TY - JOUR
AU - Beauchamp, Tom, L
AB - Abstract This autobiographical sketch is being published 50 years after I started as an assistant professor at Georgetown University in 1970. In this presentation, I cannot tell the full story of these 50 years. I write only about the formative years both before and after I was hired at Georgetown, and I emphasize two subjects. The first is the importance of the individuals who were massive influences on my intellectual development and aspirations. The second is the great importance of multidisciplinary work. I came from philosophy, a discipline that generally did not emphasize or particularly value multidisciplinary work, but I was transformed by individuals in other disciplines who directed me to this style of work. Almost sheer luck brought each of these influences into my life. Beauchamp and Childress, bioethics, principlism I. SALVAGING SOMETHING FROM A POOR EDUCATION IN DALLAS PUBLIC SCHOOLS As a youth, I was the product of mediocre schools in the Dallas Independent School District. I received better grades than most of my classmates, because I figured out how to do just what the teacher said to do. I mastered that skill, but I lacked passion about learning. I was simply first-rate at getting good grades, which I saw as a kind of game and competition more than a valuable learning experience. However, around the time I turned 16 years old, upon the gift of an older friend, I read Alan Paton’s (1948) wonderful novel Cry, the Beloved Country. This book about South Africa—in its state immediately prior to the enactment of apartheid rule—had a powerful and haunting effect on me. Even now, after 50 years of reading and doing academic work in philosophy and multidisciplinary research, no book has ever had such an immediate transformative influence as did Paton’s. He took me from an inattentive acceptance of a ridiculously twisted view of the social world to an uncompromising rejection of that world. As I read his descriptions of the deeply segregated society of South Africa, which was then on a steep slope toward an even deeper segregation under apartheid, I thought in passage after passage about my own town, Dallas, where I was living when I read the book. In Dallas, it was not merely the schools, but—like South Africa—the restaurants, city buses, most religious houses of worship, and virtually every significant institution in the city—not to mention the innumerable underlying cultural convictions of white supremacy—that supported a then rarely discussed visceral racism. Paton’s book was written, he reported, to show the world (including Afrikaners and those of British descent in South Africa) about the destructive forces of colonial rule and segregation. He showed me, in inescapable terms, the wrongs of the racism at the core of the beliefs of the culture in which I had been raised and was still living. Paton’s vivid descriptions of the culture of South Africa would lead me step by step to see my own culture as deeply morally flawed, and in the course of reading this book I became a quite different person in the way I made moral and social judgments. When I finished reading this book, I was angry and filled with questions to which I wanted answers. I then began to search for answers as to why things were as they were and what, if anything, could be done to remedy the situation. I became a very serious and socially critical young man, perhaps overly serious, as one of my high school teachers would assess me. But, this point also marks where I began to live a life of learning in contrast to a life of getting good grades in school, and it was clearly the beginning of my lifelong interest in addressing practical moral problems. Many years later, I would read Gunnar Myrdal’s magnificent 1944 book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a powerful study of the pervasive and visceral racial prejudice in America at large, which Myrdal (1944) assessed as directly in conflict with America’s professed ideals—a conclusion in which I concur. I had no one to guide me to this book in my youth, though the book had already answered many of my questions that arose when I was reading Paton and reacting to Dallas society. When I was 16, I did not know of such a resource, so I would more or less set off on my own to get answers to my questions. When I later read Myrdal’s book, I wondered how I could have been so morally blind as to miss what he had laid open in a most careful scholarly manner in 1944. I think my situation in 1957–58, as I was completing high school, was a good case of a young student deeply in need of a mentor like Myrdal to talk to about what I had come to question—and deeply to resent—after reading Paton, but I did not have a mentor, and such matters were not taught in school or even tolerated in classroom discussions. None of my friends or teachers had any interest in the subject. For the most part, my acquaintances had a simple answer to moral problems of a segregated society: “That’s just the way it is.” My parents were of the same opinion. II. MY UNDERGRADUATE YEARS This situation would change for the better when I enrolled as a freshman at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in the fall of 1958. I was shocked to discover soon after I arrived on campus that SMU was, by policy, a racially segregated university. The Perkins School of Theology at SMU was among the first schools in the South to integrate in fall 1952, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954; Watson, 2013), but the SMU Board of Trustees was too fearful of social rage to follow the path of its most progressive school and so failed to integrate for another two decades. It was my good luck in my freshman year to find a marvelous group of young people who were like-minded about the evils of segregation. We were incredibly different, but we were all resolutely serious about the evils of segregation. This group of youthful and idealistic young students—largely freshmen—were socially and intellectually crucial for me in my undergraduate college experience. