Editorial

Will Bioethics Take the Life of Philosophy?

Glenn McGee, Alden March Bioethics Institute

Stephen Toulmin asked whether the challenges of medicine So it is not surprising that philosophers both seem,
present either a special case for the utility of philosophi- often, to be the most qualified to make a valuable, timely
cal methods in professional practice or an essential test of and historically informed contribution to public debate and
whether the role of the philosopher could return to an ear- education yet are least likely to make it.
lier, central place in the discourse of literate society. His I will not pause, as have some historians of philosophy,
oft-cited essay "how medicine saved the life of ethics” to amplify the observation made by Toulmin himself that
was one part of a broad but short-lived emphasis in the the rarification of contemporary philosophy has lessened the
literature of philosophical ethics to craft a special institu- possibility that a philosopher trained at, e.g., New York
tionalized activity, largely in philosophy departments, that University, Princeton or Harvard might ever play the kind
aimed at returning ethics as a theoretical pursuit to the of social role of Socrates, Aristotle or even Nietzsche, not
American social agenda. even while holding a post in a philosophy department that
There exist a few clever exceptions, such as the presence ranks among the top “applied ethics” departments in Brian
of perhaps a dozen fully credentialed, “practicing” philoso- Leiter’s “Philosophical Gourmet Report,” a now oft-cited
phers, e.g., Ph.D.s working as sher- ranking of the key departments in the field.
iff’s deputies, therapists, or elected officials, but one can Instead I want to identify why disciplinary philosophy’s
point to a general failure of the discipline of attempts to create a new area of specialization, training
philosophy to adjust its modes of training or scholarship in and publication, which Toulmin believed could save the
response to the experiences of or opportunities for philoso- discipline from the irrelevance that Dewey predicted would
phers who are “applying ethics” to modify social institu- otherwise come for philosophy in American political and
tions. We do not teach philosophers to or solve the ethical moral discourse, have failed.
problems of individuals in any way that places the philoso- Only the briefest review of applied ethics’ most success-
pher in a direct, Socratic interaction, apart from classroom ful inroads over that past twenty years is required to see the
teaching. scope of this failure and its significance.
One need not point to the fact that the young In the application of philosophical work to medicine,
philosopher who writes popular books or articles in non- Stephen Toulmin, Al Jonsen, Arthur Caplan, Tom
philosophical journals, or who pursues a non-standard re- Beauchamp and James Childress, Norman Daniels, Donald
search agenda clearly marginalizes him or herself. This Light, William Winslade, Mark Siegler, among others, have
would have been viewed with incredulity only a century or authored canonical textbooks that attempted in part
so ago by the Harvard philosophy department of William to make philosophical material more accessible by reduc-
James’ era, and indeed across much of the history of western ing complex moral problems to formulae and/or princi-
philosophy. ples that can be applied in the course of ordinary medical
Today, if you want tenure as a philosopher, the wrong practice in a coherent way. These writers and others stress
path is public engagement. those elements of moral philosophy that are most compat-
One need not point to the almost mandatory hyper- ible with allopathic medicine. Each principle seems cho-
specialization of the most successful graduate students in sen, or at least translated, for the purpose of maintaining
philosophy, programmed into the arcane style of philosoph- its relative ubiquity, for its relevance to the law, policy,
ical dissertations or the general resistance of faculty in the and practice of such diverse medical endeavors as trans-
most prominent philosophical institutions to mentor their plantation, genetic engineering and euthanasia, and for its
students in bridging the gap between philosophical rigor simplicity.
and the idiom of the general public and its media. Just no- This spread of “cook books” in bioethics has been, of
tice where philosophers are not. In bookstores, “self-help” course, much criticized and viciously by philosophers, and
replaced philosophy by 1985. Philosophy courses are no today books of this sort are almost never reviewed in philo-
longer mandatory in most universities. Philosophers com- sophical journals, but neither have they been considered.
prise only a tiny and shrinking number of columnists and Toulmin suggested that if philosophers were not able
essayists in mainstream literature. And where philosophers to solve such problems as were encountered in professional
are present they are often selling something: the validation clinical practice of the early 1980s, they “might as well
of the current mode of teaching the discipline. close up shop.”

