Ethics Is Not a Feeling — An Interview With Julian Savulescu

Today's newsletter is a little treasure in the vault of my career as a journalist: an interview with the philosopher Julian Savulescu, recorded in 2021 on the occasion of his lectio magistralis to nursing students at SUPSI, a Swiss university of applied sciences. Savulescu is known for being the ‘bad boy’ of practical ethics and by ‘bad boy’ I mean that he upholds views that contrast with our ethical intuitions or the general opinion. For example, he argues that parents have a moral obligation to select the best embryo when using assisted reproduction — what he calls «procreative beneficence.» He defends paying people for donating organs or blood, and allowing a market for kidneys. He supports research challenge studies in which healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with pathogens in exchange for financial compensation. And he believes that moral bioenhancement — improving our moral dispositions through drugs, gene editing, or other biological interventions — is not only permissible but something we should actively explore.

These are not provocations for épater la bourgeoisie. These are authentic ethical positions, backed by rational arguments. On procreative beneficence, Savulescu's reasoning starts from a premise most parents would accept: we want the best life possible for our children — so if we can reduce the probability of serious disease or suffering by selecting among embryos, why would we not? The argument for organ markets rests on a distinction between coercion — which removes options — and exploitation, which offers new ones: a poor person who sells a kidney is not being coerced but exercising a choice they wouldn't otherwise have, and the real question is whether the price is fair. On moral bioenhancement, the argument is almost Darwinian: our moral psychology evolved for small groups on the African savannah, not for a globalized world where a single individual can trigger a mass casualty event, so exploring biological tools to close that gap is at least worth serious consideration. So even if you don't agree with him — or maybe in particular if you don't agree with him — it's worth listening to his arguments: if they are good, you change your opinion to a better one; if they are limited or partial, you have a better understanding of your prior opinion.

«Ethics is like physics,» Savulescu said during the Q&A of his lecture. «In physics you have forces which can be represented as vectors — arrows with a direction and a strength. Which way the ball goes depends on all these different vectors. You sum them, you weigh them. In ethics, the vectors are reasons.» As I said, we were in 2021: not so long ago, but times are changing faster than ever, and I think we need a little bit of context. We were during the second or third phase of the COVID pandemic. There were still restrictions but no more full lockdowns. We had more accurate information on the transmission mechanism of the virus, a better understanding of how to treat patients and, above all, vaccines. But we also had doubts on how to better conduct the vaccine campaigns, which categories should be prioritized, and which vaccine types were more efficient and better suited for specific groups. And a growing distrust in health and political institutions, with a scattered, but never prevailing, doubt on vaccine safety and efficacy.

Savulescu started his lecture with the core ethical problem that the pandemic presented us with: how to distribute harm and benefit within a society? This problem did not start with COVID-19, but the pandemic presented it in an urgent and dramatic way. So what are the options? Savulescu identified three broad frameworks. Utilitarianism says we should maximize aggregate wellbeing: save the greatest number, give priority to those with better prognoses, take age and life expectancy into account. Egalitarianism, by contrast, treats all lives as equally valuable and holds that when resources are scarce, the only defensible procedure is a random one — a coin toss, with no preference for the young over the old or the healthy over the disabled. Prioritarianism takes a different angle: it gives extra weight to the worst-off, arguing that our moral obligations are stronger toward those in the most dire circumstances. None of these frameworks alone is sufficient. Savulescu's own proposal, based on the political philosopher John Rawls, is called collective reflective equilibrium: holding in tension ethical theories and principles on one side, and people's actual intuitions on the other — gathered through surveys, behavioral data, and large-scale experiments like the "Moral Machine" study, which collected the preferences of 40 million people on life-or-death decisions for autonomous vehicles. The task is not to simply follow intuitions — some are clearly biased or historically discredited — nor to apply theories in a vacuum, but to bring the two into dialogue, adjusting each in light of the other, seeking a coherent equilibrium. This approach is now deepened in an article published in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.

One interesting point that Savulescu stressed in his lecture is the abuse of ethics. In order to advance, humans need to improve their moral reasoning (maybe with some drugs or other enhancement, but leave this topic alone now). But what we saw during the pandemic — and we continue to see now — is an abuse of ethics for positioning purposes and to signal allegiance. The mayor of New York declared that «every life is of infinite value» — a statement that sounds morally unimpeachable, but if taken seriously would require spending infinite resources to save any single life, which obviously never happens. What the statement actually does is foreclose discussion. As Savulescu put it during the lecture, much of what passes for public ethics during a crisis is really social signaling: «a way of saying 'I am such a good person'» rather than an attempt to think carefully about difficult tradeoffs. We are reluctant to seriously discuss topics like the value of life, the allocation of vaccines, the balance between freedom and public health. There was instead, in his words, «no ethical discussion», but just a daily body count treated as the one morally relevant metric, with no attention to quality-adjusted life years, differential impact by age group, or lives lost as an indirect consequence of lockdowns.

What follows is an interview with Savulescu after the lecture — due to a glitch in the recording, I had to reconstruct my questions, which were lost, but the answers are reliably transcribed and lightly edited.