American cultural politics and the rise of bioethics.

摘要

I examine American cultural politics during the 1960s and 70s through the emergence of "bioethics." During the 1960s, scientists, lawyers, philosophers, and theologians argued that a new rash of technologies was transforming the moral order. These "bioethicists" maintained that society was unprepared to answer the moral questions posed by these technologies and that, therefore, their services were needed.;My research suggests that bioethical impulses found their way into enduring social institutions not because they represented the social challenges of the 1960s but because they successfully diffused those challenges.;The modern roots of bioethics reach back to the post war "responsible science movement." Moreover, bioethics is part of the American tradition of ambivalence towards progress. The dissipation of this type of dissent has been one of the pillars of a technological society.;The bioethics "movement" assisted in transforming a social confrontation into a situation where experts managed problems generated by a technology which came to be seen, ironically, as value neutral in its creation even while it was problem-causing in its outcomes. I consider the place of bioethics within the larger narrative of 1960s protest culture and conclude that the movement from the 60s to the 70s is a shift from critique to management.;I report on the Hastings Center in New York, the nation's first bioethics institute. Additionally, I discuss how the impulse to redefine death surfaced when the demands of researchers for transplantable organs created a conflict of interest on the part of doctors deciding whether or not to "pull the plug" on potential organ donors who were irreversibly comatose. The unanticipated consequence of this situation led to the Quinlan "death with dignity" case in 1975. I describe the misconceptions surrounding the Quinlan controversy that fueled the growth of bioethics.;By the mid-1970s, bioethics was functioning as midwife to technologies and to a medical research community in need of broad social acceptance. The history of the cultural politics of bioethics exemplifies an important phenomenon in American history--the ebbing of the protest culture of the 1960s.