Forty years later: the scope of bioethics revisited

Two discrete conceptions of bioethics emerged in the 1970s: a holistic model that would "embrace within its scope long-range environmental concerns" versus a notion of bioethics that "would deal with concrete medical dilemmas." Although the latter has been the dominant perspective, Irina Pollard's new book Bioscience Ethics reintroduces a more global perspective of bioethics. This essay provides a cursory review of the different conceptions of bioethics and where Pollard's book fits in the controversy. It concludes by considering how some progress has been made to find a middle path that interprets bioethics more broadly as "the ethics of the life sciences and health care."