Cool yeah. I just want to provide another more boring reason a lot of us have piled on to bioethics that doesn’t even require ingroup-outgroup dynamics.
Basically all of the people you’re citing (like me) have an amateur interest in bioethics as it affects legal policy or medical practice or pandemic control (the thing we actually follow closely).
You and I agree that harmful decisions are regularly being made by IRBs (and politicians), often on the basis of supposed ‘bioethics’. We also both agree there are at least a handful of poor thinkers in the field who do offer up low quality moral philosophy to support these bad decisions. It’s only natural then for me and my fellow travelers to see these bad decisions, and these writings classified as bioethics justifying them, and suppose that the latter are an important cause of the former.
And these decisions come week after week for years, progressively infuriating me more and more.
I could see I’m making a mistake to judge bioethics as a field by sampling a representative bunch of papers (weighted by citations maybe), reading them, and deciding how reasonable they typically seem. Unfortunately that’s an involved process that few people with an amateur interest are going to have time for. Each person can only go down a few rabbit holes like that each year in between our normal work, personal commitments, staying healthy, and so on.
So I appreciate you and other people doing that heavy lifting and then sharing the results — it’s the only way it’s practical for our mistake to be corrected!
Cool yeah. I just want to provide another more boring reason a lot of us have piled on to bioethics that doesn’t even require ingroup-outgroup dynamics.
Basically all of the people you’re citing (like me) have an amateur interest in bioethics as it affects legal policy or medical practice or pandemic control (the thing we actually follow closely).
You and I agree that harmful decisions are regularly being made by IRBs (and politicians), often on the basis of supposed ‘bioethics’. We also both agree there are at least a handful of poor thinkers in the field who do offer up low quality moral philosophy to support these bad decisions. It’s only natural then for me and my fellow travelers to see these bad decisions, and these writings classified as bioethics justifying them, and suppose that the latter are an important cause of the former.
And these decisions come week after week for years, progressively infuriating me more and more.
I could see I’m making a mistake to judge bioethics as a field by sampling a representative bunch of papers (weighted by citations maybe), reading them, and deciding how reasonable they typically seem. Unfortunately that’s an involved process that few people with an amateur interest are going to have time for. Each person can only go down a few rabbit holes like that each year in between our normal work, personal commitments, staying healthy, and so on.
So I appreciate you and other people doing that heavy lifting and then sharing the results — it’s the only way it’s practical for our mistake to be corrected!
Thanks! I’m glad you found it useful.