For those of you not enamored of bioethics, Arthur Caplan is easily the most prominent bioethicist in the country. Personally I can’t stand him because he’s so inconsistent — I think most bioethicists like to call it nonideological, but as far as I can tell there is no single ethical view that guides Caplan’s thinking. He, and most other bioethicists, tend to be moral pragmatists who make it up as they go along.
That being said, the family of an 18-year old man who died during from a genetic engineering experiment have sued Caplan in the sort of legal action that could only occur in the United States. Follow the bouncing ball here with me for a moment:
Researchers originally planned to do the experiments on fatally ill babies under the theory that the babies were going to die anyway, and even if the gene therapy didn’t work it wouldn’t likely worsen the babies conditions. Caplan stepped in and said no way. First, by definition the babies can’t consent, and second, the parents of babies with this particular genetic condition tend to be so grief stricken that they’ll grab at any chance and so they can’t really give consent (I agree with Caplan on the first part, but think the second part is the sort of noxious holier-than-thou moralizing common to the field).
So the researchers decided instead to only do the gene therapy experiments on consulting adults. Which brings us to the lawsuit. The lawsuit essentially claims that if Caplan had just kept his big mouth shut, the researchers would have used babies and there’s no way this 18-year-old would have ever agreed to be in the study, and as a result he wouldn’t have died. Therefore, Caplan is partially to blame for the young man’s death.
The amusing thing about the lawsuit is that the lawsuit essentially turns the tables on Caplan and argues that the 18-year-old couldn’t possibly have consented to the experiments. This is kind of fitting since Caplan and other bioethicists have done so much to undermine reasonable definitions of what it means to consent to a medical treatment.