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important the experiences with my fellow students were as we debated and learned from each other and planned and conducted sit-ins at segregated Dallas establishments. These experiences might be likened to a seminar in the justification of civil disobedience—a real-life seminar with possible consequences such as arrest and even expulsion from the university, where we also held sit-ins in a vice-president’s office. We thought carefully about the justification of our actions. A number of students dropped out in the process, thinking the contemplated sit-ins either were not justified or exceeded the risks they were willing to take. We were never very successful in sit-ins in Dallas at large. Dallas city officials were too smart to be a Birmingham or a Little Rock. The Mayor and his City Council ruled the city with a firm hand. I know well how it was done, because my father was one of the 12 members of the Dallas City Council and a close acquaintance of the Mayor. I watched with my father the dramatic television reporting of the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, which was something of a test of the power of Brown v. Board of Education being conducted by then President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his dramatic conflict with Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas. I was riveted to the television—could not be pulled away, even though I had never previously been attracted to television other than for NFL football. My father had been a strong supporter of Eisenhower as President, but he was appalled at what Ike was doing in Little Rock. He and I were on totally opposite sides of the looming battles over civil rights. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had written to President Eisenhower to urge intervention, was a hero to me. To my father, he was a common criminal because of his activities of civil disobedience. Cry, the Beloved Country and the depiction of racism on display in the television reports of the Little Rock case are without doubt the best examples of early influences that led to my interest in, and ultimately my scholarly pursuit of, practical ethics. The values and commitments I picked up from these experiences would play a major role in the fields of learning I would choose and eventually would extend to what I would teach students of philosophy and publish in practical ethics. III. PHILOSOPHY OR RELIGIOUS STUDIES? By the time I was a second-semester junior at SMU, I was seriously considering applying to graduate school in philosophy, which I had found overall to be the most challenging and interesting of the fields of learning that I had experienced. However, I had some reservations about philosophy, in particular its literature in ethics. Ethics has enjoyed a glorious history in philosophy, but it had become heavily preoccupied with issues in meta-ethics such as the meaning of the word “good.” Though I found metaethics engaging, I was much more interested in practical ethics—an area that had no name in philosophy or teachers in universities. At the time, I could find not even a whiff of interest in practical ethics in philosophy. My professors certainly had no interest in it. This situation was distressing to me, especially when I compared philosophy to religious studies, a field that exhibited a considerable interest in practical ethics and had spawned leaders in the activist side of practical ethics including Martin Luther King, Jr., and William Sloane Coffin, the Chaplain at Yale, a leading figure in the civil rights movement, and an inspiration on many college campuses to idealistic students, including me. (My roommate and I were denounced in print by the editor of the student newspaper as “pinko commies”; but we got that editor removed from office by a faculty oversight committee because he had lied about his credentials in his application for the position of editor.) I believed then, as today, that training in philosophy well suits one to deal seriously with practical ethics and that there is something very wrong about practical ethics having been marginalized to the periphery of philosophy throughout most of the twentieth century. Critical ethical issues such as discrimination, poverty, inequality, social justice, racial conflict, affirmative action, ethics, and public policy and the like are a natural for philosophical examination, but the problem at the time was that most philosophers, with rare exceptions, were not professionally interested in such problems. Indeed, they were rather skeptical of the idea that serious philosophical examination of them could be achieved. For this reason, I found religious studies overall a more engaging and attractive field than philosophy. A second reason why I was more attracted to religious studies than philosophy was that I found the Perkins School of Theology at SMU