Saletan, Scholarship, and Seriousness
November 21, 2005
The editors of the always entertaining Bioethics.net are having another apoplectic fit over William Saletan’s recent article in Slate. Saletan’s crime is that he has the audacity to point out that some advocates of embryonic stem cell research, such as Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University, lack moral seriousness. Anyone who has followed the debates over ESC research will not be suprised by Saletan’s point; a fact so obvious that even the AJOB cannot refute it. Indeed, they don’t even bother but choose instead to attack William Hurlbut.
Saletan’s portrayal of Hurlbut in his article isn’t exactly flattering. He potrays him as losing the upper hand in his discussion with Zoloth. “In TV terms, she was killing him,” says Saletan, “or at least he was killing himself.” But being portrayed in such a light is not enough. Hurlbut is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics yet the AJOB is frustrated that Saletan would even deign to be in the same room with such an ignoramus. They call Hurlbut’s ANT proposal “dopey†and refer to him as “a charlatan selling a snake oil science-based solution to the stem cell debate.†The fact that “perfectly respectable stem cell researchers are publishing wacky science in Nature in order to keep the dogs at bay†has the hysterical editors reaching for the smelling salts.
Whether Hurlbut’s proposal is an adequate solution remains to be seen. But instead of addressing the problems with his ideas they choose instead to attack his credentials:
Hurlbut, it should be restated in this regard, apparently has no training in ethics, and is not a stem cell researcher.
Hopefully the peer review process at the AJOB is more comprehensive than the review they do on their peers. The editors seems to have missed what can be found with a simple Google search: Hurlburt completed his postdoctoral studies in medical ethics at Stanford, the same university where he teaches biomedical ethics. Maybe someone should notify Stanford that one of their professors is considered unqualified to teach ethics.
Such ad hominem rants reek of desperation. But because the public is unlikely to accept the weak ethical arguments presented for embryonic stem cell research by the AJOB, they have no choice but to resort to such tactics. Because they can’t win on the force of their ideas they must marginalize anyone who has the hubris to question their morally dubious approach to bioethics.
“How can you be a morally serious tutor of bioethics if you don’t write in the field?†they ask, with an embarressing earnestness. “This the problem Saletan misses. It isn’t about trust, it’s about scholarship.â€
If Hurlbut were like ethicist Peter Singer and published journal articles claiming that killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person, could he then be considered a “morally serious tutor?†Is this really the standard by which bioethics should be judged? When the gatekeepers of a prestigious bioethics journal resort to such specious appeals as “scholarship†(i.e., whatever they’ve allowed to be published) then it is apparent that they have coopted as the measure for bioethics Richard Rorty’s standard of “truthâ€: whatever our peers will let us get away with saying.