Richard Huxtable and Ruud Ter Meulen (eds), The Voices and Rooms of European Bioethics

Abstract

If there is some degree of consensus today that bioethics comprises a discipline, a profession, as well as a social movement, there remains a good deal of uncertainty whether bioethics contains distinct epistemological underpinnings in different parts of the world. Commentators sometimes levy the charge that the story of the ‘birth of bioethics’ is overly Americanised and that the field’s approaches to thinking through medical and scientific issues reflect a bias geared towards ‘American’ values such as individualistic autonomy and personal liberty, and ‘American’ bioethical frameworks such as principlism. This is a contestable and provocative charge, but has some resonance with bioethics scholars outside the USA. If this is so, are there alternative approaches stemming from different regions such as Europe, and what might those alternative (regional) approaches look like? This was the overarching question posed at the 2012 meeting of the European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME).1 Celebrating 25 years of EACME’s existence, the meeting was held at the University of Bristol, and was organised under the theme of ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms: Bioethics, Then and Now’ (a metaphor borrowed from Truman Capote’s novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms).2 Richard Huxtable and Ruud ter Meulen have collected several essays from participants at the EACME meeting, and, overall, have edited a solid collection of contributions from very capable European bioethicists. That said, foremost, the book must be judged on whether it addresses the primary goal it sets for itself—to reflect on ‘European bioethics’ from various disciplinary perspectives and locations within the European continent, while providing a counterbalance to the apparently prominent US understanding of bioethics. Two key questions for the reader, therefore, are: (i) can one describe the contour of ‘European’ bioethics, and have the contributing authors done so in this book?, and (ii) has this book advanced our understanding of any coherent notion of European bioethics?