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Yvain comments on Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people. - Less Wrong
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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.
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.