Survey: bioethicists’ views on bioethical issues

Summary

Bioethicists influence practices and policies in medicine, science, and public health. However, little is known about bioethicists’ views in aggregate. We recently surveyed 824 U.S bioethicists on a wide range of ethical issues, including several issues of interest to the EA community (e.g., compensating organ donors, priority setting, paternalistic regulations, and trade-offs between human and animal welfare, among others). We aimed to contact everyone who presented at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Annual Conference in 2021 or 2022 and/​or is affiliated with a US bioethics training program. Of the 1,713 people contacted, 824 (48%) completed the survey.

Why should EAs care?

  1. As Devin Kalish puts it in this nice post: “Bioethics is the field of ethics that focuses on issues like pandemics, human enhancement, AI, global health, animal rights, and environmental ethics. Bioethicists, in short, have basically the same exact interests as us.”

  2. Many EAs don’t hold the bioethics community in high regard. Much of this animus seems to stem from EAs’ perception that bioethicists have bad takes. (See Devin’s post for more on this.) Our survey casts light on bioethicists’ views; people can update their opinions accordingly.

What did we find?

Chris Said of Apollo Surveys[1] separately analyzed our data and wrote a blog post summarizing our results:

Primary results

  • A large majority (87%) of bioethicists believed that abortion was ethically permissible.

  • 82% thought it was permissible to select embryos based on somewhat painful medical conditions, whereas only 22% thought it was permissible to select on non-medical traits like eye color or height.

  • 59% thought it was ethically permissible for clinicians to assist patients in ending their own lives.

  • 15% of bioethicists thought it was ethically permissible to offer payment in exchange for organs (e.g. kidneys).

Question 1

  • Please provide your opinion on whether the following actions are ethically permissible.

  • Is abortion ethically permissible?

  • Is it ethically permissible to select some embryos over others for gestation on the basis of somewhat painful medical conditions?

  • Is it ethically permissible to make trade-offs between human welfare and non-human animal welfare?

  • Is it ethically permissible for a clinician to treat a 14-year-old for opioid use disorder without their parents’ knowledge or consent?

  • Is it ethically permissible to offer payment in exchange for blood products?

  • Is it ethically permissible to subject people to regulation they disagree with, solely for the sake of their own good?

  • Is it ethically permissible for clinicians to assist patients in ending their own lives if they request this?

  • Is it ethically permissible for a government to allow an individual to access treatments that have not been approved by regulatory agencies, but only risk harming that individual and not others?

  • Is it ethically permissible to consider an individual’s past decisions when determining their access to medical resources?

  • Is it ethically permissible to select some embryos over others for gestation on the basis of non-medical traits (e.g., eye color, height)?

  • Is it ethically permissible to offer payment in exchange for organs (e.g., kidneys)?

  • Is it ethically permissible for decisional surrogates to make a medical decision that they believe is in a patient’s best interest, even when that decision goes against the patient’s previously stated preferences?

  • Is it ethically permissible for a clinician to provide life-saving care to an adult patient who has refused that care and has decision-making capacity?

Results

Question 2

In general, should policymakers consider non-health benefits and harms (like whether expanding access to a service will reduce beneficiaries’ financial risk) when allocating medical resources?

Results

survey 2 responses

Question 3

A being becomes a person at...

Results

survey 3 responses

Question 4

Does the fact that a person’s life is expected to be worth living once we bring them into existence give us a moral reason to bring them into existence?

Results

survey 4 responses

Question 5

If there are not enough lifesaving resources for everyone at risk of death, we should:

Results

survey 5 responses

Question 6

Is being unable to see disadvantaging?

Results

survey 6 responses

Question 7

It is most important to prevent someone from dying at which of the following ages:

Results

survey 7 responses

Some concluding thoughts

  1. There are more analyses/​data in the paper (e.g., comparisons of bioethicists’ views to those of the US public; data on bioethicists’ backgrounds; analyses of the relationship between bioethicists’ normative commitments and their views on specific issues). You can access the paper here. Feel free to reach out if you have trouble accessing it.

  2. We also surveyed bioethicists about issues related to research ethics (e.g., challenge trials; information hazards). These results will be published separately.

  3. If you’re interested in administering this survey to EAs, please reach out.

  4. The American Journal of Bioethics will solicit peer commentaries on this paper in the near future. Please consider writing a commentary if you have thoughts. Edit: the link to do so can be accessed here.

  5. Sophie Gibert (the second author) and I have a podcast, Bio(un)ethical, where we often discuss issues at the intersection of bioethics and EA. If these issues are of interest to you, consider checking it out.

  1. ^

    Apollo Surveys and EA Funds supported this work.