Strategic Ambiguity: The Pragmatic Utopianism of Daniel Callahan's "Bioethics as a Discipline"

Camb Q Healthc Ethics. 2024 Apr;33(2):167-173. doi: 10.1017/S0963180123000440. Epub 2023 Aug 22.

Abstract

This article highlights the continuing relevance of a classic bioethical text, "Bioethics as a Discipline," published by the Hastings Center's cofounder Daniel Callahan in 1973. Connecting the text's programmatic recommendations with later reflections and interventions Callahan wrote about the development of bioethics illuminates how the vision Callahan established and the reality this vision helped create were interrelated-just not in the way Callahan had hoped for. Although this portrait relies on an individual perception of the development of bioethics, it might nevertheless, through its unique linkage of different bioethical temporalities, contribute to a broader reassessment of what bioethics became and why.

Keywords: Daniel Callahan; Hastings Center; history of bioethics; interdisciplinarity.

MeSH terms

  • Bioethics*
  • Humans