AVOIDING MORAL CHOICES: Ethics experts have a way of making almost every choice seem moral. Don't believe it
Marino, Gordon
AVOIDING MORAL CHOICES Call in the ethics expert Gordon Narino It does not require an expert to see that we are living in era of highly bureaucratized knowledge, a time that more than one...
...For Aristotle, those in need of moral counsel would be best advised to seek out the most virtuous person they could find...
...We have experts on everything—inter- and intrapsychic life, gender equity, child rearing, child violence, sex, marriage, diversity, dying/grief, leadership, you name it...
...But Commonweal 13 March 23, 2001 if experts disagree in their answers to relatively simple problems, how are we to distinguish between expert and nonexpert opinion...
...Here's an example...
...A financial consulting firm that was having a problem because their male associates had a practice of taking their male clients to gentlemen's dubs...
...AVOIDING MORAL CHOICES Call in the ethics expert Gordon Narino It does not require an expert to see that we are living in era of highly bureaucratized knowledge, a time that more than one pundit has described as "an age of experts...
...Unlike their secular brethren, they claim, in theory at least, to treat as sacral the assumptions of their sacred texts...
...Aristotle, for example, would be the last one to ring up for an ethics consult...
...More than that, the fantasy that you need a doctorate in ethics to determine right from wrong encourages nonexperts to believe that ethics is an extremely complicated matter and so we should take a wait-and-see attitude toward our moral intuitions...
...Business ethics is a billion-dollar-a-year industry...
...As early as the sixties, James Ackerman recognized the rising tide of self-doubt: "If one's position in society implies no determinate base of judgment in areas outside of one's competence, one has a choice between having no opinion or accepting the opinion of the expert, and the most available expert is the professional manufacturer of opinion...
...Ethicists of the biomedical stripe sometimes defend their turf by arguing that science and technology are developing far ahead of our moral sensibilities...
...Kierkegaard taught that we should do what we take to be the right thing now, for the longer we wait the more likely it is that we will talk ourselves out of acting by convincing ourselves that the wide way is the righteous way...
...The notion that where there is a problem there must be a professional listing in the Yellow Pages has become so ingrained that when it comes to a wide swath of issues, we almost instinctively defer judgment to one of the mandarin class, that is, to people who make their living by purveying one form or other of highly specialized knowledge...
...For example, in his scathing critique of professional ethics, Raymond Gaita notes that ethicists congratulate themselves for being able to ponder moral possibilities that they themselves previously judged to be beyond the pale, such as infanticide...
...And as Ackerman and others point out, the public is becoming increasingly diffident...
...Issues about personal identity loomed up...
...One precept that people of different ethical persuasions agree to is the notion that fair judgment is best served by disinterested individuals...
...While there are numerous graduate programs in applied ethics, there is currently no universally recognized credentialling procedure...
...Give a hundred physicists the same straightforward problem and they will respond with roughly a hundred similar answers...
...They can rehearse the reasons for holding one moral position as opposed to another and can often provide the best arguments for their moral positions...
...Freud, to whom the whole new class of experts owes an unacknowledged debt, knew that if you are going to legitimize a field of study you need institutions and journals devoted to that field of study...
...When read against the backdrop of the heinous work of the Nazi doctors {who, as Robert Jay Lifton has shown, marshaled their own bioethical justifications), Beecher's courageous essay left us less inclined than ever to leave physicians in the quietude of their morally privileged position...
...Many of the interventions of ethics experts ring as flat-footed common sense supporting the Kantian claim that moral knowledge is universally distributed in the form of conscience...
...The Association for Practical and Professional Ethics alone lists more than eighty institutional members...
...Beecher, himself a physician, detailed the routine abuses of human research subjects in medical experiments...
...otherwise, there would not be so many experts on the topic...
...But life is not an argument...
...That stranger was the first ethics expert, a bioethicist...
...Ethicists are hired by corporations to develop workshops, handle whistle-blowing incidents, write value statements, and in general to function as ancillary superegos to executives highly focused on making money...
...But one thing is certain, he believed the knowledge of good and evil to be universally distributed...
...Reluctant as I am to call upon my own experience, I must acknowledge that I have seldom if ever come away from reading an ethics case history with the sense, "Now, I see why they call some people experts on ethics...
...Ohio University sponsors the Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics...
...And while it is true that the corporate world has embraced ethicists for financial rather than ethical reasons, most of the businesses in which ethicists have found a niche are, ethically speaking, better off for their presence...
...however, most of them do see themselves as possessing a special knowledge by virtue of which they can speak with authority on moral matters...
