Drafted with Dr Robert Mendelsohn for discussion at the School of Medicine, University of Illinois Chicago, 20th November 1987
Medical ethics is an oxymoron, bringing to mind safe sex, nuclear protection and military intelligence.
Since 1970, bio-ethics has spread like an epidemic, creating the semblance of ethical choice in an intrinsically unethical context. This context has taken its shape from the extension of medicine from conception to organ harvest. Given this new domain of operation, medicine has ceased to look at the sufferings of a sick person: the object of care has become something called a human life.
The transmogrification of a person into ‘a life’ is a lethal operation, as dangerous as reaching out for the tree of life in the time of Adam and Eve.
Ethics, institutes, programs and courses have created a discourse within which ‘life’ appears as the object of medical, professional and administrative management. Thus, the umbrella of academic rationalization is now lending legitimacy to an essentially flawed enterprise. Medical ethics now obscures the practice of virtue in suffering and dying.
We consider bio-ethics irrelevant to the aliveness with which we intend to face pain and anguish, renunciation and death.