Indeed when I spoke to people from my department about challenge trials, none had both heard of and thought extensively about the issue. One respondent wished to emphasize that they hadn’t thought about this issue much yet at all when deciding. Bioethicists are no worse than the average person on the streets, but that doesn’t mean they are much better either, and maybe they should be.
This surprises and concerns me. Challenge trials seem like a textbook bioethics topic, and even if they weren’t, I’d expect that people trained to think carefully about the ethics of related problems would arrive at substantially more good-maximizing opinions. Economists are more skeptical of price controls than the public, physicians are more supportive of vaccines, and so on. Bioethicists have power in their institutions, and I think we should hold them to an accordingly higher standard.
I appreciate you sharing data on your experience, but I have to say it didn’t change my view that society would be better off with a weaker bioethics field.
This surprises and concerns me. Challenge trials seem like a textbook bioethics topic, and even if they weren’t, I’d expect that people trained to think carefully about the ethics of related problems would arrive at substantially more good-maximizing opinions. Economists are more skeptical of price controls than the public, physicians are more supportive of vaccines, and so on. Bioethicists have power in their institutions, and I think we should hold them to an accordingly higher standard.
I appreciate you sharing data on your experience, but I have to say it didn’t change my view that society would be better off with a weaker bioethics field.