ABSTRACT

In this essay we reconstruct what we take to be the primary stasis points that unite this volume’s diverse set of essays in order to come to judgments, provisional conclusions, and potential directions for the intersection of scholarship in bioethics and communication studies. The term “stasis” originally appeared in Greek antiquity with the negative connotations of “faction” and “civic discord.” In Aristotle’s hands, however, stasis becomes a productive site for thinking through exactly what is at stake in a given argument (Kalimtzis 2000, p. xii). The stasis points that we explore revolve around the themes suggested by the volume’s title: “Bioethics, Public Moral Argument and Social Responsibility.” We do not take up the contested term “bioethics” here in any detail. Instead we focus on the points of stasis present in the idea of the “the public,” the articulation of publics and “moral argument,” and, extending from the preceding two stasis points, the concept of “social responsibility.” In defi ning and engaging these major stasis points we intend to point toward three basic conclusions, demonstrating: 1) the need to understand a public as something that is not made in advance, but rather is constituted in the process of argument, coupled with a moral claim for building public capacity for argument around bioethics; 2) the necessity of thinking about a public in relation to the unique capacities for attention and modes of rhetorical mediation that constitute it as a democratic form; and 3) the imperative to understand the interdependence of claims surrounding bioethics controversies and the processes of moral argument that mediate them as a mode of instantiating social responsibility.