The American Journal of Bioethics, 6(5): 1–2, 2006 ajob 1

c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Copyright !
ISSN: 1526-5161 print / 1536-0075 online
DOI: 10.1080/15265160600953863
The American Journal of Bioethics
But the opposite happened. Bioethics opened up shop–
elsewhere. Arguably, if enrollments in philosophy and
its placement rate are metrics, bioethics began to kill
philosophy and take some most talented refugees.
When philosophers interested in medicine were able
to achieve success in developing their study and reform of
medical practice, it was primarily because they left their
philosophy department and took up jobs in the world of
medicine. In effect philosophy did close up shop to the sort
of inquiry that Toulmin envisaged; the vicious attack on
reductionism in bioethics textbooks was among the final
nails in the coffin where recognition of complex bioethics
by philosophy colleagues was concerned.
In the 20th century, chairs of American and British
philosophy departments made a profound but foreseeable
mistake in allowing bioethics to essentially spin off into
a separate discipline, often in new quarters, rather than
growing philosophy to accommodate the new work in new
methodological traditions.
So bioethics has developed a role consonant with that
played by philosophy at the dawn of the 20th century, with
multiple prestigious graduate programs, journals and social
roles.
Philosophy has comforted itself with the gentle illu-
sion that its spawn, bioethics, made a Faustian bargain,
trading rigor for fame. Many pages of the professional
literature of the American Philosophical Association are
devoted to speculation as to why, for example, the me-
dia is not more interested in philosophy as it is cur-
rently practiced. “Why isn’t there a PBS series on Kant,”
asked one philosopher, who later told me that he doesn’t
own a TV. Why, philosophers asked in a special com-
mittee at the dawn of the 21st century, can rigorous
philosophy not just be recognized without any shift in
how the discipline trains its young, conducts it activities,
and in particular how it interacts with trade presses and
television.
Philosophy of medicine, a small coalition peopled by
philosophers almost all of whom work primarily in the
world of bioethics while holding appointments in depart-
ments of philosophy, holds on to its role in philosophy with
vigor, keeping alive a newsletter of the American Philo-
sophical Association, a few journals (though even they shift
2 ajob
more every day; witness the transformation of the excel-
lent journal Theoretical Medicine to Theoretical Medicine and
Bioethics), and a smattering of books and series, including
one, the Philosophy of Medicine series, that until roughly
1985 contained, arguably, more than 75% of the canoni-
cal books in what would become philosophical
bioethics. Today, one can only (with great effort
and considerably expense–trust me) obtain these books, and
they cannot be searched on the Internet.
Philosophers of medicine are not saving the life of phi-
losophy, and in fact as sophisticated as the work of a ranking
bioethics scholar or even philosopher of medicine in a phi-
losophy department might be, bioethics as it is involving
into a robust area of research can never be truly excellent in
the minds of those for whom the application of philosophy
means traditional dissemination of epistemology or meta-
physics to the public. For them, there is little that is
truly “philosophical” about bioethics’ activities. As a friend
once noted, only philosophy, among all the great disciplines,
spends so much time asking of all work published by its
practitioners, “is this really philosophy?”
The question at hand is not, then, whether bioethics
can save the life of philosophy. The question is whether
bioethics’ success in integrating philosophical research with
the research life of the biomedical science community and
community on the whole will lead to a genuine attempt
to reorganize and repopulate philosophy departments and
change their products such that the philosopher is again
part of the broader community and yet she is said to be teaching
philosophy.
Resurrecting “public pedagogy” and “public service” as
genuine duties for any philosopher, duties that require inno-
vation vastly beyond what is currently seen in philosophical
practice, these are first steps toward a world in which not
medicine, but the practice of research in the community
of biomedical sciences, breathes new life into a discipline
that has never been more beleaguered. But ultimately, phi-
losophy departments must embrace the interdisciplinary
philosophically trained scholar, or bioethics may very well
play a role in shrinking, but not closing, the philosophy shop.
September/October 2006, Volume 6, Number 5