Abstract
This chapter considers several prominent methods in bioethics and evaluates each according to how well they avoid idealizing assumptions and account for the effects of three kinds of positioning of moral agents: (1) within institutions, (2) along axes of social oppression, and (3) as psychologically and culturally constrained human beings. Feminist naturalized moral epistemology is then presented as an antidote for these idealizing assumptions, and a more substantive version of naturalized bioethics is developed through a re-interpretation of the concept of common morality along naturalist lines. This naturalized common morality invokes three interlocking layers: the common morality as (1) shared ecological predicament, (2) as shared evaluative space of reasons, and (3) as external coherence. Each layer on its own is necessary, but incomplete as a specification of a naturalized and nonideal common morality. The three layers combined provide a comprehensive approach to accounting for the nonidealized positioning mentioned earlier.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
A similar idea is developed in Turner (2003).
- 2.
I am indebted to Schwartzman (2012) for this line of argument. Her target is the philosophical method of thought experiments, but the argument applies as well to bioethical methods invoking common morality.
- 3.
It is worth explicitly acknowledging that, though I emphasize these insights as feminist contributions, other contemporary philosophical projects committed to interrogating the way social practices of exclusion, marginalization, and oppression have shaped discourse have also reached these and similar conclusions. The insights may not be distinctively feminist, but they have been effectively deployed in unmasking masculinist assumptions undergirding supposedly neutral moral “ideals.” For an example, refer to Sect. 3.2.3. for a discussion of Quill R. Kukla’s criticism of the applicability of traditional notions of autonomy to the case of prenatal care.
- 4.
This is roughly what I identified as the first notion of common morality.
- 5.
Consider John Doris’s (1998) situationist critique of virtue ethics as an example of this. The situationist critique looks to undermine virtue theories of ethics by pointing out empirical inaccuracies in their moral psychologies.
- 6.
Recall the first kind of positioning I mentioned previously—the positioning of agents within specific institutions. This second notion of common morality provides some resources for understanding the effect this positioning has on moral agents’ deliberation in terms of understanding the institutional culture as a modification of second nature.
- 7.
Jamie Lindemann Nelson (2003) expresses a similar observation. She specifically discusses this kind of observation in relation to the metaethical views of John McDowell and Sabina Lovibond. Drawing from insights in Austen’s Emma, she argues that the debate about motivational internalism and externalism turns on “the relationship between an agent and the moral understandings considered authoritative in her moral-social world” (88). The provocative point here is that one’s experience of the moral facts that are there for you as directly motivating action depends on whether your second nature enables you to be fully integrated into your own evaluative culture.
- 8.
I am treating “form of life” here as roughly synonymous with “second nature.” Though they are not quite the same thing, they are close enough to make this comparison work. What becomes second nature to us is a specific culturally shaped view of the world as a rationally ordered sphere of human action. The second nature that one gains is a functioning part of a broader form of life that one is initiated into and includes such sundry practices as “asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying,” to name only a few (Wittgenstein [1958] 1973, §23). If a form of life is a specific interconnected set of language-games, then a second nature is a subset of those language-games having to do with practical reasoning. This is how I generally understand the relationship between the two terms, but I cannot defend that interpretation here. I do not think anything central to my account relies on the specifics of it.
References
Arras, John. 2007. The way we reason now: Reflective equilibrium in bioethics. In The Oxford handbook of bioethics, ed. Bonnie Steinbock, 46–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2016. Theory and bioethics. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2016 edn. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/theory-bioethics. Accessed 30 Oct 2019.
Beauchamp, Tom, and James Childress. 2019. Principles of biomedical ethics. 8th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brody, Baruch. 2004. Taking issue: Pluralism and casuistry in bioethics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Buchanan, Allan. 2007. Social moral epistemology and the role of bioethicists. In The ethics of bioethics: Mapping the moral landscape, ed. Lisa Eckenwiler and Felicia Cohn, 288–296. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Campbell, Richmond. 1998. Illusions of paradox: A feminist epistemology naturalized. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Campbell, Richmond, and Bruce Hunter. 2000. Introduction. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (Supp 1): 1–28.
