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steven0461 comments on Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people. - Less Wrong
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I don't understand -- are you claiming that scientists are people and therefore they're as much experts on ethics as anyone? Current bioethicists may suck, but the idea of having some people specialize at bioethics seems sound.
Yes. Actually, I would say scientists are better ethicists in their area of expertise, because
moral reasoning is reasoning, and smarter people are better at reasoning
they know what the heck they're talking about.
Can you specialize in ethics? Or is it like - to use the ever-popular reason-as-martial-arts metaphor - like specializing in kata? You sometimes see schools that strongly emphasize kata. IMHO their kata is weak, because they don't understand the purpose of their movements. To answer to this question, you need to ask whether moral reasoning within a domain is qualitatively different from any other kind of reasoning in a domain.
Perhaps if our debates on ethics used esoteric concepts from category theory and the writings of German philosophers, it would be of some benefit to specialize in ethics. But they have never risen to that level.
Philosophers are pretty smart.
Philosophers are pretty smart.
They get good scores on IQ tests. But in terms of dealing with reality, and producing real knowledge, they're incredibly dumb.
High INT, low WIS.
Generalizations, ahoy! That being said,
And sometimes way-too-high CHA. If you're naive and looking for wisdom, it's too easy to listen to someone talking nonsense about philosophy and be completely taken in. Witness the success of the irritatingly wrong postmodern thinking which holds that science is just another cultural opinion with no more validity than any other. If that were true then transistors would work about as well as rain dances or ancient Hindu theurgy, and yet people continue to spread the meme.
If they were that smart they would be avoiding politics; then again, maybe the smart ones are and that's why the gov't ethicists seem so incredibly dumb.
Scientific training is specifically training in reasoning to a much greater extent than is, say, political training. Smarter people are better than dumber people at reasoning on average, but the advantage of scientists over politicians is less that they are smarter (they are, but only modestly) than that they are selected for and trained in reasoning well while politicians are selected for and trained in reasoning poorly.
I would trust someone who understood and could use utilitarianism to solve ethical issues better than someone who didn't. Of course, modern bioethicists don't, so this is hardly a point in their favor. But I think in a perfect world people could specialize in ethics and gain unusual competence in that field.
The one real worry I have about scientists is that they're too personally invested. I wouldn't trust the guy who'd spent ten years of his life inventing a stem cell technique to determine when the technique probably shouldn't be used because of ethical issues. And I think that carries over to entire fields; biologists, in general, will have an personal investment in biological discoveries.
Optimal solution is smart people with scientific training specializing in utilitarian ethics. In our own world, I trust scientists about as much as anyone else, maybe a little more.
I have this same worry about a lot of bioethicists. Their whole shtick is telling scientists what they are and aren't allowed to do, and getting public support for their own actions. That's a recipe for fearmongering and being more restrictive than they should be in order to justify their own existence.
Obviously there are ethical decisions to be made in the field of biology, and it would probably be nice to have people who specialize in hashing out those issues, but the way the system is being set up seems dangerously dependent on -- and compliant to -- unfounded public fears.