Loving to Hate Bioethics
Wesley Smith's Second Hand Smoke is promoting Bioedge, a blog that slams bioethics and its professionals hard. Michael Cook's screed takes to task bioethics as a discpline and its members saying that "That sexy little prefix "bio" has become a Kevlar vest for so-called experts who couldn't score a job in the philosophy department of Monty Python's University of Wooloomooloo."
Ouch. Moreover, he calls out specific bioethicists, namely Julian Savulescu of Oxford University's Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. But rather than making logical arguments against Savulescu's positions with which he takes issue, Cook instead engages in snide, ad hominem attacks against the Oxford bioethicist and the field generally, going so far as to suggest that we "abolish bioethics and bioethicists" in favor of something, indecipherable called "vanilla ethics".
Yet, it would appear that Cook, ranting and raving about bioethics in Online Opinion, doesn't really know much about the field or its members. First, the fact that he believes that an argument for mandatory organ donation is new and sinister, just shows that Cook doesn't know the literature. Second, it appears he just likes to make the Uheiro Center for Practical Ethics the whipping boy for his disdain for bioethics, slamming them again in his blog yesterday. Third and finally, calling for an abolition of the field on the basis of disagreement with one person's arguments in favor of organ markets or enhancement in sport seems a bit overreaching to me.
In any case, Cook is making really weak arguments, if they are arguments at all, against bioethics all based around a disdain for one Oxford ethicist. When you have some real arguments about the lack of theory available to make bioethics a discipline, any evidence at all that bioethicists are not as well-trained, rigorous, or qualified as other ethicists, or know the literature, Mr. Cook, then we can talk.
Summer Johnson, PhD
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Hi Dr Johnson,
Thanks for your comments on my article. In part, I am well rebuked. The notion of abolishing bioethics is partly journalistic hyperbole. "Plain vanilla bioethics" is admittedly a bit weak as an ideal.
The other part, the part which deserves some serious consideration, is an attempt to strip professional bioethics of some of its mystique. Inasmuch as far-reaching and controversial changes in legislation in the UK and Australia -- and elsewhere -- have been achieved, in part, because of soothing reassurances made by professional bioethicists, isn't it time to ask what their credentials are and what bioethics is?
In particular, what disturbs me is that Joe the Plumber does not grasp the metaphysics which underpins the ethics of particular strands of bioethical discourse. So he might be induced to support a euthanasia bill (for the sake of argument), without realising that the same logic will also support infanticide, genetic engineering, and so on. Anyhow, I believe that a conference organised by Glenn McGee a couple of years ago discussed the future of bioethics. Not everyone was optimistic, as I recall.
Don't you think it newsworthy that Professor Savulescu is so well funded when the ideas he is promoting (this is *practical* ethics, mind you) would surprise Joe the Plumber? He is not alone, as you know, yet I never pick up criticism of his stand from other bioethicists. That leaves the field wide open for interlopers like myself.
I feel honoured to have been the subject of one of your blog posts.
Cheers,
Michael Cook
- by Michael Cook on Oct 26, 2008 at 10:41 PM | link
Michael, thank you for your comments. I am much more sanguine about the future of bioethics than you are, not by virtue of its "professionalization"--in fact I hope that bioethics does not attempt to become too professionalized or claim to have too much expertise--but instead because I believe that there are those studying topics in this field who are quite imaginative, intelligent or both who will generate new knowledge and new content areas in areas like neuroethics, nanoethics, and even perennial topics like health reform, stem cells, and genetics and genomics. I would prefer not to pin the future of my field on any one man or woman--be it Professor Savulescu, McGee, or even the often prescient Caplan--instead I will simply note that states around the country are getting into the stem cell game and that even if not every "Joe the Plumber" understands every bioethics argument made, increasingly more Americans are being asked to cast their vote in favor of ballot initiatives on bioethics topics. If that remains the trend, the future of bioethics won't rely upon the opinions of any one professor or even a group of them, or even a President or Prime Minister, but a whole group of citizen bioethicists like me and even you.
- by Summer Johnson, PhD on Oct 27, 2008 at 1:51 AM | link
"Citizen bioethicist"? Like it. Now I know what I am.
Thanks very much for your courteous reply.
- by Michael Cook on Oct 28, 2008 at 7:03 PM | link