The bioethicist Quill R Kukla, a philosophy professor at (the Jesuit) Georgetown University, also serves as the editor in chief of one of the most influential bioethics publications, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. To say the least, Kukla is well ensconced within the bioethical establishment.

I bring this up because Kukla was just interviewed about a newly published book the bioethicist authored, Sex Beyond “Yes”: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone. The interview was conducted without challenge by the president and CEO of the Hastings Center — the world’s most prominent bioethics think tank — for its “Bioethics Chat” feature. This is mainstream bioethics with exclamation points, and its content illustrates why I believe the predominant views in the movement are wildly out of sync with those of the general population they supposedly serve.

First, Kukla describes the book’s (which I have not read) sexual theses (emphasis within the text):

I wanted to write a book about good sex — sex that not only manages to avoid being unethical, but that is a joint activity built around pleasure, expressive and respectful of everyone’s agency, and fulfilling and worthwhile for everyone.…

I also wanted to write a book that genuinely spoke to the agency, pleasures, and experiences of all kinds of sexual subjects. In my book, queer sex, kinky sex, and sex for trans people, disabled people, old people, fat people, and nonmonogamous people are just as centered as is traditional sex between heterosexual monogamous couples. I tried to draw on the sexual wisdom of alternative sex communities such as queer and kinky communities, who have often thought and talked deeply about sexual agency because they cannot just slide unreflectively into the given heterocentric, patriarchal scripts provided by our culture.

Read the rest at National Review (paywall).

What has happened to bioethics?

You may also want to look at: “Bioethics is becoming just  another social justice political movement” at Humanize Today, May 13, 2025:

The field of bioethics was established to work through the proper parameters of medical ethics and to grapple with the vexing public health policy questions that arose in an increasingly technological age. The field’s primary (but not only) contribution to the public good (in my opinion) came early, through the work of the late theologian Paul Ramsey. In his seminal work, The Patient as a Person, Ramsey argued that forcing patients to be hooked up to “machines” against their will treated them as less than equals. The resulting bioethical discourse resulted in the legal right we all have to informed consent and to refuse unwanted medical treatment, even if that could lead to our deaths.

Alas, in the decades since Ramsey’s heyday, the mainstream bioethics movement took a hard turn into a crassly secular and utilitarianish direction that now widely rejects human exceptionalism, sees some patients as nonpersons, and is increasingly focused on political and cultural issues like acting as “ethics facilitators” in war zones and fighting climate change — issues well beyond the field’s original portfolio.

These days, the predominate ideology among bioethicists (except for those with a modifier in front of the term like “Catholic” or “pro-life”) is radically progressive about issues such as abortion, legalizing assisted suicide, imposing gender ideology, enabling radical reproductive technologies, and promoting DEI policies in medical school and hospitals.

Now, a new survey of bioethicists has just been published in the American Journal of Bioethics that illustrates how hard the movement has swung toward pushing woke “social justice” initiatives as its primary purpose: More