quite an exciting place to take courses. Two professors there—Schubert Ogden and Van Harvey—were highly influential in my education and also in my thinking about graduate studies. They were by far the best professors I had as an undergraduate. I had to fight for days with Deans and Registrars to allow me to take their courses, which were graduate courses closed to undergraduates. I prevailed, and the victory turned out to be immensely important for my education. These two men truly helped me grow up intellectually. I decided to forgo graduate school in philosophy. I had discovered a program sponsored by the Yale Divinity School that seemed almost designed for me. The School had a special track entitled “teaching and research in religion” that allowed open access to courses in several disciplines, including philosophy, in the Yale Graduate School. So, off I went to Yale, where I started to develop a more scholarly disposition and set of skills, philosophical and otherwise. IV. MY GRADUATE SCHOOL YEARS: YALE AND JOHNS HOPKINS My years at Yale were a wonderful experience that included exposure to a number of fields. In religious studies itself, I was in the end most influenced by Robert Lowry Calhoun because of his interests in philosophical theology, which were closely aligned with my own interests. It helped that he had a brilliant mind that he put to work in the classroom in both history and philosophy, which had made him a superstar from the perspective of his graduate students. I also greatly profited from several courses with Robert Brumbaugh, a Greek philosophy scholar who instilled in me a deep love of Plato, despite my thin preparation in Greek. Yale had a disorderly and discontented philosophy department, but I profited from my studies there in philosophy and ultimately concluded that, despite my prior misgivings about some parts of philosophical ethics, I had to be a philosopher. So, I graduated from Yale and went to the Johns Hopkins University for a PhD in philosophy. V. RESEARCH ON DAVID HUME’S PHILOSOPHY I loved everything about Hopkins. It had just the right small seminar environment and a wonderful set of graduate students, virtually all of whom became good friends. I there formed a particularly close friendship with fellow student Alex Rosenberg, with whom I became immersed in discussion of theories of causation. Eventually, we determined to write a book with the goal of providing a new theory of, and defense of, David Hume’s celebrated theory of causation. Alex and I finished our time at Hopkins in 1970, and in 1971 we began work on this book, which would be the most demanding and exhausting philosophical work I would ever do. It is hard to explain why it was so demanding, and I want to avoid tedious philosophical matters here, so I will say only that this work with Alex was a great learning experience in teamwork. Neither of us could have written this book by ourselves, but together we completed what I regard as a compelling and creative work that engages some basic issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and history of modern philosophy. After 10 years of labor, our book was published in 1981 as Hume and the Problem of Causation (Beauchamp and Rosenberg, 1981). Writing this book unquestionably made me a better philosopher. While drafting the causation book, I would in 1975 meet David Fate Norton, a professor of philosophy at McGill University specializing in Hume’s philosophy. We hit it off immediately and quickly discovered that we shared a deep concern about the sloppy state of the editing of and the historical and philosophical commentary by the editors in the standard published writings of Hume. We assessed the work as editorially and philosophically scandalous. We agreed that 200 years of poor textual editing and historical scholarship in these standard works had to be completely redone, starting from scratch and using only Hume’s original publications in London and Edinburgh. After sober reflection on what would be an enormous commitment of time, we submitted a successful grant to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for funding to support what we knew would be extraordinarily expensive research with the goal of producing a critical edition of all of Hume’s philosophical (but not his historical) writings. One of the NEH reviewers praised the project, but appended a final sentence to the review about me, saying “What in the world is a talented young philosopher doing in committing himself to this mammoth editorial project?”—implying that it was an act of professional suicide. It was a good question, but Norton and I proceeded forward anyway, and I have never looked back on this decision. Today, over 40 years after planning the edition with David, I am still at work on the final of the five volumes I agreed to edit. As a learning experience, I have never worked on a project in which I had to both locate (often in far distant rare books libraries) and consume so much information, in this case about the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the critical editing of Hume’s writings. Nevertheless, it has been worth everything I have put into it. David and I were aware that this work could never be done with accuracy without a computer program capable of collating the variants across the many editions of Hume’s books written after his A Treatise of Human Nature. I tried to find people who could write a sophisticated program and contracted with one person who said