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diggTime to throw in the towel
The ideas of a well-established bioethicist are so weird that it makes one despair of bioethics itself.
If you
thought Peter Singer, now a professor at Princeton University, was
Australia’s gift to world bioethics, then I
have news for you. One of his PhD students, now a professor at
Oxford, Julian Savulescu, is leaving him in the dust.
While Singer is famed for supporting animal liberation, infanticide, euthanasia, and so on, 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.
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.
What is more, the sporty, good-looking, energetic Professor Savulescu has been fabulously successful in securing funding to promote his theories. He recently received a £800,000 (A$1.7 million) grant to investigate the ethics of tinkering with the brain. In short, to quote Oxford University, Julian Savulescu is internationally recognized as “a world-class bioethicist”.
And back home in his native Melbourne, he is a minor media celebrity. A couple of years ago he even addressed the National Press Club. This gives great weight to his views on abortion. The state of Victoria is in the middle of a heated debate over the legalisation of abortion. The government supports it, but is studying how far to go. Should it merely decriminalise it? Should it legalise “a woman's choice” up to 24 weeks? Should it legalise abortion at any stage in a pregnancy? There is no doubt about where Savulescu stands: "Abortion is a legitimate way for people to control the number of children they have,” he said the other day.
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 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.
The word “bioethics” was only coined in the 60s or 70s. Forty years on, we have progressive bioethics, conservative bioethics, global bioethics, feminist bioethics, Islamic bioethics, Catholic bioethics, utilitarian bioethics, deontological bioethics, dignatarian bioethics (my favourite), and so on. Bioethics, as most of the real experts quietly agree, is a field in crisis. Jonathan Moreno, one of America’s leading bioethicists, has spoken of “a crisis of identity” and questioned “the survival of bioethics as we have known it”.
The
point is, what makes the theories of bioethicists like Julian Savulescu’s credible? Are they consistent
with common sense, with human nature, with sound public policy? Why
should we believe them rather than television evangelists or New
Age gurus? The problem is broader than Savulescu or Singer. A growing number of influential bioethicists are defending bizarre theories in leading journals and getting funding to bring them into mainstream debate.
It might interest Victorian parliamentarians, for instance, to know that Savulescu has a shadow life as a New Age guru who gushes about the loopy theory of transhumanism. "People have predicted there'll be a huge spike in computing power and artificial intelligence,” he told a newspaper not long ago. "At some point this century people could upload into machines." You can read all about it in his upcoming book, “Enhancement of Human Beings”.
My hunch is that Savulescu’s prestige is based on the cachet of his Oxford appointment and his prodigious capacity for work. Not on his ideas. Far from being sophisticated and profound, all of Savulescu’s arguments run on the same rails. Why shouldn’t we do transgressive action X? he demands. X hurts no one. X is an expression of autonomy. X is my right. Do you object that X is against human nature? No such thing, buddy. Therefore, X is ethical. Let us, then, be courageously transgressive.
It’s all very logical. And it steamrollers common sense.
I confess that I have not read all of the articles in Professor Savulescu’s 21-page curriculum vitae, but I suspect that 90 per cent of them follow this playbook.
As confirmation of this, I sampled his views on apotemnophilia, a psychiatric condition whose sufferers are obsessed with a desire to amputate perfectly healthy limbs. True bioethicists love this sort of weirdness. What does Savulescu have to say? It comes straight from his playbook: “Thus not only might amputation be permissible in some situations, it might be desirable. While it is a tragedy for nearly all of us to lose a limb, there might be good reasons for certain rare individuals to choose this fate. We must be open to such radical possibilities.”
Now, if Professor Savulescu were a mere philosopher, rather than an Oxford Bioethicist, he would be laughed offstage. To paraphrase George Orwell, some ideas are so stupid that only a bioethicist could promote them. Professor Savulescu certainly has a high IQ, but more than logic is needed to pontificate about apotemnophilia, or abortion, for that matter. You need common sense, a breadth of experience and a deep and sympathetic appreciation of human nature. In short, you need to be a plain vanilla ethicist.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet and the bioethics newsletter BioEdge.
