Bioethics in Social Context.

• Position: Review

Hoffmaster, Barry. Bioethics in Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001; .

Descriptive bioethics is the "factual investigation of moral behavior and beliefs." Social scientists--anthropologists, sociologists, and historians--engage in descriptive ethics when they investigate and interpret the actual moral beliefs, codes, or practices of a society or culture, but such non-normative work is regarded as secondary to the enterprise of normative bioethics.

This volume has two related goals: to show that bioethics is as much about understanding as it is about justification, and to give social scientists a prominent position in a reoriented bioethics. It would seem that understanding has to accompany, if not precede, any genuine form of justification, so that, contrary to the prevailing view, what social scientists can...