Bioethics and “Rightness”

If bioethics seeks to affect what people do and don't do as they respond to the practical issues that confront them, then it is useful to take seriously people's sense of rightness. Rightness emerges from the fabric of a life—including the economy of its geography, the events of its times, its popular culture—to be what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls a predisposition. It is the product of a way of life and presupposes continuing to live...