*This is some real pop-corn-eating material.
The big problem is obviously humanistic guys who worry too much
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Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard has been one of the most outspoken advocates for more gas and less brakes here. Both in writing and in talks he has expressed the view that we should move forward without substantial impediments to CRISPR-Cas9. For instance, Pinker’s “get out of the way” editorial last week in The Boston Globe on CRISPR was very critical of bioethics and advocated an expeditious path forward for the research without constraints. It sparked wide-ranging discussions and even some anger from bioethicists. Update: see also this brief reply to Pinker’s interview from noted bioethicist, Art Caplan.
A few days ago I reached out to Dr. Pinker to do an interview to learn more of the specifics about his views with a goal toward increasing dialogue. For instance, I wondered if he really felt that strongly about the harms caused by bioethics that were suggested in his editorial. I want to thank him for taking the time to provide such detailed answers that make the full depth of his views on these issues far clearer here than in the past.
Knoepfler. 1. Related to your talk at BEINGS and your more recent editorial, what do you see as the appropriate role for bioethics and bioethicists in the life sciences? “Get out of the way” seems rather absolute. Can you help us understand the nuances there in your view of bioethics if any?
Pinker: There’s a difference between ethics, on the one hand, and “bioethics” and “bioethicists,” on the other. Of course everything a scientist does—everything a human being does—ought to be ethically guided. But bioethics has become a professional guild that all too often impedes sound ethical concerns rather than advancing them. Many moral philosophers—the scholars who specialize in evaluating the soundness of ethical arguments—believe that mainstream bioethics commonly trades in confused claims based on emotion and woolly thinking (see these articles by Julian Savulescu, Sally Satel, and me for examples).
Take the very foundation of ethics. You’d think it would be an obvious ethical principle that life is better than death, health is better than disease, and vigor is better than disability. (((Uh, tell it to the Manhattan Project.))) But, astonishingly, so-called bioethicists have repeatedly denied these truisms, either explicitly (in the case of the country’s former bioethicist-in-chief, Leon Kass, who argued that the desire to extend life is a sign of shallowness and immaturity), or implicitly, by fetishizing sweeping rubrics such as dignity, equity, social justice, sacredness, privacy, and consent at the expense of the health and lives of actual people. (((You know what would be awesome? An endless, radiantly healthy life without any dignity, equity, social justice, sacredness and privacy.)))
It’s not just that many bioethicists practice bad moral philosophy. It’s that they are entangled in a conflict of interest. Institutionalized bioethics has become an academic and bureaucratic industry, and they need to rationalize their existence. You hardly need a bioethicist to tell you that it’s wrong to inject typhus into twins or to withhold antibiotics from syphilis patients. But to come up with an abstruse argument as to why a parent should be prohibited from saving the life of her infant by donating a part of her liver—for that you need a “bioethicist.” (((Uh… shouldn't any industry be some source of institutional funding for its own ethicists, somehow? You wouldn't want, say, the institution of railroad regulators doing bioethics in their spare time.)))
Regarding my advice to “get out of the way,” the nuances were stated, albeit tersely, in the article. The first is that a truly ethical bioethics must weigh the benefits of any restriction on research against the harm that will be caused to the vast number of people who would benefit if the research proceeded expeditiously. Savulescu puts it starkly: “To delay by 1 year the development of a treatment that cures a lethal disease that kills 100,000 people per year is to be responsible for the deaths of those 100,000 people, even if you never see them.” (((That's a pretty interesting argument, but doesn't Hippocrates say, "First, do no harm" ? Hippocrates doesn't say, "Quick, dose that leper up with CRISPR or else you're practically killing him yourself.")))
The second is that a truly ethical bioethics should justify any restrictions on research with rigorous, defensible arguments about benefit and harm, not with moralistic grandstanding, science fiction dystopias, perverse analogies to Nazis and nuclear weapons, esoteric theories pulled out of the air, or freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, (((now you're talkin' my language, Dr. Steve!))) people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs—all of which I’ve heard in these debates…."