...Not surprisingly, most experts agree that the lack of consensus among ethics experts is no argument against professional ethics...
...If one ethicist believes that the development of cloning procedures will lead to eugenics and another does not, then it should come as no surprise that the two will disagree as to whether or not cloning should be allowed...
...While I harbor no illusions about dismantling the ethics establishment, a concluding caveat is in order...
...Like Kant, Kierkegaard believed that we all know right from wrong, but as he put it, "we work our whole lives at eclipsing our ethico-religious knowledge," that is, at talking ourselves out of what we know...
...Not only do ethicists fail to press bedrock questions about the society in which they are fast becoming the new clergy...
...Because the individual who listens to his conscience will often find himself marching against the orders of his desire for happiness...
...Ironically, many ethicists describe themselves as followers of Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German moral philosopher...
...In the late twentieth century a new group of knowledge providers entered the ranks of experts, namely, professional ethicists...
...At that time, dramatic advances in medical technology, such as the development of the respirator, dialysis, and transplant surgery, raised a host of biting moral questions which philosophers were better suited to answer than physicians...
...The public is also developing a taste for ethics gurus...
...In the trial of Socrates, as described by Plato, the oracle at Delphi proclaimed that there is no one wiser than Socrates...
...Ethics experts are, however, no longer restricted to the biomedical professions...
...An important difference, however, might be that economic theories generate predictions which either confirm or deny the theories...
...Bioethicists are also called to speak our collective mind whenever there are public-policy questions such as: Should we cultivate embryos for research...
...In their practice, ethicists are given cases to analyze and judge...
...Secular moralists canonized the ethics of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, and others...
...There is, however, much disparity in expert opinion in ethics...
...For one obvious reason, it diminishes our own sense of responsibility and guilt...
...The philosophers David Hume and Arthur Schopenhauer, to say nothing of the contemporary evolutionary biologist E.O...
...The ethics expert with a Kantian orientation will argue that the man should be allowed to die, since for Kantians there is nothing more important than respecting the autonomy of the individual...
...The baker, the candlestick maker, and the physician each faced moral problems in the practice of his craft that he was expected to resolve by his own moral lights...
...The image of the ethicist as a disinterested moral observer is not a convincing one...
...He cross-examined representatives from a wide swath of Athenian society...
...When a hospital or healthcare provider offers a three-thousand-dollar consultation fee on a case involving a dispute with a patient's family, there is considerable pressure for the ethicist who wishes to secure further employment to come to a moral conclusion consonant with that of his employers...
...Is ethics a subject matter like medicine or physics about which one can become an expert...
...Befuddled by this pronouncement, Socrates attempted to find someone wiser than he...
...It is here important to remember that ethicists considered as a group are vocationally challenged...
...Some of the skepticism about professional ethics expressed in these studies derives from the fact that for expert and nonexpert alike, all moral reasoning is based on assumptions that, in the end, cannot be justified against competing assumptions...
...When is a person dead...
...In some circles, ethics experts are infamous for just this kind of psychological legerdemain...
...Today, whenever there is a severe conflict between the hospital and Commonweal 11 March 23,2001 a patient or patient's family over treatment, this stranger is summoned to resolve it...
...Enter the ethics expert, who sagaciously counseled the company executive to put a halt to the practice of entertaining clients at strip joints...
...But by what authority do ethics experts presume to speak...
...Those with strong personal interests often do a poor job of policing the practices that have to do with those interests...
...If we choose to relate to a class of academics as ethics experts, then there are ethics experts...
...In the process of writing this article, I approached a number of business ethicists asking them to provide me with vignettes illustrative of the good works of ethics consultants...
...But if morality is based on feeling, the capacity for which I either inherit and/or learn, then what good is the hair splitting that is the stock and trade of ethics experts...
...And this is precisely what we have begun to do...
...Sociologists maintain that through the process of specialization, nonspecialist come to lose faith in their own opinions...
...Seren Kierkegaard and other masters of suspicion in the Christian tradition would scoff at the idea of ethics experts...
...For rather substantial fees, the sophists offered to impart their moral knowledge to the children of wealthy Athenians...
...Once again, when you are in the jaws of the golem that is the modern hospital, where one stranger of a doctor passes you off to another stranger of a doctor and miscommunications abound, the ethicist is now the best person to turn to for protection...
...There are many arguments for being wary of the claims of ethics experts...
...In the late twentieth century, though, moral quandaries have become fare for the ethics expert...
...However, most ethicists are committed to trying to decide moral questions in "neutral" terms...
