[ExI] Medical power of attorney for cryonicsts

Anders Sandberg anders at aleph.se
Sat Dec 6 19:41:25 UTC 2014


Ben <bbenzai at yahoo.com> , 6/12/2014 6:57 PM:
And, Anders, aren't you making just as huge a claim, that there actually  
is such a thing as 'the One True morality'? 


I'm not committed to this view. It just made my post easier to write, rather than get into the *huge* issues in metaethics. 


I think I am more of a cognitivist about ethics than a non-cognitivist, but I am 50-50 on moral realism/ethical naturalism vs. moral subjectivism/ideal observer theory (I don't believe much in error-theory). 


One nice thing with working in philosophy is that you don't have to claim you have a firm and fixed theory. Some do, but many of us just try to do good arguments and see where they lead us. 



Re. 'Ethicists': "They have training in reasoning about ethics, the  
rules and norms surrounding medicine, and how people relate to them.  
Some are very good at making you see important facets of a medical  
situation that you would miss by looking merely from your own perspective.?" 
 
This is a very good, and important point.  It does not, however, make  
them more qualified than anyone else in deciding what is and is not,  
ethical. 


Most of them would agree with you, after pointing out that what you call "ethical" should actually be called "moral". Ethics is the study of moral questions, and while ethicists are good at that study they usually cannot claim they have moral truth (there are likely some exceptions). In the end it is *you* who will make moral choices, including the choice of what morality you follow. Good ethics means that you clarify this to yourself. 



Also, I'm not sure that everyone who is called an 'ethicist' is actually 
all that good at chasing down consequences.  Many of them seem to be  
more interested in imposing a religiously-inspired morality on other  
people than anything else, with logical chains of inference being the  
least of their concerns. 


But this is because you mostly come across "ethicists" rather than ethicists. The people who like to write moralizing editorials or sit on institutional review boards are often not very trained in ethics, but like to claim they are representing it. The real ethicists are hanging out in philosophy departments most of the time. 

There is a particularly obnoxious kind of Catholic bioethicist infesting many institutions who have learned enough philosophy to argue reasonably well but use it to defend whatever their religious intuitions say; they make bad arguments for crazy positions with the certainty of somebody who knows they stand on the bedrock of morality. Real ethicists poke at questions in an open-ended way rather than trying to get a desired answer. There is a reason so much of the academic bioethics community became mildly pro-enhancement after Fukuyama, Kass and Pellegrino. 


Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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