Occasionally, I still try to go to a symposium, or some kind of academic conference. It is always interesting to see the general picture of who is there, who isn’t; how much academia has changed, or how much it hasn’t — and that is quite aside from what might be said on a topic like Ethics.

At the beginning, in the talk about Applied Ethics, there was mention of Biomedical Ethics, research ethics, informed consent. There were three waves, the speaker said, in which applied ethics had taken shape: these waves coincided roughly with three twenty-year intervals ranging from the 1970s till today. During the first wave, dominated by biomedical ethics and research ethics, there had been these ‘life and death’ questions around issues such as euthanasia and abortion. Questions of informed consent had arisen out of the human genome project. Dates that would come up more than once were the Nuremberg Code of 1947, and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964).   

There were many empty seats at this symposium, I noticed. I wondered about the people who might like to have attended, but who were quite possibly too busy paying for their lives and living costs. Local students had been out protesting just the other day about the fact that many were being forced to choose between working to live, or studying. Others were completely burnt-out from trying to juggle both. And only yesterday, I had been out in a rural field where people were being paid just over 7 euros an hour to remove rocks from the ground. It was fairly taxing, physical labour. To put that number in context, the minimum wage in this particular European country stands at €5.67 per hour. By that measure it was generous, if still well below what might be expected to maintain oneself and still have time for an Ethics Symposium or two on the side, without being too worn out to even think about it.  

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. At some point there was mention of “echo chambers” in relation to social media — this being the idea that people on the internet tend to talk to those who already agree with them, and who reinforce their existing opinions. Later, another presenter would finish their talk by saying that academics really needed to start “communicating beyond the usual suspects”. Smart use of social media might be needed. Wow!

Academics have been saying these sorts of things for as long as I have been listening to them. It’s almost like a friendly confession amongst friends: A kind of “Yes guys, we really need to start communicating amongst more than just ourselves, haha. It’s very nice in here with the jug of iced water, the flowers and the presentation slides, but hey, we really do need to start making an effort to get out there. Eh, guys?”

Back to the conference: “Bridging the gap”. Gaps without bridges seem to be another one of these intractable problems that academia has spent at least the last twenty years fruitlessly grappling with. It has got to the point where it has the ring of a kind of therapeutic soul-searching; the kind one can always return to and still find it wanting. First, there is the gap between academia and practice, or the real world. This I can remember hearing about in lectures about human-induced global warming twenty years ago. Then, it was the idea that with all this scientific knowledge, there was this huge gap between the science and the general public. It needed to be bridged, somehow. It was Urgent. (‘Urgent’, incidentally, is still a word that academics use rather a lot. One could say it has become over-used to the point where it is almost meaningless).  

Today, there was talk of gaps within the university. Specifically, how much was ethics a matter of the individual and their behaviour, and how much of it lay in the realm of a responsible institution? Now, there were these young researchers coming through, who faced immense career insecurity. Really, the role of an institution was to be an enabler so that upholding ethics was a matter of ease for the individual; something that came naturally. (Again, I thought of the student protest, and the pay rate for picking up rocks). If one is going to start bridging gaps, would it pay to start addressing the most egregious gaps first, rather than beginning with the cases of what I would call first world problems?

Creating “actionable policy” was still a work in progress, the speaker said. It was all very well having these brilliant ideas in the thin air of academia, but, sadly, there was still this imperfect world out there (this last bit being my thoughts on what was said). “CUDOS”, she said: “Communalism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, Organised Skepticism” (these last two being joined together). The empty seats were almost flashing like warning lights. I wanted to speak, but knew that it probably wasn’t a good idea. I was feeling too distressed by now. I heard the words “individual distress”, “agency”, “enabling feedback loops”, “fair career incentives” and “need to walk the talk” in no particular order.

I needed to get out of here. I needed to walk. The answer was not to wait for the time when the microphone might travel beyond the usual suspects so that I might try and put all this into words, however awkwardly – no. I had to get out. And that is what I did. It was with a sense of relief, and agency, that I got out into the 2^nd October sunshine.