...One expert begins with the premise that there is nothing more important than preserving human autonomy, another that all decisions ought to maximize happiness, still another, the Christian ethicist, that we ought to track our moral vectors from the Bible, and still another, the feminist, that the essential point is that we be guided by a caring attitude...
...Or, are the claims to expertise in ethics spurious...
...Discussing the question of expertise in ethics with a philosopher from Moscow, I once suggested that as an alternative to panels of people expert at parsing out arguments, we assemble a core group of moral champions...
...Indeed, Leon Kass, one of the proto-ethicists at the Hastings Center, the most influential ethics think tank in the world, noted in a retrospective piece that whereas bioethics started as a discipline that challenged many established beliefs, it is now itself in danger of becoming the establishment...
...It is tempting to believe that scholars steeped in the theory of morals and its application could provide us with a semblance of moral certitude, especially when these scholars do not, a la other more prophetic moralists, demand that we turn our lives upside down and give everything to the poor...
...the University of Virginia has the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics...
...And it is no wonder, as it is difficult to imagine what the qualifying exam for ethics experts might look like...
...it is another, graver matter to begin handing over questions of right and wrong to a moral cognoscenti...
...One ethicist who directs a prominent ethics institute responds to the problem of the diversity of expert opinion by claiming that there are only a handful of people qualified to call themselves ethicists and within this select group there is in fact much consensus...
...The fate of professional ethics will be determined by the fate of the institutions in which ethicists have become embedded...
...However, critics of the ethics guild complain that ethicists have become just that, a guild with their own class interests...
...Now it seems nearly every university and college boasts some kind of ethics center...
...But are ethicists kidding themselves and us...
...As Philip Rieff has observed, the very question of the legitimacy and limitations of the expert might well be understood as one aspect of the modern problem of authority...
...Kant is a complicated kettle of fish...
...Philosophically speaking, we have been through this story before...
...The Freudian or psychodynamic model of the self was toppled not by research and counterarguments but rather by the growing reluctance of insurance companies to pay for long-term psychotherapy...
...In the beginning of the new millennium, we find professional ethicists standing in the corner and giving directions to many professions...
...The philosopher laughed and said that they had tried such panels in Russia only to find that uncompromising moralists could not compromise enough to come to any decisions together...
...According to this tradition, if you have sympathy for others you will probably behave morally, if not, then not...
...Who, after all, should be saved when the need for a new life-saving technology is greater than the supply...
...In my nonexpert opinion, it is one thing to consult an expert for help with marital problems or with getting your child to do his homework...
...Ethicists are, for the most part, lawyers or doctors of philosophy who have taken special training in ethical theory and its application to concrete situations in the professions...
...Scientists may not be the best people to set the moral parameters of the technologies that they have invented...
...As straightforwardly as a financial counselor, the ethics expert tells them...
...We must hope that people submitting such queries do not imagine that having received their responses they, the moral laypersons, are henceforth absolved from the responsibility of thinking about the matters at hand...
...Wilson, all hold that morality is based on feeling...
...While historians agree that technological advances ignited the bioethics trade, Henry Beecher's 1996 whistleblowing article, "Ethics and Clinical Research," published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave the decision impetus...
...It is hard to fathom what consequences would confirm a bioethicist's recommendations for stem-cell research...
...For I cannot have moral obligations of which I am unaware...
...Moral direction was almost always connected with faith and the acceptance of religious authority, which is itself based on the mystical phenomenon of divine prophecy and revelation...
...The female associates were becoming disgruntled because their male clients were transferring their accounts over to their male counterparts...
...Though it was to the philosophical mind that the idea of ethics experts first occurred, there are key figures in the philosophical pantheon who would seem to frown on the ethics trade...
...It would be a moral blight for us to begin to take our own moral convictions with a grain of salt, as though they were the innocent musings of a nonspecialist, akin to someone not trained in medicine speculating about the origins of a disease...
...As that great deflator of metaphysical questions, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, taught us, the meaning of a term is fixed by the community that uses it...
...There are worse fates...
...It may be that moral matters are more complicated than that complicated Dane envisioned...
...but, for all their acumen in catching out fallacious moral reasoning, ethics experts do not enjoy a privileged relation to the moral truth...
...The service-oriented American economy has produced an almost fetishistic appetite for experts...
...Over the last decade, histories of the bioethics trade, some of them critical, have begun to appear...
...The New York Times Magazine now features a regular column, "The Ethicist...
...Freud went a long way toward breaking the spell of conscience by pointing out the primitive and unconscious forces that are the source of our moral inner voice...