he could and would write the program for $2,000. Four weeks later he called me and said “It’s too difficult. I can’t pull it off.” I then looked for a year or so to find someone who could write the program, but everyone I contacted thought it was too difficult. This was an academic crisis for David and me. No computer collation program meant no chance to complete our work efficiently and accurately. I was miraculously rescued when I unexpectedly received a letter from Peter Robinson at the Oxford Computing Centre of Oxford University. Fantastic good luck. Peter had heard of our plans for the Hume project and wondered if we would be interested in a still untested collation program he had written. Peter and I would soon meet in DC, where he said, “Here’s the deal: I’ll give you the program for free if you will test it with your electronic texts.” Sets of electronic texts for all of the editions of classic works were rare in those days, but I had already prepared them for our edition of Hume. So, it took about 5 minutes for Peter and me to agree to use his collation program. His program worked perfectly, and a major crisis was thereby averted by this massive godsend. My two projects on Hume’s philosophy were arguably the beginnings of what would come to be my abiding commitment throughout my career to collaborative work. For that story, I push on to my other experiences in the 1970s. VI CONNECTING ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY My future fell into place, piece by piece, during the 1970s. These years were unquestionably the foundational years of almost everything of foremost importance in my career, especially in biomedical ethics. The first course I requested to teach at Georgetown in 1970 I titled “Freedom and Dissent.” This course would allow me to teach a meaningful course in practical ethics, which I had not seen in any form in a philosophy department in any of the three universities I had attended, and which did not exist except in a few unusual philosophy departments. Under this title, I taught classic philosophical works such as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and then brought the works to bear on contemporary social and policy issues of liberty, dissent, civil disobedience, political protests and their perils, racial discrimination, affirmative action, just wars, paternalism, and the like. Protests against the Vietnam War on college campuses and beyond were still widespread at the time, including on the Georgetown campus. So, my course title attracted a great many students, a fact my Dean liked but that did not for years lead to any interest in practical ethics elsewhere in my department. The idea of practical philosophical ethics simply had no standing there. In early 1971, I took various ideas from this course to the planning stages of a book that I proposed to edit called Ethics and Public Policy. The goal was to create the first book that was clearly practical ethics with philosophically serious work. I sold this idea to a publisher and signed a contract. Then, in late 1971, a book of articles would arrive on my desk edited by a young professor at New York University named James Rachels. It bore the simple title Moral Problems (Rachels, 1971). Rachels had beat me to the punch, and his book was beautifully done. He would later become a friend and one of the people I have most admired during my career. Rachels and I clearly saw eye to eye about the ways in which philosophy needed to expand its conception of ethics. Although my book was published 2 years after his, I was not disheartened by finishing in second place. I appreciated how good Rachels’ book was, and I learned from it. I said to myself at the time “Here is a philosopher who gets it”—the first philosopher I had ever seen who gets it with clarity of vision and deep philosophical skill. I have no doubt that in the 1970s, Rachels proved himself to be the most able practical ethicist that philosophy had yet to see. My boundless admiration for him is worth reporting here because of the way he both influenced me and comforted me about the importance of philosophy in practical ethics. The only other philosopher to exert a powerful influence on me in the area of practical ethics during the 1970s was my friend Joel Feinberg, whose social and political philosophy often fell into the territory of practical ethics and was brought to an impressive and systematic work in social philosophy and practical ethics in the 1980s in his four-volume The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (1984–1990). It deserves status as a classic of practical ethics if that general field has classics. Around the time I finished my Ethics and Public Policy book, I would, in rapid succession, meet a number of truly extraordinary people who would deeply influence me and give me a boost to my career, help me grow as a scholar, protect me from being fired by the senior members of my department, and introduce me to fields of learning other than philosophy. The 6 years between 1973 and 1979 would be by far the fastest learning curve of my life, taking me into new territories of learning that I had never visited before or imagined might be a part of my career. VII ANDRÉ HELLEGERS AND MY UNANTICIPATED TURN TO BIOMEDICAL ETHICS It all began when my friend and colleague LeRoy Walters introduced me to André Hellegers, a physician at our medical school who had recently started the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. André would