Misconceiving “Neutrality” in Bioethics: Rejoinder to “Bioethics and the Myth of Neutrality”

Excerpt

In a recent editorial in the journal, Dawson et al. (2018) called on the bioethics community to examine critically the “myth of neutrality” in bioethics—in particular the putative neutral stance of bioethics associations like the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law (AABHL), as in cases “where sustained harm is deliberately inflicted on vulnerable populations or where there are clear failures to abide by international human rights norms” (483) and took as an example Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. In an accompanying editorial, Ashby and Morrell (2018) point to the risk of conflating the academic analysis that is the primary activity of bioethics, with ethics as an engaged political force. They consider that bioethics earns public authority from the distillation from its analytic activity of strongly agreed normative positions such as professional ethics codes, but that this authority could be lost if bioethics is used directly in politically contentious debates. They conclude “It is probably therefore desirable for ethics as activism to be clearly separated off from the academic discipline itself and its normative consensus standards” (480). …