PRAGMATISM IN BIOETHICS: BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

Abstract

It has often been remarked that bioethics is a quintessentially American phenomenon. Broadly speaking, bioethics as a field has tended to enshrine the value of autonomy, it places individual rights above communal well-being, and it has adopted a largely permissive and optimistic view of emerging biotechnologies. In contrast to much European thinking at the intersection of ethics and medicine, American-style bioethics has been resolutely middlebrow, eschewing grand philosophical schemes in favor of pragmatic policy-making and democratic consensus. It was, then, perhaps only a matter of time before various theorists began proposing a marriage between bioethics and pragmatism, which is the homegrown American philosophy.