The Bioethics Scam

     As one who loves words and delights in their proper use, it offends me when words used to express important concepts are twisted away from their public meaning to serve a political agenda. For example, we’ve seen the word justice brutalized by the addition of one modifier after another, none of which have any relation to justice as it’s been understood since the Enlightenment. Similar violence has been perpetrated upon rights, a word equally critical to Western thought.

     The word to be rescued today is ethics.

     An ethic is a rule that specifies right and wrong conduct toward other people. It’s inherently a rule for individuals; it doesn’t change when they form groups. Right and wrong don’t shift for the group as a collective. Groups neither gain nor lose rights or ethical standards according to their size.

     So what does it mean to call a man a bioethicist? Does he acquire special powers to discern right and wrong when the subject is biology? What about medicine? Environmentalism, perhaps?

     “Bioethicists” have been hawking their positions about public policy for some time now. There was once a “bioethicist” named Daniel Callahan who advocated a kind of national medical triage. He argued for providing decreasing medical care to the elderly as they age, supposedly to free “medical resources” for the “needy.” Look him up; you might be surprised how much respect he’s received from “policy wonks.”

     And now we have this…person:

     S. Matthew Liao, a “bioethicist” with ties to the WEF: Humans should be genetically modified to induce an intolerance to meat, in order to solve “climate change”.

     “It turns out that we can use human engineering to help us address climate change… People eat too much meat, right? And if they were to cut down on their consumption of meat, it would actually really help the planet. But people are not willing to give up meat… We can use human engineering to make it the case that we’re intolerant to certain kinds of meat. That’s something that we can do through human engineering.”

     I’m sure he has lots of fans in the corridors of power.

     This is a sophisticated example of a game everyone can play. If you have some sort of preference that goes against the way people actually prefer to live, and you’d like to force it on the rest of us, just follow this simple procedure:

1. Acquire a credential of some sort.
2. Posture as an expert in some fictitious discipline, e.g. “bioethics” or “eco-management.”
3. Gather with other pseudo-experts in a serious-sounding “studies” group.
4. Publish “white papers” in BS-filled “journals.” For extra panache, hold speaking tours.
5. Wait for power-hungry mandarins to come to you.

     Trust me; you won’t have to wait long.