A few months ago, I penned a satirically titled piece, “Bioethicists Want to Rule the World,” pointing out that the CEO of the Hastings Center — which we might think of as the intellectual command and control center of bioethics — advocated expanding the field’s jurisdiction to encompass policy issues well beyond health care and medical ethics. These included such political controversies as the homelessness crisis, racism, global warming, and purported “threats to democracy.” In other words, everything is to become bioethics now.
Reinforcing my earlier point, the Hastings Center has now published an utterly naive article advocating that war itself be transformed into a bioethics issue. True to form in the field, the authors propose six bioethical “principles” to apply to considering whether potential combatants should resort to war or make “wiser choices.” From “Bioethics Must Address War as a Public Health Crisis:”
Health Justice demands distributing health-related benefits and burdens fairly and stresses a special responsibility to populations most vulnerable to war’s health harms, such as women, and children. Health justice gains support from the right to health, which the U.N. has recognized as a fundamental right of all human beings.
Accountability holds warring parties responsible for war’s effects on civilian populations. It extends to international groups such as the U.N., International Criminal Court, and World Bank. Accountability’s basis is the dignity and worth of persons, which makes tactics like rape, torture, or using civilian populations as shields indefensible.
Dignified Lives mandates taking reasonable steps to safeguard people’s central human capabilities, such as their ability to be healthy; have bodily integrity; exercise senses, imagination, and thought; plan their lives; affiliate with others; relate to nature; play and recreate; and regulate their immediate environment.
Public Health Sustainability names the ethical requirement of military planners to maintain public health services for war zone populations. Its justification relates to the fact that being healthy directly impacts people’s access to a normal range of opportunities in life, such as their ability to make and carry out a life plan, access education, and earn a living.
Nonmaleficence and Public Health Maximization call for creating the best possible balance of public health benefits and harms. Applying these principles requires comparing the health benefits and harms of war to its alternatives, such as economic sanctions, arms embargoes, diplomacy, nonviolent resistance, positive incentives, or military assistance.
What will these newly enunciated bioethics principles accomplish?
All six public health principles take stock of short- and long-term health effects. Combined, they reframe the ethics of war, changing calculations of whether waging or continuing a war is ethically defensible.
And here’s where the desired jurisdictional hegemony reveals itself again:
Putting these principles into practice requires bioethicists to engage more directly with war in their research, teaching, and service. Bioethics research should examine not just the ethical challenges associated with crisis response, but also war’s precipitating factors, such as poverty, food insecurity, displacement, and lack of equitable access to education, health care, and jobs. The preconditions that make war more likely are hardly inevitable. By addressing the social and economic conditions that trigger war, bioethicists can be a “bridge to peace.”
Sure.
So, what’s the point of this beyond virtue signaling? I think the ultimate goal behind bioethicists’ ambition to “rule the world” is to boost employment in the field. The more issues are deemed bioethical, the more bioethicists will be needed, and the greater need for bioethics professors. Thus the piece advocates:
Bioethics teaching should raise awareness about war’s public health effects among trainees and the broader public. For example, education can take the form of hosting public lectures, developing courses, compiling cases, and designing other training materials . . .
Bioethics service might include deploying bioethicists as ethics facilitators to serve as advocates for war zone populations. To date, ethics facilitation has been applied mostly to clinical and research settings, yet it is highly relevant outside these settings where the health of populations is at stake. The core competencies for ethics facilitation include “clarifying the ethics concern(s) and question(s) that need to be addressed, gathering relevant information, clarifying relevant concepts and related normative issues, helping involved parties to identify a range of ethically acceptable options, and providing an ethical justification for each option.”
Can you see it? Putin calling the Hastings Center and asking for a bioethics consultation before invading Ukraine. LOL.
Okay, time to be real. War is hell and an ever-present, brutal threat in this imperfect world. Preventing war requires military strength and the willingness to deploy it. In other words, the Iranian mullahs are not about to worry whether civilians will be able “to relate to nature; play and recreate” or “carry out a life plan, access education, and earn a living,” when deciding whether to attack Israel. They will compute the likely costs to Iran, and more particularly, to themselves.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called bioethicists. War is too serious and consequential an issue for such raging dilettantism.