become a mentor and, in the end, a phenomenal influence on me in several ways. As it happened, André and I both worked in our offices on Saturdays, so we took to having lunch. Eventually, I realized that André was recruiting me to be a faculty member in his new Institute. André was a salesperson—as good as I have seen in the academy. He was selling me on the importance of bioethics and its future. One day he impressed me by saying, “I tell you, Tom, physicians have no idea about what is on the horizon of ethical issues in medicine.” André taught me a great deal in our discussions about moral problems in medicine and did so with a deep passion and conviction about the need for bioethics. He pulled me into his world and captured my imagination. André had this interesting view that he did not have the answers to these problems, being a mere physician, but he thought people well trained in ethics should be able to figure out the answers. Little did he know that a trained moral philosopher can do more to confuse and puzzle you than to solve your problems. André soon said he wanted to make me an offer of an office overlooking the Potomac River, a secretary, and research assistants—no additional salary, which I stupidly did not request. At the time I had a dingy office with no windows in the basement of the university library and no support staff, so André’s offer was too attractive to resist, and I accepted it—one of the best decisions I ever made. André was a person with presence and a natural leader. I learned quickly from him not only about how to develop what truly was a new field, but about leadership, mentoring, and vision in a university. He was the right person at the right time for me, and it was just luck to have been introduced to him in the first place. He was another transformative person in my career—turning me in a new direction in my already formed interests in practical philosophy to the new field of bioethics. André would soon introduce me to a young professor in the law school named Judy Areen, who would later become Dean of our law school. He packaged the three of us to speak together to various university audiences on the problem of abortion immediately in the aftermath of the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, which André could see was destined for massive moral and legal controversy. Introducing me to Judy was a gift, but the biggest gift was how much I learned from the two of them about the legal and medical aspects of the abortion problem. So it would go in my relationship with André until his untimely death at age 52 in 1979. VIII. JIM CHILDRESS AND PRINCIPLES OF BIOMEDICAL ETHICS André made another gift to me in 1975 by appointing a young scholar named James Childress to a research chair at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Jim and I had been fellow graduate students at Yale. Now together again at Georgetown, we quickly began to recover a decade of separation by discussing our interests in ethical theories. At first, we thought we had views that were irreconcilably separated by the then much discussed partition between consequentialist and deontological theories. I was more consequentialist and Jim more deontological, but then we began teaching together in the Kennedy Institute’s Intensive Bioethics Course where we found that, in the area of moral principles of central importance to bioethics, we had substantially similar points of view that might find their way to a book about a framework of principles for biomedical ethics. In those days, the few works to be found in bioethics centered on practical moral problems such as abortion, with little attention paid to something like a moral framework of principles, virtues, and rights. Jim and I set out to write precisely such a book, and in 1976—at the invitation of Medical Editor Jeffrey House of Oxford University Press in New York, who had met with us in DC about the book—we submitted a proposal. The proposal was accepted and a book contract issued in record time because Jeff had become enthusiastic about our conception of the book. Since we already had a good beginning of the book in lectures we had given, we started writing chapters right away. The writing of Principles of Biomedical Ethics (Beauchamp and Childress, 1979 first edition; 2019 eighth edition) and subsequent work on seven revised editions over the course of 40 years (the eighth edition is being prepared at the typesetters for OUP as I write this article) have been a great pleasure and source of new knowledge for me, especially in clinical ethics, biomedical research, and public policy. Principles is the most influential book I ever published, and of course it is the teamwork with Jim that has made it so successful throughout the 40 years of our writing and revising it. As we drafted and later revised the book, I increasingly came to respect the virtues and skills of this unrufflable, sweet, esteemed man whom I have so enjoyed as a coauthor. His well-balanced judgments and reconstructions of my sometimes overly aggressive ideas have been crucial to the success of Principles. In the early years, Jim and I educated each other in the then almost nonexistent area of ethical theory and bioethics. I give him tremendous credit for the success of our book and the various joint awards that have come our way as a result of it. IX. THE BELMONT REPORT AND PATRICIA KING AT THE NATIONAL COMMISSION The process of Jim’s appointment at Georgetown and our start in writing