Dove va la bioetica?

The article offers an account of the development of bioethics, both as an academic discipline and as an engine for cultural and social reform, from the Seventies to the current situation. The article highlights several crucial changes. One major change concerns the consensus in the Seventies drawing together the contribution of several disciplines joined with social and political reform broken in the next decade by the wars around the bioethical agenda, starting with the Reagan presidency and continuing today. Another major change concerns the idea of freedom, introduced as an emancipatory notion and transformed into the freedom to assert one’ s private possession at play in the neoliberal and populist conservative framework.