Wesley Smith’s Second Hand Smoke is promoting Bioedge, a blog that slams bioethics and its professionals hard. Michael Cook’s screed takes to task bioethics as a discpline and its members saying that “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.”
Ouch. Moreover, he calls out specific bioethicists, namely Julian Savulescu of Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. But rather than making logical arguments against Savulescu’s positions with which he takes issue, Cook instead engages in snide, ad hominem attacks against the Oxford bioethicist and the field generally, going so far as to suggest that we “abolish bioethics and bioethicists” in favor of something, indecipherable called “vanilla ethics”.
Yet, it would appear that Cook, ranting and raving about bioethics in Online Opinion, doesn’t really know much about the field or its members. First, the fact that he believes that an argument for mandatory organ donation is new and sinister, just shows that Cook doesn’t know the literature. Second, it appears he just likes to make the Uheiro Center for Practical Ethics the whipping boy for his disdain for bioethics, slamming them again in his blog yesterday. Third and finally, calling for an abolition of the field on the basis of disagreement with one person’s arguments in favor of organ markets or enhancement in sport seems a bit overreaching to me.
In any case, Cook is making really weak arguments, if they are arguments at all, against bioethics all based around a disdain for one Oxford ethicist. When you have some real arguments about the lack of theory available to make bioethics a discipline, any evidence at all that bioethicists are not as well-trained, rigorous, or qualified as other ethicists, or know the literature, Mr. Cook, then we can talk.
Summer Johnson, PhD