For the most complete discussion on how “bioethics” started, take a look at what Dr. Dianne Irving wrote here: http://www.hospicepatients.org/prof-dianne-irving-whatisbioethics.html
Dr. Irving is a former bench scientist at the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. and was in the first bioethics doctoral class at Georgetown University. She knows this stuff first-hand.
Thanks for the article, Michael.
I agree with those who say that there are important issues to be studied in the field of bioethics and that many scholars are studying them with intellectual honesty.
However, I think there is often something of Orwell’s doubletalk about bioethics as taught in not a few secularist medical faculties. I was amazed 15 years ago reading a book on bioethics by a professor at Manchester University and all it talked about, as far as I could see, was against ethics. “So people want ‘ethics’ and we (secularist relativists) want ‘anti-ethics’? Well, let’s call our anti-ethics ethics, like our 1984 ‘Ministry of War’ a ‘Ministry of Peace’.”
Stuart asks if we know what human nature involves. Let me translate a paragraph from a book I am reading on Grace: “Humans are beings endowed with intelligence, will and senses, with the ability to use symbols and language. They walk on two legs, have very dexterous use of their hands and a great capacity for facial expression: they can cry and laugh, making their emotions manifest and living them. These and many other characteristics belong to their nature and we expect to see them in all humans, though there can be illnesses and anomalies.” I add that the adjectives “rational” and “abstract” often precede “intelligence”, to indicate a qualitative difference between our knowledge and that of simians; “free” often precedes “will” to indicate that we do not only have an animal instinct or simply react to physical stimuli.
As someone who is utterly disgusted with the antics of radical pragmatists and the transhumanists, I agree entirely with Michael Cook’s comments. I do not think it absolutely necessary to delve into philosophical foundations in a piece like this, though it is clearly necessary to do so when trying to discuss these issues with the radical pragmatists and people who cannot see the obvious.
I take your point that the term bioethicist has lost its good meaning, and when someone presents such credentials, they must supplement them with further information to reassure people that they are not mere erudite expositors of hair-brained or otherwise dangerous ideas.
Then again, I tend to be skeptical about anyone’s mere credentials, because I have seen absurd instances in virtually every field.
another master piece by Michael Cook.
I agree with Stuart. Your criticism should not be directed to the study of bioethics itself but rather the school of utilitarian thought and its approach to bioethics. To assert that bioethics should be erradicated is to undermine the necessary and very hard work that good bioethics do, including those in Australia such as Tracey Rowlands and Bishop Fisher. Globally, there are good people at prestigious institutions promoting intrinsic value appraoches to bioethics such as Robert George at Princeton.
Surely by writing an article outlining Savulescu’s position without providing any criticism of the significant flaws in his arguments you are falling into the same sensationalism that you are criticising?
I understand that you are proving a commentary and not an analysis but it is difficult to refer people to this site when the commentary is so vaporous and the arguments ad hominem.
Ex absurdum sequitur quod libet! Without any grounding / guiding principles, one can say anything and make it look and seem logical. This is, I think, the main problem of our society right now, of which Savulescu is merely one of the more obvious examples.
This the reason is why the Pope’s battle against relativism is something we all should make our own.
Success, prestige and funding seems to be related to how clever and daring one can be as a rationaliser. Much of hospital ethics comes down to that. It seems that boring, wet blanket types who say no are just so has-been.
Oh- except if you say no to their industry or funders.
