What It Is to Reason about Ethics

Sidgwick claimed that if we want to understand the methods of ethics, we should study the methods by which people reach reasoned convictions about morality. This book has explained how speculative reasons and drawing distinctions are the building blocks of moral reason. Of course, moral principles, concepts and theories have some role to play but it should be much more limited than it currently is and is not the most useful thing to teach those new to bioethics. When bioethics draws upon these argumentative strategies and is empirically engaged, then bioethics can give us normative, practical advice about what we should do.

Drawing Distinctions

Introducing or refining moral concepts is an important way of embellishing moral reason. Concepts that pick out distinctive moral issues more clearly are useful ways of furthering ethical debate. Concepts can be defined in a number of ways. In addition to introducing a new concept, arguments can be progressed by considering what must be the case about a concept that is in use in order for it to do the ethical work asked of it. This kind of strategy is what I call drawing ‘transcendental’ distinctions. This chapter describes how distinctions are drawn within slippery-slope arguments, how new concepts can be introduced for a specific moral purpose, and how existing concepts can be refined and theorized. Slippery-slope arguments are quite common in bioethics and, as I will show, can be difficult to sustain and are vulnerable to some common objections.

What Is an Ethical Argument?

Paying attention to the underlying structure of an ethical argument is a good way to make progress when writing in bioethics. While syllogisms might seem an overly abstract way of expressing an ethical argument, they can be a useful way of teasing out the validity and strength of an argument. There are some common forms of argument, and one good starting place is to construct an argument that describes relevant liberties and harms, and considers whether resulting harms might warrant restricting liberty. Questioning the factual claims made to support an argument is a simple and important argumentative strategy. When constructing moral arguments, we should minimize our theoretical assumptions.

Empirical, Socratic Bioethics

Good bioethics must be empirical in the sense that it engages with actual ethical issues and does so in a way that reflects their nuances. It must also be Socratic in the sense that it develops a moral argument. Armchair ethics is unlikely to have the content and nuance that is required for good bioethics. Without a degree of conceptual sophistication, bioethics is unlikely to make progress with practical normative issues. The two classes of argument in bioethics are ‘making distinctions’ and ‘speculative reason’, which we might also view as Socratic reason. The complexity of the moral issues addressed by bioethics means that it should be conducted with a degree of ‘epistemic humility’ because what we argue about is usually contingent upon a complex set of facts, and these can change quickly.

The Fact/Value Spectre

The fact/value distinction has cast a shadow over bioethics and if taken in a naïve sense it has damaging implications for method in bioethics. Some still believe that all values are on a par epistemically and that leads to absurdity when we consider the status of some scientific values. It can be taken to imply positivism, meaning that unless ethics is conducted empirically it will be meaningless or subjective. It can also be taken to imply that all values are on an equal footing and I will show how that cannot be true and leads to an impoverished conception of what it is to do ethics well.

How to Find Your Footing in Bioethics

The early years of bioethics were preoccupied with the search for a theoretical foundation. That tendency has decreased somewhat but the conflation of moral theory with method in ethics continues to be an obstacle for those starting out in bioethics and obscures what is common to all approaches to bioethics. Moral theory is not as useful for ‘doing ethics’ as it first appears and it is much more helpful to direct effort into teaching people how to argue about ethics. By grasping a few basic skills in argument, newcomers to this area can draw upon their knowledge and expertise and do good bioethics without mastery of normative moral theory.

Speculative Argument and Bioethics

Speculative reason is an important aspect of practical reason and one of the core activities in Socratic moral reason. Speculating, or posing ‘what if?’ questions when reasoning about ethics can take a number of forms and these are some of the most useful methodological tools for bioethics. Perhaps the most common form of speculative reason for bioethics is the argument from analogy, which involves comparing an ethical response to one situation with our response to another similar situation to see whether we are consistent in our ethical judgment. Speculative reason can aim at deepening our moral understanding by making the implications of ethical choices more vivid. A third form of speculative reason is what I call an intuition pump. Speculative reason is used to tease out intuitions about a possible but hypothetical situation in order to advance our ethical thinking about similar cases. Finally, speculative reason can have a more heuristic function in that it encourages us to think about an area of ethics in a different way.

Four Spectres of Bioethics

Bioethics continues to be frustrated by dubious methodological habits and assumptions that it would be much better off without. This chapter describes four of the five methodological spectres that continue to frustrate bioethics. The first is the ‘moral mantra mistake’, which is the problematic way in which principles can be recited as if their mere utterance justified a moral position. The ‘tedious theory tendency’ refers to the assumption that moral theories are the route by which we can understand how we reason about ethics. Theoretically driven approaches to bioethics overdetermine the answer to an ethical question, so they are like a ‘sausage machine’ that converts a range of substances into a single output. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, there is a tendency for some disciplines to plead that their discipline is fact crucial for bioethics, and that idea is what I call ‘the snooty specialist spectre’.

‘Good’ Bioethics

‘Good bioethics’ draws upon a range of approaches and does not privilege one theoretical or disciplinary perspective. It also aims at being ‘practical normative’ in the sense that it helps us find a way forward with moral issues. That requires a degree of empirical engagement and implies that good bioethics draws upon a range of disciplines and cannot be done from an armchair. Good bioethics is always typified by sound moral reason. That means it is Socratic in the sense that it seeks to test via argument the strength of moral claims, with the aim of finding well-justified moral conclusions. Moral reason admits of degrees; it is possible for someone to reason well or poorly, and the extent to which an instance of bioethics does either, contributes value or disvalue to it as bioethics.

Drawing Distinctions

Drawing distinctions is the second important class of methods in moral argument. Our choice of concepts and how they defined can often be ‘programmatic’, meaning that the concept itself implies something about it being good or bad. Clarity about the meaning of a concept can be very important to an ethical argument. A powerful form of argument is to show that the meaning that an opponent proposes cannot be correct because of what it implies, and to then suggest a better meaning for that concept. By drawing distinctions, we can also clarify the meaning of concepts that play an important role in ethical argument.