The last thing the world needs is to depend on views approved by the bioethics establishment.
The bioethicist Quill R Kukla, a philosophy professor at (the Jesuit) Georgetown University, also serves as the editor in chief of one of the most influential bioethics publications, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. To say the least, Kukla is well ensconced within the bioethical establishment.
I bring this up because Kukla was just interviewed about a newly published book the bioethicist authored, Sex Beyond “Yes”: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone. The interview was conducted without challenge by the president and CEO of the Hastings Center — the world’s most prominent bioethics think tank — for its “Bioethics Chat” feature. This is mainstream bioethics with exclamation points, and its content illustrates why I believe the predominant views in the movement are wildly out of sync with those of the general population they supposedly serve.
First, Kukla describes the book’s (which I have not read) sexual theses (emphasis within the text):
I wanted to write a book about good sex — sex that not only manages to avoid being unethical, but that is a joint activity built around pleasure, expressive and respectful of everyone’s agency, and fulfilling and worthwhile for everyone. . . .
I also wanted to write a book that genuinely spoke to the agency, pleasures, and experiences of all kinds of sexual subjects. In my book, queer sex, kinky sex, and sex for trans people, disabled people, old people, fat people, and nonmonogamous people are just as centered as is traditional sex between heterosexual monogamous couples. I tried to draw on the sexual wisdom of alternative sex communities such as queer and kinky communities, who have often thought and talked deeply about sexual agency because they cannot just slide unreflectively into the given heterocentric, patriarchal scripts provided by our culture.
Ah, the dreaded patriarchy countered by “sexual wisdom of alternative sex” and “kinky communities.” So much to teach us! Libertinism, thy name is bioethics.
Kukla believes in what I call bioethics imperialism, that is, that bioethicists should inform and substantially influence most areas of public policy:
I can no longer meaningfully separate bioethics from biopolitics. We are facing existential threats that are saturated by ethical issues. We are in the midst of multiple global wars that are killing civilians, leaving children orphaned, destroying basic infrastructure supporting health and well-being, and causing widespread precarity and trauma. These wars generate bioethical issues that cannot be separated from existential and political issues. Similarly, we are on the brink of climate collapse, which will leave billions of already-vulnerable people without homes, food, safety, or basic health care access, and which may leave our children with no sustainable future lives. Meanwhile, AI is penetrating all aspects of our lives, and we have no idea what the consequences will be for our public or personal health and well-being.
Kukla is asked whether recent U.S. “political changes” (i.e., Trump and Republican control of Congress) have “generated biopolitical crises.” You know the answer already:
I do indeed, but I also think that what is happening in the United States cannot be extricated from our global situation. The assaults in the United States on immunization and on evidence-based medical care, for instance, risk causing epidemics and pandemics that can quickly become global crises. The fundamental assaults in the United States on rights of bodily autonomy and integrity — rolling back abortion rights and gender-based care and reinstating conversion therapy, for instance — are parts of a larger global pattern of the corrosion our bodily privacy and self-determination.
Of course Kukla is pro-abortion. Most mainstream bioethicists are. Moreover, many of us believe that telling the parents of gender-confused children that they can either have a dead son or a living daughter to convince them to transition their children is the real “conversion therapy.” But let’s not get into that here.
The bioethics leader concludes the interview by urging young bioethicists to exert influence far beyond traditional bioethical concerns of public health policy and medical ethics:
Bioethics will be too niche and abstract to survive if it isn’t directly embedded in larger political questions and issues. The world desperately needs bioethicists to find an authentic way of caring for the world in the face of multiple existential emergencies threatening our health and well-being.
No. The last thing the world needs is to depend on views approved by the bioethics establishment, which is really hard-left-wing political advocacy masking as academic expertise.
Does every bioethicist agree with Kukla? No. But I would bet that most — other than bioethicists with a modifier like “Catholic” in front of the term — do, meaning that Kukla is far from fringe. Rather the perspectives presented constitute conventional bioethics advocacy.