Currently there is a
lack of suitable textbooks to support bioscience students in learning about
bioethics in the United Kingdom. Many of the alternative texts either focus
heavily on medicine to the exclusion of ethical issues which are more relevant
to bioscience students, or are very heavily USA oriented both in terms of
examples but also, more misleadingly for the UK students in terms of law.  Bioethics An Introduction for the
Biosciences is a laudable attempt to fill this gap.

There are two main
approaches to teaching ethics to bioscientists, either by investigating and
explaining various current hot topics in ethics and bioscience (The applied
ethics approach) or by exploring and elucidating the ethical obligations and
considerations that are part of the role of a bioscientist. (The professional
ethics approach) Mepham takes the first route and does a remarkable job of it
exploring current issues organized into five groups:

Part 1. The Theoretical Background to Bioethics

            Chapter 1.
The nature of bioethics

            Chapter 2.
Theories of ethics

            Chapter 3.
A framework for ethical analysis

2. Bioethics and Human Futures

            Chapter 4.
The haves and the have-nots

            Chapter 5.
A time to be born?

            Chapter 6.
Reproductive choices

3. Bioethics and Animals

            Chapter 7.
Human uses of animals

            Chapter 8.
Experiments on animals

            Chapter 9.
Animals and modern biotechnology

4. Bioethics, Plants and the Environment

            Chapter 10.
The first generation of genetically modified crops

            Chapter 11.
Dietary futures

            Chapter 12.
Environmental Sustainability

5. Bioethics in Practice

            Chapter 13.
Risk, precaution and trust

            Chapter 14.
Politics and the biosciences

            Chapter 15.
Bioethics in the laboratory

This division of labor
ensures a consistency and sense of progress throughout the book; arguments made
in earlier chapters are developed and revisited.

Pedagogically, the text
is well developed, and written in an engaging manner suitable to the level it
is pitched at. Each chapter begins with the objectives of the chapter and at
the end of each chapter the main points are summarized and a set of exercises
and further readings are suggested. Throughout the text diagrams and
illustrations are used to excellent effect to highlight and demonstrate points.

As such this text would
be excellent as the basis for a course which is intended to introduce students
to current controversial issues and various ways of thinking and arguing about
them.

I do however have two
qualms that make me hesitant to recommend this text as the first bioethics text
that students encounter. The first is that while the focus on controversial
issues is engaging for students in terms of interest, the lack of more than a
cursory engagement with the topic of scientific integrity and the professional
norms and roles of a scientist (what might be called the professional ethics of
science) leaves students in a position when faced with challenging ethical
arguments where they might simply reject that ethics is relevant to them or
their profession. (This is sometimes the case in other areas of applied ethics
teaching such as medical ethics and business ethics).

My second qualm is
Mepham’s championing of his ‘Ethical Matrix’ approach throughout the text.
Embedding a controversial method of resolving bioethical disputes within the
text, while not unusual, to some degree limits the usefulness of the text for
those who don’t share the view that the ethical matrix is a useful approach.

For those who are not
familiar with this sort of approach the idea of an ethical matrix is to map out
how the interests of the different groups affected are impacted by the
different options in terms of three principles, well being, autonomy and
fairness which are intended to reflect the focus of the major ethical theories
— clearly these principles also reflect Beauchamp & Childress’ four
principles. While Mepham is very clear that this is supposed to be an aid to decision
making not a decider and that it cannot and should not be used in a mechanical
fashion, I would be concerned that nonetheless students would tend to use it
that way. The approach also tends to support the unreflective pluralism that
already is prevalent in some bioethical debates, by drawing on reasons from
each different ethical theory without considering at a methodological level
whether they are compatible. This lack of methodological integrity is
unfortunate and leaves separate decisions made using the matrix up to the
charge of inconsistency. Furthermore it is unclear that these methods of trying
to resolve bioethical debate are genuinely ethically neutral, tacitly the very
process of weighing reasons against each other seems to adopt part of consequentialist
reasoning since pure deontology typically is both non-aggregative and sees
established principles as absolutes rather than mere considerations to be
weighed against other considerations.

Nonetheless when
supplemented with some introductory material on the professional ethics of
scientists, and taught in a way that enables students to both engage with and
to question the prescribed text and it’s methodology, this book could make for
an excellent introductory text book. Certainly in comparison to the alternative
offers currently available (though I should say that I have not yet seen Introduction
to Bioethics by John Bryant, Linda Baggott la Velle and John Searle which
is also said to be pitched at bioscience students) this is a welcome addition
to the resources available to teach bioscience students about bioethics.

 

Ó 2006 David Hunter

 

David Hunter, Lecturer
in Bioethics, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland

Categories: Ethics