He's Done a Course

Back in my days editing the JME blog, we used to get the occasional unsolicited post sent to us.  Almost always, they went unpublished; this was overwhelmingly because they weren't very good.  The one person who did sometimes get his unsolicited work published was the ethicist-turned-barrister Daniel Sokol.  There was a number of reasons why we were a little more forgiving of him: he was someone we knew, and a reasonably well-known person in the field - he had a fairly regular column in the BMJ; his submissions, while sometimes a bit self-congratulatory, were often fairly inconsequential - but they were by the same token pretty harmless, so could tide us over during those periods when we had little to say of our own; and, finally, if we did reject his submissions, we could more or less guaratee that they'd appear on the BMJ's own blog anyway, so there wasn't much point our trying to act as gatekeeper.

A post by him appeared on the JME blog a few days ago, detailing the help he had been able to give a doctor, one Tarek Seda, who had found himself in professional trouble and facing a hearing from the Medical Practitioners' Tribunal Service in 2019.  This post purported to be a brief account by Dr Seda of how Sokol was tremendously helpful, andit was supplemented by an account by Sokol himself of how Sokol was... er... tremendously helpful.

Now, I do not know whose idea the post was - in the comments, Sokol writes that

[a]fter the outcome of the MPTS hearing, Dr Seda selflessly asked how he could help other doctors in a similar situation.   One suggestion was to write an article, giving a dual perspective on the process of ethics remediation: the doctor’s and the ethicist’s.   This blog is the product of that idea.

This tells us little about whose idea the post was, although I do have my suspicions - and I'll come back to that in a moment.  But it will not have escaped anyone's attention that the post as a whole does come across rather as an advertorial.  Evidence for this can be produced from the final sentence of the post proper, and the supplementary text that follows it:

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bias

In a little while, I’m going to be giving a couple of lectures to my undergrads on a person with whose views I disagree; indeed, I would count myself as an opponent of the whole tradition from which he comes.  It’s quite a fun lecture to give, because the subject is quite straightforward.  It also lends itself to some fun digressions, and the occasional half-decent joke.  So in that sense, I’m quite looking forward to it.  (In the sense that it’s at 9am, I’m not.  But that’s a different matter.)

But there is a niggling doubt about whether I’ll be doing justice to the topic.  Granted that it’s desirable to be disinterested when giving a lecture, will it be possible to present the arguments in a dispassionate way?  I’m not sure it will; and this generates a problem about whether the lecture will be as disinterested as we’d intuitively want it to be.

Yet one other thing occurs to me: that it might be no bad thing to drop the aspiration to disinterest altogether.  If we do that, the problem vanishes.

The thought goes something like this.  A person who spends time thinking about a topic will, likely as not, come to hold a position.  We’d like to think that that position would be reached by means of a dispassionate examination of the evidence; but that’s unlikely always to be the case, not least because what counts as evidence, and how powerful that evidence is, will depend on the intellectual and theoretical commitments that one has.  At the same time, the sources and arguments being scrutinised may well impact on one’s general commitments over time.  This means that it’s often hard to tell whether one holds the positions one does because the arguments are powerful, or whether the arguments are perceived to be powerful because of the commitments that one has.

Lest we think that this is a problem confined to the humanities, it probably isn’t.