Check out another active “bioethicist” Leslie Cannold’s slippery and dishonest treatment of professional autonomy and conscience. Her carry-on, in defense of proposed legislation that will radically deregulate the abortion industry in which work her mates, has so little to do with the realities of professional life in medicine it would be laughable except that a major metropolitan daily is always ready to give her column space being as she is so reputable! Doctors have apparently sworn to leave their conscience at the door when they head of to the clinic every day. How on earth they manage to weigh up their patient’s clinical picture with relevant research and professional views or debate without using their conscience I don’t know. In fact, how they push themselves through a punishing schedule of patients day in and day out without ever succumbing to the pressure to dole out the antibiotics and sleeping tablets, sign off on half blind grandma’s driving license forms, and helping an 80 year old decide whether heart surgery is really what they want or not without an exercise of conscience would be a mystery to me. Cannold cant seem to grasp that conscience is intricately tied up with professional decision making and that a doctor might have medical and ethical reasons why they would not want their patient to have an abortion. He might know about those medical and ethical reasons and not give a damn about his patient. Or he might conscientiously decline to refer. But that would be denying the woman her termination which translates to a denial of a tidy little fee to an abortion provider - so that, in her professional bioethical opinion, is unethical.
Populist maybe but so refreshing to hear someone get a little passionate about outrageous statements that are in themselves populist. Yeah, OK, I used the term outrageous - I guess that makes me polulist too. I shall try to behave myself :-)(But they are outrageous!)
I share Michael’s exasperation that characters like Savulescu can be given such credence by the popular press (let alone prestigious universities), but I agree with Stuart: don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
There are plenty of us engaged in practical bioethics on a day to day basis, grounded in solid philosophical traditions rather than empty popularism, who don’t deserve to be tarred with the save brush as Savulescu. I think friend Julian needs to spend more time among intelligent, thinking professionals who actually engage members of the public in delvering practical ethical advice and counselling on a daily basis. His thinking needs to be challenged by others wh are actually doing the hard yards in hospitals and clinical centres. Academics rarely do this, and often enough that lack of practical engagement shows through in the nonsense they put forth as ‘bioethics’.
Savulescu’s perversion of the discipline might win him headlines, but no-one with a solid grounding in philosophical ethics - and no-one who actually cares about delivering practical assistance to individuals facing ethical problems - will be taken in by that. So keep up the good work, Michael, but do be careful with that bathwater!
I don’t share Savulescu’s radical utilitarian/autonomy views either, but I don’t think that—because you find his approach distasteful—that bioethics itself is worthless or in an irretrievable state of crisis. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. “True bioethics love this sort of weirdness.” Um, no, they don’t. It erodes public trust and makes the work harder.
Bioethics has always incorporated a number of disciplines, and (therefore) its boundaries have always been fuzzy and what constitutes ‘expertise’ has always been a matter of dispute. (It is not the only field like this.) There is definitely a problem with bioethics and the popular media. Nevertheless, there are people who work honestly and thoughtfully in the field, and that can contribute to informed public debate.
Although it makes some good points, Mr. Cook’s argument is weakened by a cheap populism that does not fair any better from a philosophical view than Savulescu’s wacky assertions. Do we know what human nature involves? Is common sense something uncontentious that we can reliably fall back on to solve the problems of bioethics?
I guess my question is: How do these people get into Oxford and Princeton to begin with? Is it that these institutes of “higher learning” are trying to push the weirdness envelope and say they have something unique that others do not? It seems to me that Savulesco is simply pushing the bodily autonomy ethic to it’s ultimate limit.
Go Michael Cook! I couldn’t agree with you more. I have long remarked on how bioethicists have become the “secular priests” of our society. It seems that when people throw away their God, they still need someone who will tell them what is right and wrong - unfortunately, it’s no longer God but other people: bioethicists. These have been turned into god-like creatures whose peculiar personal opinions are oddly considered a gauge for the morality of everything from genetic engineering to murder, as if they are somehow more enlightened than the rest of us.
We would get more worth for our money if we simply asked the blue collar worker on the street, because chances are that he’d be more in touch with regular common sense morality and reality than an ego-driven and university-indoctrinated professor who wants to promote himself with the shock value of his opinions.
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