Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 363.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 07:34:39 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: supping with a long spoon
Carl Elliott, in the "Diary" column(s) of the latest London Review of Books
(24.23 28/11/02, pp. 36-7), gives a disturbing portrait of what can happen
when a field of the humanities is applied in partnership with strong
commercial interests. The field is bioethics, the commercial partners are
the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.
After reviewing the strong evidence for bribery and influence-peddling (his
terms), Elliott argues that, "Bioethicists are not supposed to be mere
agents for their employers: they are expected to be moral critics as well."
But, he notes, implicit in a recent report compiled by the American Society
for Bioethics and Humanities and the American Society for Law, Medicine and
Ethics -- whose presidents were then working for Geron Corporation
(http://www.geron.com/) and DNA Sciences (http://www.dna.com/) -- "is a
distinctive (though not altogether unexpected) view of what bioethics is,
according to which bioethicists are not primarily scholars, teachers or
clinicians but professional service providers in a market economy,
advertising and selling ethics to paying customers." "It is possible to
describe bioethics as a commodity in a market economy," Elliott continues,
"and if the right social and institutional structures are developed, that
it exactly what it will become. But would that development be good for
anyone other than the bioethics entrepeneurs?.... The initial shock that
many outsiders have expressed at the idea of ethics-for-hire comes partly
from the sense that words like 'honour' or 'duty' stand on a different
plane from phrases like 'advertising revenue', 'profit margins' and
'consulting contract'. The point here is not to deplore the wickedness of
the market, only to keep the market in its proper place." But how is that
to be achieved?
Of course few of us in humanities computing have any occasion to require
the long spoon that a number of bioethicists seem to have left back in
their philosophy departments. But the rhetoric by which teaching and
research become service provision in a marketplace is not entirely
unfamiliar either, and it doesn't come only from outside the academy. What
is the attraction of such a notion for those within it? Might the root
problem be a crisis of confidence in the academic professions? It does
sometimes seem as if the old "mandate of heaven" (as the Chinese emperors
used to call their basis of legitimacy) having crumbled, the academy is
struggling to come up with a new one -- to reinvent itself as a social
entity. Computing seems an obvious point of connection and so, at least
potentially, a way of doing the humanities that bridges intra- and
extramural worlds. Thus we enter the scene with talk of "transferrable
skills" and the like -- but without the distracting temptations, at least
for the moment. So we are in a very good position to work out in small what
a productive (and indeed ethical) relationship between academic and
non-academic worlds might be like.
Comments -- particularly from those who are doing it?
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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