Socrates Tenured by Robert Frodeman Adam Briggle

Author:Robert Frodeman,Adam Briggle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International

Chapter 5

Bioethics

As species of applied philosophy, environmental ethics and bioethics occupy different places in our social imagination. Environmental ethics strikes many as an arcane subject, of concern mostly to tree-huggers. The field has failed at its largest goal: convincing society that environmental health and sustainability are the sine qua non for all human endeavours. ‘Bioethics’, on the other hand, is intuitively understood. Possibly no other area of practical ethics is so readily grasped, and so quick to anger people, whether the subject is the rationing of healthcare, the high cost of prescriptions, or Obama’s purported Death Panels.

There are also similarities between the two domains. As we’ve noted with environmental philosophy, medical ethics is also as old as Western philosophy. Moreover, in parallel with environmental ethics, bioethics is a creature of the twentieth century, its development spurred by historical events and technoscientific development. But we cannot claim, as we did with environmental ethics, that bioethics is a product of twentieth-century philosophy and disciplinary culture. When it emerged as a more or less distinct field in the 1970s, it was through the interdisciplinary efforts – sometimes competitive, sometimes cooperative – of lawyers, physicians, nurses, scientists, theologians, sociologists, and philosophers. Bioethics was never ‘applied philosophy’, if by that term we mean the application of academic philosophy to questions of social concern. Its provenance has not been so pure. And this has been a key to its greater degree of success in terms of influencing society.

In the West, medical ethics dates back to the Hippocratic Oath (fourth century, BCE), which codified physician responsibility (although this provenance has been questioned: parts of the Oath seem to reflect Pythagorean rather than Hippocratic philosophy). Questions of medical ethics show up in Plato: in the Republic, Socrates voices concern with excessive efforts to tend to the frail, and of course the platonic corpus as a whole is concerned with medical ethics, in that the philosopher is thought of as the physician of the soul. Moreover, both Plato and Aristotle discuss questions such as the permissibility of abortion and the appropriate level of care due to the body. Much more recently, the development of a formal medical ethics was a key part of the professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century. The social power of physicians grew as they locked down a monopoly on the legitimate practice of medicine. Medical ethics, particularly as inscribed in codes of conduct, was the expression of the duty to wield that power responsibly. At the centre of that obligation was the principle of beneficence: do no harm. Medical ethics underpinned a relationship of trust: society relied upon physicians to use their knowledge for good rather than ill.

This trust was violated by the Nazi physicians who conducted heinous experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Following the war, international military courts put on trial twenty-three Nazi physicians, in what came to be known as the twelve ‘Doctors’ Trials’ or the ‘Subsequent Nuremberg Trials’. In an appeal to a principle transcending the laws of any one nation, the indictments referred to ‘crimes against humanity.

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