The Place of Philosophy

I discovered bioethics by happenstance as a senior at Dartmouth. A restless anthropology major, just back from four months in Indonesia, I discovered that if I took one more religion course I wouldn't have to take another anthropology course. Standing in line to register, I saw an acquaintance, a hard-core religion major, who recommended Professor Green. "Take Religion 10 . . . any course with Green is fantastic. . . it doesn't matter what it's about," my friend told me. And so I came to take my first bioethics course with Ron Green.

During my first course in bioethics, something clicked for me. I had found questions that were important and worth thinking long and hard about. I was good at it. I found myself attending office hours and reading extra material. In retrospect, I think the timing was right. After three-and-one-half years of dabbling, of trying out as many new subjects, interests, and hobbies as I could, I was ready to be serious about something, to be committed enough to delve deeply and rigorously into a field of inquiry.

And here was a field that was invigorated with the energy of its newness. What I saw through the eyes of a 20-year-old was a set of questions that required skills of reflection, critical analysis, and imagination, as well as mastery of diverse kinds of knowledge: literary, cultural, historical, spiritual, and technological. Bioethics stands at crossroads in so many ways: it brings together expertise from a number of disciplines; it provides a space for reflection that allows us to transition from technologies of the past to technologies of the future; and it calls upon a tradition, not necessarily strong in this country, of the public intellectual. The field of bioethics satisfied my passion for the contemplative life, as well as my need to perform a public service. I agree with the idea that bioethics is a field created by technological innovation that forces us to rethink important questions about value. When we are bioethicists, we take the life of the intellectual and modify it for public service in order to answer questions that have become unsettled by technological changes.

My first year at Georgetown I was giddy with the delight of graduate school and completely in over my head. Later I discovered that every so often Georgetown takes a chance on a person like me, an anthropology major from Dartmouth with a postcollege bioethics internship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and no background in philosophy. When I entered Georgetown, I could not have told you the difference between metaphysics and epistemology. At the time all I cared about was becoming a bioethicist, and if the study of philosophy was a path toward that goal, then that is what I would study. Fortunately, Georgetown is committed to a rigorous and deep philosophical training for its bioethics graduate students and has an excellent faculty and library staff to support that commitment.

Eight years later, with the end of my dissertation in sight, I am proud that I am a philosopher. Although there is much that I have come to love about philosophy, I am particularly proud of two things that I can bring to bioethics as a philosopher. One, questions in bioethics are inescapably questions of value—of the relationship between the good and the right, of the goals of medicine, of the nature of the good life—and philosophy has a long and rich tradition of thinking through these questions. Two, philosophical training places considerable emphasis on the skills of critical analysis, which is an important set of skills to bring to the complex and very charged public debates that engage our country.

While committed to philosophy, I have never lost sight of the collaborative, multidisciplinary nature of bioethics. During the summers I have supplemented my philosophy training with internships. I spent one summer at the Bioethics Center (then Bioethics Program) at the NIH and two summers at the Genetics and Public...