...It is the virtuous individual, and not necessarily the scholar who has been studying ethical case histories, who will have the most acute moral sensibilities...
...Every culture has its own resources for responding to moral problems...
...They do not bear the relation to their subject matter that physicists bear to physics or for that matter that physicians bear to medical science...
...There are other arguments that can be mustered against the very idea of expertise in ethics...
...The clouds of a court proceeding were forming...
...For example, last year I spent a couple of weeks in the coastal village of Camden, Maine, home of the free-floating Institute for Global Ethics...
...Neil Postman observes that with the emergence of the cult of the expert, we, the nonexperts, have commenced to talk ourselves out of much of our common stock of knowledge...
...A depressed septuagenarian with terminal cancer wants to stop all treatment...
...Ethicists can illuminate conflicting moral interests...
...Telling your boss the truth may be the right thing to do, but it could cost you your job...
...For almost any given area of expertise, there is today another area of expertise called "the ethics of" that area of expertise...
...As earlier noted, ethicists are currently carving out moral guidelines for cloning, stem-cell research, the distribution of organs for transplant, and other weighty matters...
...According to Plato's text, the first gospel of Western philosophy, Socrates eventually came to understand that he was the wisest person in Athens by virtue of the fact that he alone knew that he was ignorant...
...In the medical field, it is the ethics maestros who have made sure that people undergoing surgery or participating in experiments give Commonweal 14 March 23,2001 their informed consent...
...they are often in the pockets of the hospitals and corporations that employ them...
...Inasmuch as all our moral reasoning is guided by assumptions, we are all flying by the seat of our moral pants...
...It is not easy to gather ethics experts under the same conceptual umbrella...
...Commonweal 15 March 23, 2001...
...Eventually, one proudly confided that he had made a positive intervention in a brewing gender equity issue...
...Should he be allowed to, or should his depression be regarded as rendering him incompetent to make such decisions...
...And yet, until the age of experts, ethical issues were not thought of as separable from the warp and woof of the practices of everyday life...
...Some ethicists call themselves "religious ethicists...
...Over the past two decades, scores of specialized ethics journals have come into existence, many of which are the children of ethics institutes...
...But Kant assures us that we are all morally culpable, or to put it in the patois of the present age, that we must all "take responsibility" for our actions...
...As Anne McClean points out in her rigorously argued critique of the ethics industry, The Elimination of Morality (Routledge, 1993), one of the dangers of the professional ethics movement is that a diffident public could easily come to confuse the voice of reason with the voice of ethics experts...
...Although ethicists may have extraordinary acumen in the dissection of moral problems, they do not deduce their recommendations from a set of incontrovertible principles absorbed in the course of their doctoral studies in ethics...
...The moral resources of the West derive from Jerusalem and Athens in the form of the Judeo-Christian faith and Greek philosophy which, on account of Paul's attempts to convert the Greeks, left its impress upon the content of the Christian faith...
...While Kant would agree that we need an expert to decide on the right course of medical treatment for grandmother's cancer, we do not need an expert to decide on the morality of taking someone off life support...
...Though he vehemently denied the charges, Socrates, who was executed in 399 B.C., was accused of being one of those ethics experts...
...Ethics groups unaffiliated with postsecondary institutions are also multiplying...
...As people were kept alive much longer by artificial means, the questions emerged, What exactly are the limits of life...
...Does the judgment that Socrates passed upon the ethics experts of fourth-century Athens apply to the legion of ethics experts in contemporary America and Western Europe...
...Readers send in moral quandaries such as, "I have twice told my bank that it has over-credited my account...
...If you are looking for a person to develop a protocol for the just distribution of organ donations, you do not want to ask someone in need of a transplant...
...Oddly enough, ethicists do not pretend that their training in moral theory renders them more virtuous than their clients...
...About half of them have graduate degrees in philosophy or religion...
...Ethicists are, after all, part of the growing cadre of lifestyle engineers, people who make their daily bread by teaching us how to relate to others and to ourselves...
...These breaches of public and private trust included injecting live cancer cells into unwitting patients and infusing mentally defective inmates with hepatitis virus and then testing different treatment modalities...
...With the Enlightenment, however, came a fervent attempt to found moral theory and much else on the pedestal of human reason alone...
...Watergate and the corporate scandals of the eighties prompted some to see that medicine was not the only market for people with special training in ethics...
...Expert counsel was all over the board...
...In short, all moral reasoning, expert and nonexpert alike, is based on assumptions...
