1 - More than Words

Summary

In this introduction to Bioethics in Action, editors Françoise Baylis and Alice Dreger explain that this volume is a work borne of shared frustration: frustration over seeing many specific instances of bad behavior, poor judgment, dangerous ignorance, harmful cultures, or outright injustices in contemporary medical care and medical research; frustration over medical systems punishing whistleblowers and agents of positive change while rewarding bad actors; frustration over the public being distracted by sexy bioethics micro-punditry while so much harm is accruing, largely unacknowledged, at a much larger scale; frustration especially at how “bioethics” has come to be understood—within the academic realm as something that is to be measured by external grants and (secondarily) publications, and within the public realm as sporty commentary on oversimplified medical controversies purposefully dramatized to increase media outlets’ advertisement revenues. This volume speaks to a different type of ethics that we call “Impact Ethics”— fundamentally oriented toward public service, often challenging the ‘powers-that-be’ in a direct fashion. We suggest that the outcomes that ought to matter in bioethics are witnessing and ending injustices, improving patients’ lives, and defending and protecting research participants’ rights—but we recognize this kind of work can be personally highly costly.