Michael Cook Says Scuttle Bioethics and Start Over
Boy, I get accused of being hard on bioethics, but Michael Cook, the creator of Bioedge, has topped me. He blew his top, finally sick and tired of the rush at prestige universities to reward the most radical bioethicists with big dollars (or pounds), the more radical the better.
We all know about Peter Singer and Princeton. Another case in point is Singer's fellow Australian Julian Savulescu, who I have written about here at SHS. I have seen him debate and there is no question, he is a real doozy, so far gone that he was larded with a ton of money by a foundation and brought to Oxford! From Cook's column:
Savulescu has broken new ground. A youthful 44, he has been at Oxford since 2002 as the head of something called the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.Savulescu has, Cook writes, even supported doctors being given permission to cut off healthy limbs of people obsessed with becoming amputees, a mental illness I have warned could be the next stop for the "choice" train.
His postal address may be an ivory tower but he gets down and dirty with "practical ethics". He argues trenchantly for performance enhancing drugs in sport, genetic screening, early abortion, late-term abortion, sex-selective abortion, embryonic stem cell research, hybrid embryos, saviour siblings, therapeutic cloning, reproductive cloning, genetic engineering of children for higher IQs, eugenics, and organ markets. For starters...Julian Savulescu is internationally recognized as "a world-class bioethicist".
Cook thinks things are so akilter, it is time to scuttle the whole bioethics project:
Which provokes me to suggest something even more radical than his outlandish theories. After several years of reviewing the theories of Savulescu and his colleagues, I'm fed up. It's time to abolish bioethics and bioethicists. What we need is plain vanilla ethics.That's the problem alright: Bioethics doesn't really believe in any firm principles. It's all relativistic and free floating. In such a milieu, and in an age when anti-human exceptionalism and bioscience radicalism is in baby, the more extreme you are, the better you do. Of course, as a consequence there is blood on the floor.
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. Because there is no agreement about what bioethics is, about what areas it should cover, or about its fundamental principles, just about anyone can dub themselves a bioethicist. And just about anyone does.
Good for Michael Cook for pushing back.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:01 PM
9 Comments
9 Comments:
This post would benefit from more empirical data, as I hear similar things about excessive bioconservatism, e.g. the President's Council on Bioethics, the influence of the Catholic Church, etc.
Do you have figures on the total numbers of people, prestigious positions, and dollars associated with different viewpoints?
The point is that money shouldn't dictate morals of a society which should be protecting the weak among us period and that such extreme educators are actually guilty of diminishing humanity.
I agree, Wesley.
I realize that people in the bio-community come from all different religions, or no religion, but I think that back when there was some acknowledgment or at least pretence of a common Judeo-Christian worldview, that served as a foundation for bioethical principles to spring from and as a brake on the more outrageous ideas. (Of course they weren't calling it bioethics then.) I think we've even cast aside "first do no harm" now.
It sometimes seems to me that "bioethicist" means "person who finds a way to rationalize whatever a doctor or researcher wants to do".
Wesley, you've reported a string of propositions for which Prof. Savulescu has argued in support. Apart from the fact that you disagree with them, what, exactly, is wrong with them? In other words, would you like to try countering his arguments, or are you satisfied merely to list the things that he supports and dismiss them, as if they're obviously wrong--which they're not.
Speaking as a philosopher, I strongly agree that bioethics should be scotched. Let the chips fall. The fact that it would be financially bad for Philosophy departments should not weigh.
There is nothing particularly professional about ethics. It should not be professionalized. It is not a technical discipline at all. An ordinary person with a clear-eyed understanding of right and wrong is a much better ethicist than Savelescu. That should go without saying. But people think you can get a credential that makes you especially well qualified to decide whether Grandma should die just like you get a credential to decide how to do brain surgery. Which is nonsense.
I'm with makarios. If bioethics is not wrong, why should it be scrapped? Just because people don't like it? That's like saying that evolutionary biology should be scrapped just because people don't like it, and not considering whether it is actually true or not.
Reading the article, the author seems to be suggesting that bioethics be abolished because it's not a serious discipline.
That is, that without a good philosophical grounding, there's nothing to separate what comes out of bioethics chairs from "television evangelists or New Age gurus", to quote the article.
The author doesn't list out all of his reasoning, but if Professor Savulescu's philosophical output can in fact be reduced to "Personal autonomy is total, so let's do neat science-fictiony stuff", I fail to see how that rises to the level of an Oxford-funded academic discipline.
It's not that people disagree with the conclusions of bioethicists, but that no serious academic work seems to be going on.
I don't see how Savulescu's principle of 'procreative beneficence' can be reduced to personal autonomy being total. But, maybe it can...
And, I seem to recall that Oxford still employs theologians. If they can work at Oxford, so can bioethicists and other philosophers.
Bioethics is a "science" that was created by Congress. Dr. Dianne Irving, a former bench scientist at the NIH, was in the first "bioethics" doctoral class at Georgetown. She has written an extensive paper on this called "What is Bioethics?" It can be found here: http://www.hospicepatients.org/prof-dianne-irving-whatisbioethics.html
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