Global Bioethics: A Question of Planning the Social and Intellectual Landscape

Abstract

Potterian bioethics plays a proactive role, when carried out in collaboration with multidisciplinary teams with a mandate to operationalize public policy, as highlighted in the Canadian Journal of Bioethics in 2022 where several articles on Van Rensselaer Potter’s thinking appeared on the 50th anniversary of the first publication of the term bioethics in the North American literature. This global perspective, which is still insufficiently detailed, critically reflects on the place, the role and the imperative of bioethics as an adaptive management of the environment; and it aims to accompany empirical projects in the operation of their scientific, political and public visions, which are sometimes synergistic, and other times conflicting. In order to specify the operationalization of this global perspective of bioethics, it is pertinent to mobilize theoretical notions from sociology and philosophy of science, in particular the Latourian concept of Hybrid Forum and the Paradigm associated to Thomas Kuhn. To illustrate this, the argument presented here mobilizes the empirical case of a project to design a monitoring of antibiotic use in Quebec, Canada (2018-2022), and expands on the importance of being aware of context (technological, sociological and anthropological) in order to deepen and pose constructive criticism. This article presents an alternative perspective to the act of governing by proposing a proactive process of governance.