Moral bricolage and the emerging tradition of secular bioethics

Public bioethics aims to provide moral guidance on questions of public policy, research, and clinical ethics. However, Alasdair MacIntyre famously opened his seminal work, After Virtue, with a 'disquieting suggestion' that contemporary moral language is in such a state of disorder that securing authoritative moral guidance will not be possible. In Ethics After Babel, Jeffrey Stout responds to MacIntyre's pessimistic description of contemporary moral discourse by developing the idea of moral bricolage, which involves taking stock of the ethical questions that need answering, the available conceptual resources at hand from a variety of traditions (e.g., philosophies, theologies, law), and then reworking them to create a solution. In this essay, we draw upon MacIntyre's insight about tradition and Stout's metaphor of moral bricolage to argue that some works of bioethical consensus are appropriately described as works of moral bricolage that, when analyzed, reveal theoretical insights about an emerging tradition of secular bioethics.