This book review is excerpted from a detailed review in the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Medicine and Philosophy, v. 10, n. 1, Fall 2010.

Jonathan D. Moreno and Sam Berger (eds.)
MIT Press, Cambridge, 2010
286 pp., with Index
Foreword by Harold Shapiro
Introduction and Afterword by Jonathan D. Moreno and Sam Berger
ISBN: 9780262134880

Bioethics addresses issues shaped by abstruse empirical fact and the technical parameters of the technologized controversies of contemporary culture. It is tempting to imagine that our philosophy must be as technologically-informed as our understanding of our lives has now become – that human flourishing must be in some ways dependent upon technological problem-solving, that the range of values and possibilities accommodated within the morally good life is wider than previously imagined, and that these observations define a particular stance, critical but welcoming, toward the prospect of aggressive engagement with the future through the tools and products of science.

Something like that is the position ascribed to “progressive bioethics” by the authors of the just-issued essay collection, Progress in Bioethics: Science, Policy, and Politics. The volume collects almost 20 essays on questions of the nature of bioethics as a field, its relationship to progressive ideology, and the ways that relationship plays out in particular issues and controversies characteristic of the field now and in the past. The authors are a roll-call of respected and influential figures in contemporary bioethics, not all of them academics, subscribing to a wide range of perspectives on progressivism and the task of progressive bioethics. The impression they give is of a fluid and open-minded community, engaged in a searching and sometimes indeterminate discourse with itself and the wider world.

The Foreword, Introduction, and essays of both Section I: “Bioethics as Politics” and Section II: “The Sociology of Political Bioethics” investigate the nature of progressivism, the issues that are or should be of interest to progressive bioethics, and the practicalities of politics and policy that bioethics is often involved in. Section III: “The Sociology of Political Bioethics”, addresses questions of the professional identity of bioethics, and how progressive ideology meshes with other personal and professional values. Section IV: “Conflicting Views of Biotechnology” contains one unabashedly pro-technology piece, and another warning against an uncritical stance on science. The concluding Section V: “Progress Beyond Politics”, offers higher-level reflections on the field of bioethics in general. In the “Afterword”, the editors remark upon the prospects for progressivism and healthcare reform in the advent of the Obama administration – a question that could not be more timely.

Necessarily, there are gaps: the definition of progressivism needs further exploration, and it remains unclear why progressivism should have any of the content suggested for it; at times the content or scope of bioethics also seem taken for granted. Even the role of science in progressive bioethics awaits further examination. These are not faults in a collection of diverse viewpoints; however, much remains to be discussed. This volume opens that discussion insightfully, searchingly, and provocatively.

Progress in Bioethics is must-reading for political progressives interested in biomedical issues, bioethicists who identify as political progressives, bioethicists in general who are interested in the conceptual landscape of contemporary biomedical policy and cultural controversy, and for those who seek to develop a humanitarian pro-science viewpoint, whether on biotechnology or other complexities of our technologized modernity.