I have a practicing bioethical consultant on my team, and I have very much realized that the rationalsphere is unduly prejudiced against the field. This paper set confirms that for me, since my reading in the field is due entirely to selection bias.
Bioethics is, in my opinion, healthier than philosophy in that it more often requires coming to a decision on a current moral question.
Notice, however, that Bioethics papers will skew in a way that bioethical consultants will not. In general people in the field have an additional specialty/ practice like law, clinical research, hospital management, drug research, social work, psychology, and, of course, academia. I think this diversity of professions with actual jobs to perform, makes the field more healthy (but perhaps less coherent) than Eliezer and Alex Tabarrok realize.
A higher number of these papers are at least on interesting and consequential questions, even if the authors fumble, than one finds in philosophy.
I would expect bioethics to be healthier than theoretical ethics, for reasons related to “it more often requires coming to a decision on a current moral question”: decisions feel more consequential and you get more feedback on the impact of ideas.
I’m not sure I’d expect bioethics to be healthier than the average Anglophone-philosophy subfield. I predict that adding morality to the mix makes humans get the wrong answer a lot more than they otherwise would, for a variety of reasons: emotions run higher; there’s more temptation to grandstand and merely-signal; it’s harder to point to good consensus models of what ‘successful normative reasoning’ looks like (unlike ‘successful descriptive reasoning’); etc.
I have a practicing bioethical consultant on my team, and I have very much realized that the rationalsphere is unduly prejudiced against the field. This paper set confirms that for me, since my reading in the field is due entirely to selection bias.
Bioethics is, in my opinion, healthier than philosophy in that it more often requires coming to a decision on a current moral question.
Notice, however, that Bioethics papers will skew in a way that bioethical consultants will not. In general people in the field have an additional specialty/ practice like law, clinical research, hospital management, drug research, social work, psychology, and, of course, academia. I think this diversity of professions with actual jobs to perform, makes the field more healthy (but perhaps less coherent) than Eliezer and Alex Tabarrok realize.
A higher number of these papers are at least on interesting and consequential questions, even if the authors fumble, than one finds in philosophy.
I would expect bioethics to be healthier than theoretical ethics, for reasons related to “it more often requires coming to a decision on a current moral question”: decisions feel more consequential and you get more feedback on the impact of ideas.
I’m not sure I’d expect bioethics to be healthier than the average Anglophone-philosophy subfield. I predict that adding morality to the mix makes humans get the wrong answer a lot more than they otherwise would, for a variety of reasons: emotions run higher; there’s more temptation to grandstand and merely-signal; it’s harder to point to good consensus models of what ‘successful normative reasoning’ looks like (unlike ‘successful descriptive reasoning’); etc.