The Merits of a General Education in Bioethics

Bioethics is by nature interdisciplinary. The ideal bioethics program should thus provide its students with a formation that is both general and extensive enough to render its students fluent in each of bioethics' core disciplines. Yet, as I shall discuss below, it is not clear that this ideal can easily be met when one studies bioethics from within just one of these core disciplines.

My own graduate bioethics education has involved training from two different institutions. The first, McGill University, offers a program that is multidisciplinary by design. Its faculty consist of a doctor, lawyer, philosopher, and religious-studies professor, and its students are enrolled in either the school of medicine, the school of law, the department of philosophy, or the religious-studies department, and then cross-enrolled in the Biomedical Ethics Unit. Two of the three courses that students take each semester are dictated by the bioethics program, and the third is dictated by the home department. The bioethics courses include a clinical practicum, health law for bioethics students, basic principles of medicine for nonmedical students, and bioethical theory.

The second institution from which I received graduate training in bioethics was the philosophy department at Georgetown University. While the faculty there included some of the most eminent bioethicists from whom one could hope to learn, many of the students who entered the program with interests in bioethics abandoned these by the end of their first year. Bald speculation about the reasons for this shift yields the following: Philosophy departments seem to want to first ground their bioethics students in philosophical theory before the students turn the greater part of their attention to practical matters. On this conception of the appropriate way to proceed, it would be premature to confront, for example, the issue of organ transplantation without first arriving at a conception of distributive justice. Likewise one could determine the moral authority of a living will only after one has developed a coherent conception of personal identity.

To be sure, I have no objection to training philosophers in this way. Indeed, my peers at Georgetown prove that a department can turn out excellent philosophers when it provides students with as solid a grounding in philosophy as Georgetown's philosophy department does. It is not clear, however, that this sort of training can nurture a sustained interest in bioethics. If philosophy students come to adopt the notion that the respectable way to pursue bioethics is as a mere application of the results of deeper philosophical inquiries, then the bioethical questions become secondary; it is the more foundational questions of philosophy that are taken to really require the student's attention.

In cleaving to this way of proceeding, however, the philosophy student with an interest in bioethics can easily get caught up in the tantalizing questions that philosophical theory already presents. And, the more ensconced in theory he or she becomes, the less urgently the practical problems that motivated his or her initial interest in philosophy press. So it is, I believe, that bioethics loses many of its potential thinkers to the more theoretical regions of philosophy.

Even for the student who does retain an interest in bioethics, there is no reason to think that pursuing that interest with the philosopher's skill set will allow the product of his or her work to have any currency in bioethics' other core disciplines. Indeed, my own experiences in hospital settings, philosophy departments, and now law school lead me to believe that this is true not only for the philosopher-bioethicist who wishes his or her work to have significance for lawyers, chaplains, and clinicians but also, say, for the lawyer- or physician-bioethicist who wishes to find an audience outside of his or her field. The different disciplines from which to pursue bioethics have different conditions of legitimacy. What counts as work with merit in one field might be irrelevant, even denigrated, in another. As a result, bioethicists who have adopted the norms and values of just one discipline may fail to appreciate, or even be suspicious of, the work of bioethicists in the others. Thus, to...