Bioethicist Position Available: Philosophers Need Not Apply.

Sometimes Blumenthal-Barby et al. (2022) discuss the philosopher’s contribution to bioethics as a largely theoretical or apriori one that arrives from out of the blue—like Parfit’s identity theory—and is subsequently appropriated by bioethicists for their own work. At other times, the authors seem to represent the academic philosopher (AP) as one who transitions from Plato’s world of forms to the messy, culturally embedded, realworld dilemmas with which bioethicists grapple every day. In this essay, I’m more interested in the former, “pure” philosopher account rather than the philosopher-journeyman one, such as when philosophers transmogrify into full-time medical ethicists or neuroethicists. Accordingly, this essay addresses the question as to what special expertise a philosopher qua philosopher might have, distinct from scholars in law, medicine, investigative journalism, political science, gender studies, economics, etc., that is of unique value to bioethics. I shall argue that the answer is none. In fairness, Blumenthal-Barby et al. acknowledge that possibility but don’t take it on. I will. In what follows, I’ll offer three arguments that shamelessly borrow from Tristram Engelhardt’s and Richard Rorty’s deflationary accounts of the Western philosophical canon and recall what more than a few philosophers have recently admitted: that despite millennia of effort, philosophy has made next to no progress in answering Plato’s “big” questions, and that there is little prospect for change (Chalmers 2015; Dietrich 2011; Shand 2017). If true, then it is hard to see how bioethics or any other “applied” scholarly discipline can benefit from philosophers’ distinctly “philosophical” reflections.