Rogers Wendy
Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Bioethics. 2019 Oct;33(8):881-889. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12558. Epub 2019 Feb 8.
Bioethics is a practically oriented discipline that developed to address pressing ethical issues arising from developments in the life sciences. Given this inherent practical bent, some form of advocacy or activism seems inherent to the nature of bioethics. However, there are potential tensions between being a bioethics activist, and academic ideals. In academic bioethics, scholarship involves reflection, rigour and the embrace of complexity and uncertainty. These values of scholarship seem to be in tension with being an activist, which requires pragmatism, simplicity, certainty and, above all, action. In this paper I explore this apparent dichotomy, using the case example of my own involvement in international efforts to end forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. I conclude that these tensions can be managed and that academic bioethics requires a willingness to be activist.
生物伦理学是一门注重实践的学科，它的发展旨在应对生命科学发展中出现的紧迫伦理问题。鉴于这种内在的实践倾向，某种形式的倡导或行动主义似乎是生物伦理学本质所固有的。然而，作为一名生物伦理学行动主义者与学术理想之间存在潜在的矛盾。在学术性生物伦理学中，学术研究涉及反思、严谨以及对复杂性和不确定性的接纳。这些学术价值似乎与行动主义者的要求相矛盾，行动主义者需要实用主义、简单性、确定性，尤其是行动。在本文中，我以自己参与国际社会为终止在中国从良心犯身上摘取器官的行为所做努力为例，探讨这种明显的二分法。我得出的结论是，这些矛盾是可以处理的，并且学术性生物伦理学需要有成为行动主义者的意愿。
