COURTING CONTROVERSY

Good bioethics will invariably challenge boundaries. As my friend and colleague Julian Savulescu, editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics has found out to his chagrin, publishing controversial ethical analyses will lead to very serious personal abuse. His journal published a paper whose author takes a stance on infanticide that, as Savulescu rightly notes, is not terribly new or original in bioethics. She then applies these arguments to maternal and family interests. Of course, an argument on infanticide, particularly one that does not reject infanticide out of hand, will probably upset some or even most readers. The same is true, to a lesser extent, for other topics. Bioethics occasionally runs invited guest editorials. A few issues back we published a guest editorial with a plea for ‘queer bioethics’. Conservative commentators had a field day on the internet with what was arguably a tame editorial suggesting we should take into consideration patients belonging to sexual minority groups. As we have discovered in academic analyses of former US President Bush’s chief bioethicist’s indefensible claim, that if we find something repugnant it’s probably morally wrong, feelings of disgust and even horror are bad indicators of the moral soundness or otherwise of normative views, behaviors etc. Otherwise interracial marriages would likely have never come about, given how disgusted people were about this possibility just a few decades ago. Good bioethical analyses will continue to challenge and test boundaries we take for granted. In that context it is legitimate to publish papers discussing infanticide as much as it is legitimate to publish papers discussing the participation of doctors in torture under certain circumstances. As editors of bioethics journals we are interested in sound critical analyses, wherever those analyses take the substantive conclusions of papers. At Bioethics we have published religiously motivated analyses as much as we have published papers driven by the secular modi of analysis. We will continue to do so. Savulescu certainly was right to publish the controversial paper in his journal, especially given that his peer reviewers indicated that the manuscript in question was worthy of publication in the Journal of Medical Ethics. No doubt there will be critical responses to the article, and that, too, is to be applauded. Arguments in our field cannot be tested by other means. It is important for editors of bioethics journals not to yield to ideologically motivated outside pressures. We must not permit self-censorship to occur in anticipation of outcries by readers who find themselves in disagreement with content we publish. Instead, we encourage our readers to submit sound critical responses to analyses we publish. Express your rational disagreement in letters to the editor, critical notes, even articlelength ripostes. I cannot think of a bioethics journal that would not welcome your response. Do not expect us, however, to respond to excited hand-waving in non-peerreviewed outlets or on partisan internet sites. Time is too precious for this.