Bill Saletan has a review of a national bioethics convention that took place in Philadelphia on Friday in Slate this morning.
I had the very great pleasure of studying under Arthur Caplan in graduate school before he went to Penn and admire him and his work tremendously. His bioethics class was a real standout in my curriculum. He is really at the top of this game, and despite the tone of the article and the conference, I would hardly call Art Caplan "tame" as a promoter of liberal bioethics!
The Slate article reviews the keynote address by Mike Gazzaniga, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, and the author of a thought provoking book: The Ethical Brain. He wants to turn the field of bioethics into a Mobius strip that turns in on itself by promoting the argument that biology explains ethics, so ethics cannot judge manipulations of biology.
Fascinating stuff - I would have loved to attend.
UPDATE: Here's the second half of the Bill Saletan article on this conference, where he specifically reviews Art Caplan's keynote address "The Rights and Wrongs of Eugenics: What Can We Learn from the Past. The conference is all the more apt because it was held in the grand hall of the Philadelphia College of Physicians, which is also home to one of my favorite museums in the world - The Mutter Museum. I used to work about 2 blocks from the Mutter Museum and went there often. It's also a very popular place for health care related events and lectures in Philly, so it was also a bit of an occupational hazard. The juxtaposition of this lecture at that location speaks volumes.
(PS I hope blogger lets me post this!! - It's been cranky all day)
