An article by Prof. G. Del Missier, published on the blog of the Alfonsiana Academy
Albert R. Jonsen – one of the pioneers of the discipline – asked himself this question already in 2000: “Why has bioethics become so boring?”. In a rigorous, but not ironic, article, he pointed out how the intellectual exaltation, the political astuteness and the moral courage of the beginnings in the 70s of the last century had now given way to a measured, respected and repetitive approach in the slavish application of consolidated methodologies [1].
Twenty-five years after that publication, things don’t seem to have changed much for bioethics. In fact, they’ve perhaps gotten worse, as boredom has turned into a kind of lethargy, much like a terminal coma. Is bioethics destined for a slow but inexorable process of extinction? We posed this question about the discipline’s uncertain fate and future prospects to Professor Henk Ten Have (Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA), one of the leading experts in the field. Ten Have will deliver his keynote address at the International Bioethics Conference, which will be held at the Accademia Alfonsiana in Rome on March 17-18, 2026.
In his time, Jonsen suggested the need to leave places that had become too familiar to venture out and discover new territories: “Bioethics has remained at home for too long and must begin to go out and travel” [2], indicating the need to explore the fields of related subjects – medicine, economics, politics, law, social and environmental sciences, etc. – to integrate their most significant acquisitions within moral arguments, recovering with greater determination the interdisciplinary vocation of Van Rensselaer Potter’s global bioethics. A second piece of advice concerned the need to travel intellectually abroad to learn about the approach of other cultures and to compare their way of elaborating moral arguments on the basis of different beliefs and values, also to become more aware of the tradition to which one belongs and of the specificity of one’s own moral reflection. And without fear of being contradicted, it can be argued that Henk Ten Have, in recent decades, has tried precisely to lead bioethics onto new paths that had previously been little frequented.
A first area in which he worked successfully was the international context and the intersections between international moral and legal reflection, bio-law, and politics. Indeed, as Director of the Department of Ethics of Science and Technology, he led the unexpected drafting of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights , approved without a vote of opposition by the UNESCO General Conference on October 19, 2005, in Paris, and adopted unanimously by all member states. Since then, it has served as a fundamental reference for defining a global ethical framework for life sciences and biomedical technologies, respecting human dignity and fundamental rights, with particular emphasis on developing countries.
In a subsequent academic work (2016), recently translated into Italian (2024), he investigated vulnerability as a category capable of challenging and vivifying bioethical reflection in such a way as to integrate, in the mainstream of North American principalism, an anthropological constant as fundamental as it is, which makes us all interdependent and in need of meaningful relationships in order to best allow our most authentic humanity to flourish, especially in situations in which the limits and disabilities of our fragile, limited and finite creaturely condition become more evident.
Last but not least, he opened the perspective of bioethics to a global horizon ( originally published in English 2016 – translated in Italian 2020 ), demonstrating how the problems facing us today require a much more nuanced and complex bioethical awareness and methodology than was originally the case. This is due to the globalization-driven nature of certain issues (e.g., health tourism, surrogate motherhood, organ trafficking, access to basic healthcare, etc.) and their inevitable intertwining with other issues that call into question blatant injustices and inequalities between the global North and South, along with the international economic, financial, political, and legal relations that exacerbate situations of social inequality (intersectionality). Moral questions, therefore, expand beyond the realm of life, health, and the application of biotechnology in healthcare, implying, beyond theoretical discourses, the need for concrete actions for fair and effective health governance on a global scale, as the critical management of the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated .
A competent, broad, and detailed appeal that sounds the alarm for the most tired bioethicists, besieged by the temptation of sleep, to restart academic research with renewed enthusiasm, daring to go beyond traditional boundaries to open up to new challenges and unprecedented interdisciplinary stimuli. And one more reason to seriously consider registering for the Bioethics Conference of the Alfonsiana Academy (Rome, March 17-18, 2026) , which offers a rich program that our BOLG will soon return to reflect on ( link to the form to formalize online registration ).
[1] Cf. AR Jonsen, “Why has Bioethics become so boring?”, in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 25/6 (2000) 689-699.
[2] Jonsen, “Why has Bioethics become so boring?”…, 691 (our trans.).
