“The moral naivete of ethics by numbers”

Susan Dwyer (University of Maryland):

What do bioethicists do? According to a recent Boston Globe op-ed by the Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, they needlessly get in the way of saving and improving human lives by throwing up ethical red tape and slowing the speed of research, and in so doing, they undermine their right to call themselves ethicists at all.

Read on at Aljazeera America. You can also listen to her discuss this — as well the need to consider race, class, and gender in medical research — at The Majority Report.

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“The moral naivete of ethics by numbers” — 1 Comment

  1. I agree with almost every line in Dwyer’s piece. But I’d also point out that ‘bioethics’ by groupthink (e.g. mindlessly echoing whorephobic protests against the decriminalisation of sex work or jumping on the Islamophobic media bandwagon attempting to manufacture consent for the next round of US military adverturism in the middle east) just because ‘feminism’ is also pretty morally naive.

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