From the February issue: In June, the American Journal of Bioethics published an editorial pushing back on “assaults on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” Theologian Gilbert Meilaender charts the decline of bioethics as a field of study just as the need for sound moral reasoning on matters of death, life, and procreation is on the rise: “One may reasonably wonder whether bioethicists have any real claim to expertise about the character of the good life, and aggressively asserting what are, in large part, political claims only exacerbates the problem.”
For further reading: First Things founder Richard John Neuhaus had already perceived this decline in 2007, writing in “The Politics of Bioethics” that “one must acknowledge that bioethics as an intellectual institution is, in significant part, an industry for the production of rationalized—sometimes elegantly rationalized—permission slips in the service of the technological imperative joined to the pursuit of fame and wealth.”
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