Bioethics and the Philosophy of Medicine: A Thirty-Year Perspective

Abstract

With this volume, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy enters into its fourth decade. This issue begins, as the Journal began, with an article by Edmund D. Pellegrino, the founding editor (Pellegrino, 1976). He understood that the Journal should take seriously the exploration of the intellectual assumptions of medicine and the biomedical sciences (Pellegrino, 1986). From the beginning, Pellegrino was committed to locating bioethics and the medical humanities within the philosophy of medicine. He recognized that the Journal should support the critical examination of the concepts and arguments underlying the field of bioethics. Only then, he realized, could one adequately address the challenges of the complex and heterogeneous cluster of fields that went under the rubric of bioethics (Engelhardt, 1990). Bioethics needed what only a philosophy of medicine could supply: a critical, intellectual perspective. In his contribution to this issue, Pellegrino continues this commitment through developing a distinction between politics in the sense of a political philosophy concerned with the nature and structure of a good society, and politics in the sense of partisan, agenda-driven political maneuvering. Through this distinction, he indirectly brings the reader’s attention to two major concerns facing bioethics: First, his reflections point to the danger of seduction. The field is often invited to offer intellectual support for particular political ideologies. For example, despite the substantive diversity of philosophical accounts of justice, fairness, and equality, there is a temptation to