...As this process goes, the very existence of a recognized guild of child-rearing experts will undermine the nonexpert's confidence...
...As a triple-click onto the Internet will attest, there are thousands of ethicists offering consultations on the moral questions specific to computers, sports, law, media, engineering, organization, and myriad other fields...
...The director of one ethics institute rightly explains that the divergence of expert counsel is an understandable reflection of two factors: a difference of opinion about projected outcomes and a difference of basic premises...
...It is the recognition of just this fact that converts many undergraduates into relativists...
...The conclusion drawn will depend not only on how you understand depression, but also on your foundational notions of right and wrong...
...Professional ethicists have done some good...
...And, in truth, it is not as though there were an essence of "ethics" and an essence of "experts" so that it could be definitively demonstrated that the idea of an ethics expert is a contradiction in terms...
...For a sampler of ethics think tanks, Dartmouth has its Institute for the Study of Applied and Professional Ethics...
...The very notion of the ethics expert is formed around the idea that in the professional ethicist we have someone who is both trained in ethical reasoning and relatively free of interest in the issue that he is charged with reasoning about...
...Into the late seventies there were but a handful of ethics institutes...
...nevertheless, the image of ethics conjured by the acceptance of an ethical establishment tempts some of our worst impulses...
...Arguments or no, the influence of professional ethicists will continue to expand...
...In golden-age Athens there were teachers, namely, "the sophists," who claimed to be experts on ethics...
...Until quite recently, those seeking moral counsel could only go to the clergy, who were sometimes referred to as "directors of conscience...
...Santa Clara University is home to the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics...
...Socrates concluded that the ethics experts of his time were impostors, or to be more precise, that they were flatterers who had a knack for telling affluent Athenians just what they wanted to hear...
...For Kierkegaard, the only expert of moral moment would be one who could help us resist the self-deceptive tendency to take the easy way by dishonestly identifying it as the righteous way...
...The question of the proper criteria for establishing legitimacy is an urgent one among ethicists...
...Indeed, in a study published in the Journal of Clinical Ethics, 144 ethicists were given a very straightforward and common hypothetical problem as to whether or not to remove life support from a patient in a vegetative state...
...Philosophers working in the trenches of applied ethics will tell you that there is no more diversity of expert opinion in ethics than there is in, say, economics...
...Or, What is a just method of distributing organs to transplant candidates...
...According to Aristotle, moral percipience is a function of moral character, and character of proper habits derived from imitating virtuous deeds...
...About thirty years ago, a stranger, who was not a medical practitioner, began to appear at the bedside of the sick...
...The utilitarian expert, whose dictum is to do that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people, might surmise that everyone, family and medical staff included, would be best served if the man were not allowed to discontinue treatment...
...The ethics doyens at the National Institutes of Health and other places are already occupied answering some of the definitive moral questions of our age, such as questions concerning cloning and stemcell research...
...If ethics constitutes a body of knowledge, then you might expect ethics experts to offer similar responses to the same straightforward problem...
...Accepting the idea that the voice of nonexpert conscience is the voice of an uneducated dolt would further undermine our individual sense of moral responsibility...
...Questions about distributive justice also came to the fore...
...Indeed, were Aristotle to put together an ethics committee, it would probably be composed of the likes of Jesus, Socrates, Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, King, Mother Teresa, and other moral paragons...
...It could, I suppose, be reasoned that the authority of professional ethicist is grounded in an extraordinary ability to illuminate ethical issues...
...Professional moralists entered the ranks of the expert class Gordon Marino is associate professor of philosophy and director of the Hong/Kierkegaard Library at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota...
...What should I do...
...Before obeying the inner voice that commands me to take more time away from my own private projects to help those less fortunate, I ought to let some time pass and think about it, for after all, ethics is a complicated matter...
...It would be an act of selfdeception on our part to pretend that we cannot be morally wrong for enacting a policy that had received the imprimatur of a committee of ethics experts...
...Surprisingly, they were rather reticent...
...Ethics experts often disagree with one another...
...Perhaps it says something about the level of morality desired, but moral Commonweal 12 March 23,2001 heroes are seldom sought after to sit on ethics panels...
...And yet there are strong psychological motives for wanting to recuse ourselves from moral decisions...
...If moral knowledge were not universally distributed and the horde of us stood in need of experts to teach us right from wrong, then those of us who were moral laypersons would be ignorant of our duties and therefore morally inculpable...
...in the late sixties...
...The job market in these fields is only a little stronger than the market for slide rules...
...California State University hosts the Kegley Institute of Ethics...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 6
