Help me Rebrand!

I’m writing from the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Conference in St. Louis, where I just had barbecue at a blues jam.

While here, I’ve been called a “recovering philosopher” more than once, and while I have my quibbles, the charges aren’t entirely false. (More on that in a moment.)

But now that I’ve been a practicing bioethicist for all of two weeks…

what the heck am I even doing?!

Well, here’s what my current homepage says:

I study tradeoffs between incommensurable values in AI and Bioethics. When different kinds of goods are at stake, how can we articulate conflicts between them in more illuminating or insightful terms?

Here are some things I like about that summary:

• The technical term “incommensurable” links to my article on Robert Horry and Value Capture, which many of y’all apparently enjoyed. (It got 5 hearts after all, and no I’m definitely not paying too much attention to the stats, that would be value capture.)
  

• I manage to slip in the key technical term “articulate” in an almost natural way, although now that I say “articulate conflicts” out loud, no I don’t.
  

• The first sentence is short and sweet. The second one’s a question inviting you into my headspace. I think that’s an approachable format.
  

However, this intro blurb was definitely written with philosophers in mind. And now that I’m working in Bioethics—a deeply interdisciplinary field by nature—I’ve found that the number one question I get is:

“What would you say you *do* here?”

That’s really a question about methodology.

Am I an “unrecovered philosopher” who sits around in an armchair all day defining what counts as a “chair” or “informed consent” via pure reflection on my own concepts?

Well…hell no!

(I never really was.)

I’ve described my methodology to philosophers as “crypto-genealogy” and occasionally even “philosophical anthropology,” and I think those terms are both reasonably accurate.

But my God they’re obscure, even to other philosophers.

Shouldn’t I do better explaining my own work to a broader audience?

So, let’s start over.

Here are three commitments I have that structure the increasingly historical work I do.

I think our practices and values are:

1. Incommensurable We care about different kinds of practices+values.
   

2. Historically Contingent Our practices+values have shaped each other over time, and might have turned out very differently.
   

3. Demonstrably Improvable Our practices+values don’t just change arbitrarily; we can point to clear improvements or declines.

   
   

Together, these commitments invite a particular kind of historical reconstruction of what our practices and values have been, so we can see the conflicting forces and momentums within them now, and consider which developments could speak to those inner tensions in the future.

At this point, most folks have nodded and gone, yeah that makes sense and even sounds cool, but can you give an example?

And then I start talking about my dissertation, where I unearth the history of the philosophical term “well-being” since the 1980s. By uncritically equating well-being to the economic notion of “self-interest,” the philosophical literature inherited all the accompanying problems of thinking of my own utility as a quantity to be maximized. Blah blah blah, you’ve already seen me do a lot of this before.

So uh...how do I get there quicker?

Well, here’s my latest blurb draft, written in a whiskey bar.

(Bioethics conferences are fun.)

I’m not sure it beats the current blurb champion, but it’s on the right track:

I study ethical tradeoffs in AI and bioethics. When different kinds of goods are at stake, how can we frame conflicts between them in more illuminating or insightful terms? My approach is to reconstruct where our values and practices come from, and how they’ve shaped each other over time. By recognizing inherited tensions in our lives today, we can improve on our values and practices tomorrow.

Does that make sense?

Can we do better?!

Leave me a comment or shoot me an email!

My work about progress is still very much a work in progress.

Cheers,

Ricky