What Would You Do? Juggling Bioethics and Ethnography

Abstract

Bioethics is a fairly new enterprise, only decades old, but it has been the subject of much sociological investigation. The author of this book, Charles Bosk, is one of the pioneers in this study, and his book takes advantage of the author's many years of experience in diverse medical settings. The study of bioethics itself has become large enough that a clarifying distinction must be made. It has become commonplace to think of bioethics as broken into (at least) two parts: clinical bioethics, concerned with how decisions are made in hospitals and medical experimentation, and public bioethics, concerned with public decisions about scientific technologies like embryonic stem cell research. Bosk is focused on clinical bioethics. The twelve chapters of this book are a compilation of essays written for various purposes, selected chapters taken from his earlier books, one original chapter plus an original introduction and conclusion. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas is said to have retorted that ‘I write in the service of others’, by which he meant that his writing was on topics asked of him by the sponsors of conferences, symposia and the like. Bosk has similarly been in demand since his earlier book-length statements about ethics in medicine, and it is a valuable project to gather this writing into one book. Placed between the two covers, we can see that Bosk's recent career has had two central concerns that have different implications for bioethics and ethnographic social science. The first is displayed in the essays in the first section, entitled ‘The Ethnography of Ethics’. These are explorations into bioethics as an institution, focusing more closely on the formal institutions of clinical bioethics such as institutional ethics committees and ethics consultation. The recurring question is whether clinical bioethics should be considered a profession. The first chapter is on the history of bioethics, and Bosk avoids a Whiggish history by talking of other possible historical trajectories.