Bioethics After the ‘End of IDEOLOGIES’: From the Myth of Ideological Disappearance to the Transformation of Normative Frameworks

This article examines the background to bioethical debates in the context of contemporary claims regarding the “end of ideologies”. While bioethics is often presented as a neutral framework for ethical decision-making in medicine and the life sciences, this study argues that it remains deeply rooted in competing normative and philosophical traditions. For this, it adopts a conceptual and historical qualitative approach based on a critical and narrative review of the literature on bioethics, governance of biomedicine, political and moral philosophy, and sociology. The corpus was selected to include seminal works in bioethics, fundamental analyses of moral pluralism and decision-making in bioethics, as well as reference works of the debate on ideology, biopolitics, deliberation and technocratic governance. Drawing on these sources, this analysis reconstructs the axiological frameworks underpinning contemporary bioethical debates and examines whether the purported disappearance of ideologies from the bioethical debate leads to a real post-ideological bioethics. The article argues that ideology is not eliminated but rather its expression is transformed into implicit normative structures embedded within decision-making processes. Ideologies presence in bioethical debates is masked by what might be termed procedural and technological bioethics. These approaches aim to objectify the debates and ensure that bioethics meets the requirements of the scientific method. This analysis challenges the notion of bioethical neutrality and highlights the enduring role of ideological frameworks in shaping biomedical ethics. Ideological and axiological perspectives thus permeate bioethical debates and shape the direction of bioethical decisions and regulatory provisions, though an institutionalized arena for managing moral pluralism.