The Direction of Medical Ethics The direction bioethics, and
specifically medical ethics, will take in the next few years will be
crucial. It is an emerging specialty that has attempted a great deal,
that has many differing agendas, and that has its own identity crisis.
Is it a subspecialty of clinical medicine? Is it a medical reform
movement? Is it a consumer pro- tection movement? Is it a branch of
professional ethics? Is it a ra- tionale for legal decisions and agency
regulations? Is it something physicians and ethical theorists do
constructively together? Or is it a morally concentrated attack on high
technology, with the prac- titioners of scientific medicine and the
medical ethicists in an adversarial role? Is it a conservative endeavor,
exhibiting a Frankenstein syn- drome in Medical Genetics ("this time,
they have gone too far"), or a Clockwork Orange syndrome in
Psychotherapy ("we have met- hods to make you talk-walk-cry-kill")? Or
does it suffer the afflic- tion of overdependency on the informal
fallacy of the Slippery Slope ("one step down this hill and we will
never be able to stop") that remains an informal fallacy no matter how
frequently it's used? Is it a restricted endeavor of analytic
philosophy: what is the meaning of "disease," how is "justice" used in
the allocation of medical resources, what constitutes "informed" or
"consent?" Is it applied ethics, leading in clinical practice to some
recommenda- tion for therapeutic or preventive action? This incomplete
list of questions indicates just how complex,
