U.K. bioethics, U.K. metabioethics: organ sales and the justification of bioethical methods.

Abstract

Bioethicists currently working in the United Kingdom demonstrate—as indeed do the very best of their colleagues internationally—an eagerness to engage in two extremely different but complementary approaches to their subject. First, they readily become involved in discussions of concrete bioethical issues that are of great concern to the medical profession, legislators, and the wider U.K. public. Second, perhaps because they recognize the importance of the “first-order” questions that exercise the public imagination, they show themselves commendably willing to turn their critical gaze onto the very methods and frameworks they use to address those questions. The first approach we can properly call “bioethical,” whereas we might term the second approach “metabioethical.”