EA - Survey: bioethicists' views on bioethical issues by Leah Pierson

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Survey: bioethicists' views on bioethical issues, published by Leah Pierson on May 22, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
Bioethicists influence practices and policies in medicine, science, and public health. However, little is known about bioethicists' views in aggregate. We recently surveyed 824 U.S bioethicists on a wide range of ethical issues, including several issues of interest to the EA community (e.g., compensating organ donors, priority setting, paternalistic regulations, and trade-offs between human and animal welfare, among others).
We aimed to contact everyone who presented at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Annual Conference in 2021 or 2022 and/or is affiliated with a US bioethics training program. Of the 1,713 people contacted, 824 (48%) completed the survey.
Why should EAs care?
1. As Devin Kalish puts it in this nice post: "Bioethics is the field of ethics that focuses on issues like pandemics, human enhancement, AI, global health, animal rights, and environmental ethics. Bioethicists, in short, have basically the same exact interests as us."
2. Many EAs don't hold the bioethics community in high regard. Much of this animus seems to stem from EAs' perception that bioethicists have bad takes. (See Devin's post for more on this.) Our survey casts light on bioethicists' views; people can update their opinions accordingly.
What did we find?
Chris Said of Apollo Surveys[1] separately analyzed our data and wrote a blog post summarizing our results:
Primary results
A large majority (87%) of bioethicists believed that abortion was ethically permissible.
82% thought it was permissible to select embryos based on somewhat painful medical conditions, whereas only 22% thought it was permissible to select on non-medical traits like eye color or height.
59% thought it was ethically permissible for clinicians to assist patients in ending their own lives.
15% of bioethicists thought it was ethically permissible to offer payment in exchange for organs (e.g. kidneys).
Question 1
Please provide your opinion on whether the following actions are ethically permissible.
Is abortion ethically permissible?
Is it ethically permissible to select some embryos over others for gestation on the basis of somewhat painful medical conditions?
Is it ethically permissible to make trade-offs between human welfare and non-human animal welfare?
Is it ethically permissible for a clinician to treat a 14-year-old for opioid use disorder without their parents' knowledge or consent?
Is it ethically permissible to offer payment in exchange for blood products?
Is it ethically permissible to subject people to regulation they disagree with, solely for the sake of their own good?
Is it ethically permissible for clinicians to assist patients in ending their own lives if they request this?
Is it ethically permissible for a government to allow an individual to access treatments that have not been approved by regulatory agencies, but only risk harming that individual and not others?
Is it ethically permissible to consider an individual's past decisions when determining their access to medical resources?
Is it ethically permissible to select some embryos over others for gestation on the basis of non-medical traits (e.g., eye color, height)?
Is it ethically permissible to offer payment in exchange for organs (e.g., kidneys)?
Is it ethically permissible for decisional surrogates to make a medical decision that they believe is in a patient's best interest, even when that decision goes against the patient's previously stated preferences?
Is it ethically permissible for a clinician to provide life-saving care to an adult patient who has refused that care and has decision-making capacity?
Results
Question 2
In general, should policymakers consider non-health benefits and harms (lik...