The Ethicist's New Clothes

Slate

Credentials and committees don't make you ethical. Principles do. Those principles have to make sense. You have to apply them consistently or rethink them if you can't stomach their implications. And the easier you make them, the less they matter. The slickest way to make yourself look ethical is to narrow the definition of ethics so that it won't interfere with what you want to do. But that won't make you ethical. It'll just make you an ethicist.

Oooh-Snap! Hey, he's talking about the search for the high ground on stem cell research, but we can all be broader-minded in the application of some good prose if it fits elsewhere, right?