Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Is It Time for a p2p De-Professionalization of Ethics?

In the Moot earlier this afternoon, Friend of Blog Anne Corwin wrote:
I am no longer willing to waste my time in endless back-and-forth debates in which nothing I say is given any weight unless it fits tidily into someone's favorite "ism" or widget. While philosophical and ethical "systems" can indeed be useful and interesting at times, and while they probably do each account for some situations fairly handily, no such system can possibly encompass all of messy, complex, contextually-diverse Real Life. And disregarding that messiness might be fine and appropriate if one is writing a paper for a class or engaging in a debating contest, but I think some people go way too far in thinking that because you can eliminate certain variables "on paper", you can also ignore them in real life.

I'm not arguing for an anti-intellectual approach to ethics here, of course -- I'm just saying that by failing to recognize the contextual, limited nature of all formal philosophical systems and "widgets", people can very easily end up advocating things that are actually really nasty and awful.

What is extraordinary to me is that things get so topsy turvy when one is arguing with would-be "professional ethicians" (let's leave to the side for the moment the very questionable status of the credentials of many of these so-called professionals) that one can actually come to worry that expressing an actually critical, actually engaged, actually sensitive attitude toward values will be attacked as "anti-intellectual."

Formulaic undercritical rationalizing approaches to these issues of the kind familiar in so much professional ethical discourse look to me far more anti-intellectual than your approach -- with which I sympathize personally, I should say, in the interests of full disclosure. Indeed, in comparison, the pieties of professional ethicians scarcely seem to me like thinking at all in too many instances.

And let me add, I think there is something a little worrisome in the very idea of a "professionalization" of ethics in the first place in a world where every person capable of consent is likewise capable of critical thinking.

I don't deny that philosophers who have devoted their lives to thinking through complex normative quandaries might often have useful advice that deserves a hearing for those who would make informed decisions, and I don't deny that meta-ethical frameworks organized by Kantian (autonomy) or Benthamite (utility) or Tolstoyan (reconciliation) or Leopoldian (ecological) intuitions, or their many subsequent variations, can indeed sometimes help clarify such quandaries -- as they are also surely known to distort them too sometimes when relied upon too robotically.

But I don't think professional ethicians on the whole seem to me a more reliable group of folks as guides for my own thinking in moments of normative perplexity than are common or garden variety thoughtful, practical, or kind people of my acquaintance who would never dream of calling themselves "professional ethicians."

Indeed, if I had to throw generalizations around I'd likely have to admit the reverse is true, and it is rarely the professionals who seem to have the most useful insights to help guide me in the midst of moral and ethical distress.

I suspect that with ethicians as with so-called professional intellectuals more generally what will matter most is whether or not one devotes ones intellectual energies as a professional to speaking truths to powers that be, or to providing rationalizations for incumbent interests.

Let me stress: This question of accommodation as against resistance to constituted authorities comes to the fore for me only wherever intellectual engagement manages to become professional. I don't think this circumscribes all intellectual life in the same way. There is far more to thinking as such than just accommodation of and resistence to incumbency and authority.

But where professional bioethical and technocratic discourses in conversation with public policymaking and corporate investment strategies are concerned, it seems to me worth noticing that incumbency has an enormous lot to gain from the promulgation of a ubiquitous normalizing regulatory medical apparatus promising optimality and providing predictability, docility, and conformism.

This alone should recommend caution, even if one didn't know about the eugenic and puritanical and authoritarian histories of priestly, courtly, and official ethicians of so many past social orders. Perhaps there is something to be said for a p2p de-professionalization of the ethical and technodevelopmental deliberation to which constituted authorities feel themselves most beholden?

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