Some Reflections on the Importance of Philosophy to Bioethics.

Abstract

contrary, we could see it as the way philosophy has always worked, from Plato and Aristotle on, as concerned with conceptual issues, with normative issues, and especially with unrecognized assumptions that plague casual thought. Philosophy has been the generative parent while the infant bioethics was emerging; this progeny has now matured into a recognized and affluent, influential, and in many ways authoritative field. Can we see in the rich picture of bioethics that BB brings to bear a struggle to break free, to develop into a comparatively autonomous, independent party, to develop its own norms and practices? Tristram Engelhardt‘s prescient warning about the development of a “secular priesthood” should be always in our minds, that a field like bioethics, replacing as it does much of the moral discussion that had been going on in the churches, may become divorced from any religious project but nevertheless invested with “the mantle of knowing what is right.” BB’s thorough account of the ways in which philosophy is still needed and still operative in many of the most trenchant discussions in contemporary bioethics suggests that bioethics can best be viewed as the mature offspring of its parent philosophy, increasingly adult and capable, but–if it doesn’t calcify into “philosophy light” or rote applications of the four-principle so-called Georgetown Mantra—remains a lineal descendant, a full-fledged “field” in its own right but one that still lives with the fortunate DNA of its parent. In BB’s argument, despite the sometimes less fortunate “two fields” phrasing, I think philosophy isn’t dethroned at all; rather, philosophy’s continuing centrality in bioethics is warmly and appropriately recognized.