Law Commons^™

Can There Be A Progressive Bioethics?, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

Progressive bioethics-the words are not an oxymoron. Far from it; they are more redundant than oppositional. Yet they leave me almost as uneasy, as if they were contradictory. My unease exists because bioethics should be neither progressive nor regressive, neither right wing nor left wing, neither liberal nor conservative. It should be just good, sound ethics applied to the often difficult moral problems posed by present-day medicine and the genomic revolution.

I do not mean to suggest by this that all bioethicists need agree. Respectable ethicists using established modes of ethical analysis have long disagreed on and argued for different …

Concluding Thoughts: Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider

Book Chapters

What happens when the language of the law becomes a vulgar tongue? What happens, more particularly, when parties to bioethical disputes are obliged to borrow in their daily controversies, the ideas, and even the language, peculiar to judicial proceedings? How suited are the habits and tastes and thus the language of the judicial magistrate to the political, and more particularly, the bioethical, questions of our time? We must ask these questions because, as the incomparable Tocqueville foresaw, it has become American practice to resolve political—and moral—questions into judicial questions. We now reverently refer to the Supreme Court as the great …