Callahanian bioethics Brian D. Earp Yale University This is the author’s copy of a forthcoming comment. This version may be cited as: Earp, B. D. (2019). Callahanian bioethics. Hastings Center Report, 49(5), 7-8. For someone with an outsized influence on a field he helped to create, Dan Callahan was anything but overbearing. Physically compact, thin, and wiry in older age, he spoke at the rapid speed of his mind and with the same warm spirit that animated his eyes, which danced with a wise intelligence and good humor. When I met him, I was in my late 20s, just finding my footing in bioethics. I had no idea what I was doing. My background was in cognitive science and philosophy, mostly, but through a series of accidents I had started writing essays about bioethical themes and submitting them to bioethical journals. Suddenly on the cusp of what would become a year-long residency at The Hastings Center—an experience from which I grew as much as a person as a scholar-in-training—I found myself seated in the decidedly quaint living room of Dan and Sidney Callahan, who had invited me to dinner. The dynamic between them was its own delightful thing. They would interrupt each other, lovingly, with little corrections or amendments or elaborations, eager to explore (not demolish or defend, but really explore) whatever idea was in the air. From their approach to conversation you could infer their intellectual values, which served as imperatives for their way of being in the world: remain curious, follow no dogma, think for yourself, argue in good faith, use common sense over formal method, favor real life over theory, and see the big picture without losing sight of the details. Substantively, too, there were at least two recurring themes: there is more to well-being than physical health alone; and history and context, relationships and communities, and the integrity of social institutions should be central to moral judgment. A good life isn’t only about promoting individual needs and desires. Dan told a story that evening, one of many that still sticks in my head. It seemed to encapsulate his moral mindset and, in a way, his broader vision for bioethics. I am sure he has told the story many times to many people; but here it is as I recall it. He was taking a graduate class at Harvard, where he eventually got his Ph.D. in 1965. The professor was going over the “big two” theories—utilitarianism and deontology—which dominated moral philosophy at the time, much as they do now. “Doing ethics,” Dan learned, was essentially a matter of applying these grand abstractions in a top-down fashion to particular, often highly contrived cases, in something like an intellectual game that philosophy professors liked to play. What kind of bizarre conclusions could you force your opponent to accept as an ethical implication of their favored view? 2 This professor was a Quaker. Dan had somehow found this out and it made him curious. The Quakers, after all, preached pacifism, egalitarianism, radical cooperation, and racial equality: not hypothetical thought-experiments, but doctrines designed to make a difference in the world. How, Dan asked the professor, did utilitarianism or deontology apply to his being a Quaker? What was the relationship, that is, between the professor’s moral choices in everyday life, presumably influenced in some way by his religious convictions, and those lofty formulas they were learning about in class, all about maximizing the sum of happiness or willing universal maxims? It was an earnest question. But you can guess how it was received. Sitting across from me as he recollected, Dan broke into an impression of the professor’s reaction, all frowns and scowls, uttering something that signaled, in effect, that the question was inappropriate. It was as though Dan had made a category error—confusing the high-minded pursuit of moral philosophy with such practical (and personal) matters as really trying to live a moral life. The way Dan told it, this is when it clicked for him that “doing ethics” in the way prescribed by philosophy departments of the 1960s (and by many philosophy departments still today) was simply not going to cut it. Ethics as he understood it was inherently messy; it was about real-life choices made under conditions of uncertainty; it was (or it should be) contextsensitive; it had tangible social and political implications. If doing ethics didn’t involve a headlong dive into the center of such roiling normative issues, tracing their origins, examining them from all angles, making as much sense of them as one could (in openminded conversation with others), and putting forward actionable yet morally principled policies, then what was the point? 3 Of course, doing ethics well doesn’t really require making such an either-or choice. With his staggering oeuvre, Dan showed a generation of scholars and policy-makers that highminded rigor, detailed engagement with particulars, and sensible practical proposals can not only coexist but be harmonized with elegance. Essay after essay of his was—and is—as well-argued, nuanced, and applicable as it is simply a pleasure to read. One his last essays was never published. It remains an unfinished draft: a deeply personal piece about aging, in which he discusses in frank terms what he calls the “burdens,” both physical and mental, of growing old. He muses, as he had throughout his career, about whether being kept alive by medical technology is good past a certain point. “I [have] had a long, happy, and successful life,” he writes in it. He was at that time eighty-eight. I suppose success in life can be measured in a multitude ways. I don’t know the metric Dan had in mind as he typed those solemn phrases. But here is one way of measuring it that I think he would endorse: success tracks the extent to which a person uses their gifts and talents to do as much good as they can do, and inspires others to try to do the same. By that measure, then, and in so many ways—his lifelong mentorship of younger scholars like me, the ongoing work of The Hastings Center, and the sheer force of his example—Dan’s life was very successful indeed. 4