ABSTRACT
From the 1980s onwards (with an increasing number of invitations to lecture abroad on medical ethics), it became obvious that the author's two academic careers, in pastoral care (still at that time his academic home was in the Faculty of Divinity in Edinburgh University) and in medical ethics could not be sustained. The setting up of the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) entailed a commitment to interdisciplinarity from the outset. With an editor trained in both philosophy and theology and two senior medical figures as consulting editors, the journal could not be seen as narrowly medical, yet still remained very closely in touch with, and focused on, medicine. The optimistic predictions of many libertarian and consequentialist writers about human progress and their (unfounded) predictions of so called ‘human enhancement’ (even moral enhancement!) seem to the author to feed into the very socio-political influences that medical ethics should be combatting.
