The truth is, said she, wheresoever is learning, there is most commonly also controversy and quarrelling…
- Margaret Cavensish: The Blazing World (1666)
Abstract
Many people working in bioethics take pride in the subject’s embrace of a wide range of disciplines. This invites questions of what in particular is added by each. In this paper, I focus on the role of philosophy within the field: what, if anything, is its unique contribution to bioethics? I sketch out a claim that philosophy is central to bioethics because of its particular analytic abilities, and defend its place within bioethics from a range of sceptical attacks.
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Notes
Whether the Kantian will concede this is another matter entirely; the common idea of duty may, after all, turn out to be a reflection of something based in pure reason. Still, Kant is aware that he has to be able to make the leap from the “ordinary rational knowledge of morality” to the philosophical, and this is the task of the first section of the Grounding.
I make no claims about the reliability of such critiques—but they could be made.
Pace the obvious objection here, I concede that clinicians in this situation do not have the luxury of going through the process of settling such questions. But talking about such hypothetical cases may prove helpful in drawing up policies to which medics can refer.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to my Manchester colleagues, especially Matti Häyry and Simona Giordano, for their useful comments on drafts of this paper. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers who provided very insightful comments to which I am only too aware that I have not been able to do full justice within the limits of this paper.
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Brassington, I. What’s the Point of Philosophical Bioethics?. Health Care Anal 21, 20–30 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-012-0220-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-012-0220-5