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Current mainstream bioethics and biolaw, both in the Anglo-American and in the European context, take the form of a revisionist kind of ethics and law based on individualistic, rationalist, and pragmatist conceptions and attitudes. They demonstrate an astonishing lack of critical spirit as to the investigation of their presuppositions and basic ideas. At the same time age old, commonly shared ethical and legal wisdom is disregarded or even discarded. Although they have an air of undisputable rationality, mainstream bioethics and biolaw in fact express and participate in an ideological framework in which morality, human dignity and human rights are reinterpreted and adapted to an age of almost unhindered technological and economic progress.Revisionist ethics and law have symbolic effects which disturb still widely shared ethical sensibilities and attitudes without being able to supersede them altogether. They strongly influence ethical and legal practices and policies particularly under the impulse of different bureaucracies and of market mechanisms.Those who want to return to a substantial ethical debate that takes real ethical intuitions originating in the life world into account, are confronted with several opposing forces which seem to reinforce each other: the flourishing of a type of revisionist ethics and politics (with its proliferation of bioethical commissions and bureaucracies); the liquefaction of fundamental symbolic distinctions and boundaries typical of late, liquid modernity; the influence of a strong pragmatist and instrumentalist attitude related to the overpowering desire for control present in contemporary culture both in private and in communal or public life.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-33365-6_9

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