Principles occurred in exactly the same period of time in 1975–76 when I became a consultant to, and then staff member for, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. I there drafted The Belmont Report for the National Commission (Belmont Report 1978). This drafting was done at exactly the same time Jim and I were drafting Principles, and the drafting of the one would deeply influence the drafting of the other in areas of research ethics and general principles. Formally, I was hired at the National Commission by Staff Director Michael Yesley, but he would have had the approval of key commissioners. On my second day on the job, Yesley brought me a book so large it was difficult to carry under his arm. He said, “There is only one required reading in this job, and it’s this,” handing the book over to me. The book was edited by distinguished Professor of Law, Medicine, and Psychoanalysis at the Yale Law School, Jay Katz, with the support of two associates, Alexander Capron and Eleanor Swift Glass. The title was Experimentation with Human Beings, published in 1972. This book would be my constant companion and guide in my new position, all 1,208 pages of it. At first, I was mildly surprised that there were no philosophers in these pages. As I came to grips with the material on research ethics, I appreciated that philosophers had made no contribution to this literature. In the end, this book would teach me what bioethics in the area of human-subjects research could be and why it had to be multidisciplinary, ranging across innumerable fields of learning. Jay Katz would occasionally call me at the National Commission with questions about what we were doing and almost always had a question about the role we were giving to the principle of respect for autonomy. Jay would always let me know when he detected a shortcoming. Having given me the book, Yesley said, “Using this book as background, I want you to draft for us a monograph that we are required by a public law to write. We call it ‘the Belmont Paper,’ and I am assigning you to write the moral principles part of this work, which will be the bulk of it.” I asked, “What’s the content of these principles,” to which he responded, “I think that’s for you to figure out.” No one in my interviews had ever mentioned this nebulous thing called a Belmont Paper, which it turned out had no drafted conceptions, no notes on a retreat that had been held on the subject, etc. I thought I had been hired to work on really exciting stuff such as research on children, research on prisoners, and psychosurgery—all of which the Commission then had under active consideration. Instead, I was to write on something no one at the Commission had any conception of or had thought about for several months. One of the commissioners (one of only 11 appointed to this commission), who had already been serving since 1974, was Patricia King, my friend and colleague at the Georgetown Law School. Feeling uncertain about this Belmont project, I called Pat and asked “Can you tell me about this Belmont Paper?” A dinner meeting was quickly arranged. At this point I would become a learner from a master teacher. Patricia, with her impressive wisdom and knowledge, would teach me about public policy as well as federal agencies such as NIH and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (its name at the time), about which I then knew virtually nothing. She also explained how the Belmont Paper—only later to become The Belmont Report—might turn out to be a critically important document for the National Commission because it was directly and prominently mandated by the U.S. Congress that it be written. I then felt much better about my assignment to write this report. For months thereafter, Patricia would continue to tutor me in legal and ethical aspects of public policy and would become one of the best friends I have ever had. I still believe she is the wisest person about ethics and public policy I have ever encountered. I had been advised by colleagues in my philosophy department not to take the position offered to me at the National Commission on grounds that it would be a distraction from my research, but in the end the work at the Commission enhanced and improved my research and significantly expanded my knowledge of research ethics. This position exposed me to many superb minds in bioethics, gave me a knowledge of the history and frontiers of research ethics, and in general gave me the right path to what I was later able to achieve in bioethics. My colleagues’ advice was just wrong. X RUTH FADEN’S INDELIBLE INFLUENCE Earlier I mentioned André Hellegers’ several gifts to me, including my friends Judy Areen and Jim Childress. As history would have it, in the same period of 1976 I have been discussing, André would introduce me to the person who has been the greatest influence throughout my life, both personally and academically: Ruth Faden of the Johns Hopkins University. She would come into my life in 1976 when André invited her to a week-long course we were teaching at the Kennedy Institute when she graduated with her PhD at Berkeley and started her career at Hopkins. Later, after seeing Ruth’s huge promise, André made an arrangement with her and Johns Hopkins to give her a part-time faculty position at the Kennedy Institute, and she came as a visiting scholar one day a week for many years. We spent countless days in long conversations. Early in getting to know Ruth, we discovered that we both had a deep