The Logic and Legitimacy of American Bioethics By Mary R. Leinho ...

DeVries (1995) lamented the dearth of attention to the institutionalization and professionalization of bioethics, and to extramedical factors encouraging the bioethics enterprise. Reminding readers that bioethics addresses not just medicine but the life sciences generally, Hanson observed that DeVries and Subedi’s edited volume Bioethics and Society (1998) “reflects the promise and the infancy” of the sociology of bioethics (Hanson, 1999, p. 427).

Social science perspectives can help bioethicists reflect on the fit between the results they produce and their intentions. Anthropologists can refine bioethical analysis and foster critical reflection in bioethics by attending to the transformation of bioethical concepts by various constituencies, such as policy makers and journalists, and by studying the practitioners as well as the issues of bioethics (Muller, 1994). Sociology can handily counter the twin assumptions that the domain of ethics lies outside of social structure, and that “the right thinking with the right values” is sufficient to resolve ethical problems (Bosk, 1999, p. 65). Bosk provided a laundry list of questions for sociologists to ask of bioethics:

A small group of social scientists have heeded these calls for research, and engaged in penetrating sociological analyses of bioethics in previ-ously unexamined settings. These studies underpin the research I describe here. In her historical study of the cultural context of the rise of bioethics, Stevens concluded that bioethics became successfully institutionalized because it diffused, rather than represented, the social challenges to biomedicine that arose in the 1960s. In its early years, bioethics shifted away from analyzing and critiquing the underlying causes of ethical quandaries, toward merely managing them; bioethics adopted “the limited role of establishing guidelines for the use of procedures and technologies that it largely accepts as inevitable” (Stevens, 2000, p. 158).