The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics How Can We Help? From “Sociology in ” to

he relationship between sociology and bioethics has been an uneasy one. It has been described as “contentious and adversarial,”1 and at least some of the sociologists who have ventured into the territory of medical ethics “report back on unfriendly natives. ” 2 This bioethical ill will toward sociology is not without cause. Sociologists have been quite critical of what they call (with not-so-subtle pejorative overtones) the “bioethical project.” Two decades ago — when bioethics was just getting up on its organizational feet — Renée Fox and Judith Swazey leveled the charge of “cultural myopia ” against bioethics, noting that this myopia “generally manifests itself in the form of systematic inattention to the social and cultural sources and implications of its own thought. They go on to say “if [bioethics] is an indicator of the general state o