The Challenge of Defining Success in Bioethics' Humanist Wing

In "Reason and the Republic of Opinion," Leon Wieseltier bemoaned an age that reduces reason to utilitarian calculation and requires almost ritual genuflection before the altar of numbers. The spirit of this age is at work in the field of bioethics where, as Debra Mathews and colleagues point out in "A Conceptual Model for the Translation of Bioethics Research and Scholarship," researchers and scholars are increasingly "being asked to demonstrate and also forecast the value and impact of their work." Despite the reductionism that typically accompanies the movements imbued with this spirit, the concern for accountability that stands behind the call for measuring success is legitimate. The bioethics community is thus fortunate to have such a distinguished group of scholars wrestling with these matters. Indeed, the effort of Mathews et al. to articulate a framework for determining success in bioethics research and scholarship is especially admirable precisely because they resist the temptation to reduce success to quantitative measures alone. That said, it is also important to say that it is nearly impossible to engage with the task these scholars have set for themselves and not succumb to a kind of data fetishism. It is well and good to talk about the complexity of bioethics as a field, but the language of "metrics," "outputs," "feedback loops," "stakeholders," and the like is not the language of the disciplines of history, literature, philosophy, or religious studies-all fields that Mathews et al. rightly credit with making important contributions to bioethics research and scholarship.