Churchland, Paul. 2000. Rules, know-how, and the future of moral cognition. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (Supp 1): 291–306.
Clark, Andy. 2000. Word and action: Reconciling rules and know-how in moral cognition. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (Supp 1): 267–289.
Dancy, Jonathan. 2017. Moral particularism. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2017 edn. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/moral-particularism. Accessed 30 Oct 2019.
Doris, John. 1998. Persons, situations, and virtue ethics. Noûs 32 (4): 504–530.
Fadiman, Anne. 1997. The spirit catches you and you fall down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Flanagan, Owen. 2017. The geography of morals: Varieties of moral possibility. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gert, Bernard, Charles Culver, and Danner Clouser. 2006. Bioethics: A systematic approach. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 2009. Democracy and disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen, and Charles Taylor. 2011. Dialogue. In The power of religion in the public sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen, 60–69. New York: Columbia University Press.
Haidt, Jonathan, and Jesse Graham. 2007. When morality opposes justices: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research 20 (1): 98–116.
Jaggar, Alison. 2000. Ethics naturalized: Feminism’s contribution to moral epistemology. Metaphilosophy 31 (5): 452–468.
Jonsen, Albert, and Stephen Toulmin. 1988. The abuse of casuistry: A history of moral reasoning. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kukla, Rebecca. 2005. Conscientious autonomy: Displacing decisions in health care. The Hastings Center Report 35 (2): 34–44.
———. 2014. Living with pirates: Common morality and embodied practice. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 23 (1): 75–85.
Laden, Anthony. 2012. Reasoning: A social picture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lee, Hakyung Kate. 2020. South Korea’s contact tracing sheds light on extensive efforts to slow spread of COVID-19. ABC, December 9.
Lindemann, Hilde. 2014. Holding and letting go: The social practice of personal identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lindemann Nelson, James. 2003. The social situation of sincerity: Austen’s Emma and Lovibond’s Ethical Formation. In Moral psychology: Feminist ethics and social theory, ed. Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Lindemann, Hilde, and Marian Verkerk. 2012. Toward a naturalized clinical ethics. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 22 (4): 289–306.
McDowell, John. 1998. Mind, value, and reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Neurath, Otto. 1983. Philosophical papers 1913–1946, ed. R.S. Cohen and M. Neurath. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Quine, W.V.O. 1969. Ontological relativity and other essays. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1986. Reply to Morton White. In The philosophy of W.V. Quine, ed. L.E. Hahn and P.A. Schilpp, 663–665. LaSalle: Open Court.
Rawls, John. 1999. A theory of justice, Revised edn. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Scheman, Naomi. 2011. Shifting ground: Knowledge and reality, transgression and trustworthiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schwartzman, Lisa H. 2012. Intuition, thought experiments, and philosophical method: Feminism and experimental philosophy. Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3): 307–316.
Scully, Jackie Leach. 2008. Disability bioethics: Moral bodies, moral difference. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.
Shafer-Landau, Russ. 2003. Moral realism: A defence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sherwin, Susan. 1992. No longer patient: Feminist ethics and health care. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Simmons, John A. 2010. Ideal and nonideal theory. Philosophy and Public Affairs 38 (1): 5–36.
Swenson, Kyle. 2017. Who came up with the term ‘sexual harassment’? The Washington Post, November 22.
Turner, Leigh. 2003. Zones of consensus and zones of conflict: Questioning the “common morality” presumption in bioethics. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 13 (3): 193–218.
Walker, Margaret Urban. 2000. Naturalizing, normativity, and using what “we” know in ethics. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (Supp 1): 75–101.
———. 2007. Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2009. Introduction: Groningen naturalism in bioethics. In Naturalized bioethics: Toward responsible knowing and practice, ed. Hilde Lindemann, Marian Verkerk, and Margaret Urban Walker, 1–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. [1958] 1973. Philosophical investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Pearson Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Beck, D. (2021). The Positioning of Moral Agents and Its Relationship to Nonideal Bioethics. In: Victor, E., Guidry-Grimes, L.K. (eds) Applying Nonideal Theory to Bioethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 139. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72503-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72503-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-72502-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-72503-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)