The New Clergy

#### "Avoiding Moral Choices" by Gordon Marino, in Commonweal (Mar. 23, 2001), 475 Riverside Dr., Rm. 405, New York, N.Y. 10115.

About 30 years ago, a stranger began to appear at the bedside of the sick: the bioethicist. Today, America swarms with ethics experts, thousands of them, dispensing their putative wisdom not only in medicine but in business, law, engineering, sports, and other fields. But do these secular specialists really know much more than the rest of us about right and wrong? Marino, a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, is doubtful.

Most professional ethicists are lawyers or doctors of philosophy who have studied ethical theory and its application to concrete situations in the professions. They "may have extraordinary acumen in the dissection of moral problems," Marino acknowledges. But their moral reasoning, just like that of nonexperts, "is based on assumptions that, in the end, cannot be justified against competing assumptions." Ultimately, "we are all flying by the seat of our moral pants."

Given even a common, straightforward problem, ethics experts often disagree, he points out. In a Journal of Clinical Ethics study, 144 ethicists were asked whether life support should be removed from a patient in a vegetative state. Their answers were "all over the board," Marino says. So how expert can they really be? Many ethicists would respond that certain other fields, such as economics, also are rife with disagreement. But at least economic theories generate predictions, Marino observes, which then "either confirm or deny the theories. It is hard to fathom what consequences would confirm a bioethicist’s recommendations for stemcell research."

One thing that ethicists do agree upon is that they should be relatively disinterested parties with respect to the issues and cases they handle. But instead, Marino asserts, they "are often in the pockets of the hospitals and corporations that employ them." The market for ethicists is small, he notes, and ethics consultants who continually arrive at inconvenient conclusions may find their career prospects limited.

Though in many cases their advice is no more than common sense, professional ethicists "have done some good," Marino believes. "In the medical field, [they] have made sure that people undergoing surgery or participating in experiments give their informed consent," and most businesses that employ ethicists "are, ethically speaking, better off for their presence."

Nevertheless, Marino warns, the rise of the ethicists as "the new clergy" poses this danger: that the rest of us, taking the easy way out, will avoid moral decisions and issues on the excuse that they are too complicated and best left to the "experts." Unfortunately, he says, there aren’t any.