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 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.