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The Implicit Anthropology of Bioethics and the Problem of the Aging Person

Part of the book series: Ethics and Health Policy ((EHP,volume 1))

Abstract

For those of us who are lucky enough to live in affluent societies it is quite likely that we will survive into old age and will eventually die as a result of age related conditions and diseases. The fact that more of us get old is not a problem, it is a sign of economic and medical success!

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Because of my own linguistic limitations the focus of this paper is on English language bioethics. I can vouch for the fact that a similar implicit anthropology can be found in bioethics writing in the Scandinavian languages, but am unable to say whether it is also typical elsewhere. There may well be an analytic/continental divide in relation to philosophical anthropology as with some many other philosophical topic areas, but investigating whether that is the case is outside the scope of this paper.

  2. 2.

    This is partly substantiated by my experience of giving talks with ‘anthropology’ in the title at bioethics conferences, where people often ask me before the talk why I am going to talk about social science and are surprised when I say that I will talk about philosophical anthropology.

  3. 3.

    It is questionable whether the stable nuclear family has ever been the statistical norm in Western societies, but it has definitely been the type of family held up as the ideal.

  4. 4.

    An age old preoccupation of human beings already pursued in great detail in the Hebrew Bible, the Norse Sagas and many other ancient writings.

  5. 5.

    With some honourable exceptions like Ross 1998.

  6. 6.

    Just as there is no direct logical entailment between a negative evaluation of ‘the disabled state’ and a negative evaluation of ‘the disabled person’. But the absence of a logical entailment is not the absence of a possible inference.

  7. 7.

    I have argued in previous papers that even transhumanists rely on an implicit anthropology, although many of the future scenarios they claim to evaluate morally contain no human agents. But, even for such scenarios we need to be able to say something about what is good for the agents in the scenario, and we most often do that by, in this case illicitly, importing assumptions taken from an implicit anthropology. See Holm 2006, 2007.

  8. 8.

    Also evidenced in the medieval and later depictions of the ‘wheel of life’.

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Holm, S. (2013). The Implicit Anthropology of Bioethics and the Problem of the Aging Person. In: Schermer, M., Pinxten, W. (eds) Ethics, Health Policy and (Anti-) Aging: Mixed Blessings. Ethics and Health Policy, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3870-6_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3870-6_5

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