interest in issues of informed consent, a subject barely under serious consideration at the time in ethics literature. Ruth and I soon wrote a successful grant application to the National Library of Medicine to write a book on A History and Theory of Informed Consent (Faden and Beauchamp, 1986). Little was published about the history (except, arguably, the history in American law), and no theory of the subject was available other than legal theories, which we would argue in the book are poorly suited for both clinical ethics and research ethics. The grant was awarded in 1979. Ruth and I commenced writing just as Jim Childress and I were celebrating the publication of Principles of Biomedical Ethics and just as Alex Rosenberg and I finished the final drafting of all of the chapters for Hume and the Problem of Causation. I had found a new project and another superb coauthor. Ruth and I were committed to writing a comprehensive book about informed consent, but we were concerned about our lack of training in law and medicine. So, we decided to hire a young physician, Bettina Schöne-Seifert, and a young lawyer, Nancy M. P. King, as research assistants and consultants and enter into serious discussion with them about our information gaps. This hiring done and the book well on its way, Ruth and I also decided to find a time to get married, which we did in March 1980. And then, we decided to have long weekly meetings at our home with our research assistants and colleagues. I soon came to appreciate Ruth as a natural and truly brilliant leader of a team engaging in multidisciplinary work. I do not have this talent and was awed by what this 30-year-old phenomenon could absorb and pull together in reading the literature of multiple disciplines, while creating terrific ideas through intense dialogue. To this day, she is the best I have ever seen at this sort of academic work. She is simply peerless. As a footnote to this account of Ruth’s impact on me, we were married for over 30 years before we fortuitously discovered during a symposium in a national meeting of PRIM&R (Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research), in a symposium at the Washington National Harbor, that we shared an important assessment when a question was put to us from a member of the audience: Who has been the person who has done the most to advance each of you in your careers and make it possible to achieve what you have been able to achieve in bioethics? To our surprise, we independently answered by naming the same person: André Hellegers. He is such a great example of a person of leadership and vision who could summon a genuine interest in young faculty and then take steps to advance their careers. What amazing gifts André gave to both of us. We cannot imagine what our worlds would have been without his mentoring. XI. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS In this compact intellectual autobiography, I have concentrated, when discussing biomedical ethics, on the 1970s, the time when virtually everything of importance in my career was set in place. I have emphasized that most of my good fortune in meeting great people came from luck, rather than my own pursuits. The various projects on which I worked in that decade would determine much of the rest of my career through four additional decades down to today. Although the discipline of philosophy primarily promotes individual scholarly research, which I love to do, the colleagues with whom I worked in the 1970s and 1980s would turn my attention to a different model of scholarship, eventually concentrating my interests in biomedical ethics. The change started with the mentoring of André Hellegers, my collaborative writing with Alex Rosenberg and Jim Childress, and then the National Commission (notably Pat King), and, most importantly and profoundly, Ruth Faden. All would reshape my way of thinking about my research. Each of these superb scholars was from a different field of learning. I have long celebrated what each contributed to my career. I owe all of them, most especially Ruth, far more than the tributes in this article show. I have not had space in this short piece to mention my friendship with, and the deep influence of, a legend in American medicine, Dr. Donald Seldin, who died at age 97 this last year. Donald hounded me, year in and year out, to improve Principles of Biomedical Ethics, and I repeatedly learned from his piercing critiques. I loved Donald, and he loved me. I have never had a more penetrating critic; nor have I ever learned from anyone as much about medical practice and research as I learned from him. REFERENCES Beauchamp , T. L. and J. F. Childress. 1979 . Principles of Biomedical Ethics . 1st ed. New York : Oxford University Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC ———. 2019 . 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New York : Harper and Row . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Watson , K. M . 2013 . The shadows of segregation: The integration of Perkins School of Theology in the civil rights era . Methodist History 51 ( 2 ): 217 – 32 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Lucky Me: The Amiable and Weighty Influences on My Career
JF - The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
DO - 10.1093/jmp/jhaa018
DA - 2020-07-29
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/lucky-me-the-amiable-and-weighty-influences-on-my-career-Y68IzYaQHZ
SP - 396
EP - 409
VL - 45
IS - 4-5
DP - DeepDyve
ER -