ugly, a purely educative role for bioethics does not look like a mission worth having. It starts to look like a parlor game.

Again, the question is Aristotle's: what kind of a society do we wish to be?

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Sally Satel has kindly provided a link to a longer essay in which she develops her argument further.  (In my view, one of the great failures of American bioethics is that it has not been engaged with concerns of social justice nearly enough for my liking.  Accordingly, as you might imagine, I remain decidedly unconvinced by Satel's argument to the contrary, although I am grateful to be directed to the full version). 

Comments

[Kelly Hills]

I think that in some ways, the cherished grasp on neutrality (even though it's an impossible dream) is a reflection of the acknowledgment that we don't have a model of functionality for how to work with multiple, varying, conflicting points of view to achieve any kind of resolution. Right now, the only way we know how to get a group consensus is if we pretend that everyone strips off their bias and beliefs when they "approach a problem objectively."

(This, fwiw, has always been my problem with Rawls's solutions for how we can possibly function in a pluralistic society.)

[Daniel S. Goldberg]

Enthusiastic agreement, all the way around, especially as to the parenthetical.

A Rawls scholar once protested that he addresses all of those problems in "Political Liberalism," but I am dubious.

[Kelly Hills]

Yeah, I know a Rawls scholar who's tried to argue that with me, as well. The problem is, Rawls's theories (in any of the books) require that you accept as a basic premise that people are able to separate their motivations from their actions. That is, Rawls assumes that any religious person will be able to justify their beliefs in non-religious terms, or won't bring them into the public sphere for debate. This shows, to me, a fundamental lack of understanding of the religious person. ;)

Rawls' theories are great, if you're a dispassionate robot... ;)