Spectacular Bioethics: Guy Debord, the Society of the Spectacle, and the Odd Position of Modern Clinical Ethics Consultation
Martin Fitzgerald, The Ohio State University
Guy Debord wrote of modern society wherein images (understood in a broader sense than literal pictorial depiction) supplant relationships. The Spectacle, as he called it, reflects a society that has become deeply alienated from itself by the derealization of authentic human interaction. Although Debord had modern Capital in mind as he wrote his 1967 work *The Society of the Spectacle*, the insights from this work can help us in an unlikely area: the most recent iteration of the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities' (ASBH) *Core Competencies* outlines a vision of the modern bioethicist that can only be described as Spectacular in nature.
Modern clinical ethics consultants possess a series of unenviable task. Among them, they are to provide moral guidance, though never by directly guiding; they are to possess ethical expertise, though without ever being experts at ethics. How can such a delicate balance be maintained? For ASBH, I claim, the device to effect such an end comes in the strategic (and subtle) shift of focus from providing *justified* claims to providing *justifiable* claims. The clinical ethics consultant produces rationales for justifiability, but without ever directly endorsing what is justified. From where, then, does justifiability derive? To understand this question requires us to return to Debord.
ASBH declares readily and often that an ethics consultant ought never to let their own personal ethics inform their practice of ethics consultation. As a corollary, they do not ever directly endorse one particular course of action. Instead, they reference a series of claims that a professional clinical ethics consultant would find to be justifiable. Yet, there are no clinical ethics consultants who would actually endorse actions without in turn endorsing their own personal moral beliefs. Hence, we cannot be referencing even a particularly good clinical ethicist when we consider what is justifiable. What we have left, then, is clinical ethics as an enterprise of the Spectacle. The role exists as pure Spectacle insofar as the consultant is expected to act only as the image of herself, and never as herself as a concretely existing agent in the moral universe.
Modern clinical ethics consultants possess a series of unenviable task. Among them, they are to provide moral guidance, though never by directly guiding; they are to possess ethical expertise, though without ever being experts at ethics. How can such a delicate balance be maintained? For ASBH, I claim, the device to effect such an end comes in the strategic (and subtle) shift of focus from providing *justified* claims to providing *justifiable* claims. The clinical ethics consultant produces rationales for justifiability, but without ever directly endorsing what is justified. From where, then, does justifiability derive? To understand this question requires us to return to Debord.
ASBH declares readily and often that an ethics consultant ought never to let their own personal ethics inform their practice of ethics consultation. As a corollary, they do not ever directly endorse one particular course of action. Instead, they reference a series of claims that a professional clinical ethics consultant would find to be justifiable. Yet, there are no clinical ethics consultants who would actually endorse actions without in turn endorsing their own personal moral beliefs. Hence, we cannot be referencing even a particularly good clinical ethicist when we consider what is justifiable. What we have left, then, is clinical ethics as an enterprise of the Spectacle. The role exists as pure Spectacle insofar as the consultant is expected to act only as the image of herself, and never as herself as a concretely existing agent in the moral universe.