ABSTRACT
Bioethics, born in the twentieth century, has been consumed with autonomy. The occupation with autonomy makes sense. Bioethics began as an effort to ‘speak truth to power’ – it was a part of the ‘rights movements’ of the 1960s and 1970s, with a desire to make a strong statement that the medical-industrial complex must not be allowed to run roughshod over the best interests of research subjects and patients. Not only are academic critiques of the principle multiplying, but several changes in the world, and in the world of medicine, are conspiring to spell the end of autonomy as the preeminent principle of bioethics. Perhaps the effort to defend a common morality is the last gasp of a moral algorithm that was important in establishing the authority and value of the new field of bioethics, but is now out of date. In fact, other voices in different rooms are making it apparent that autonomy is dead.
