What can bioethics contribute to ethical theory?
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Contemporary psychiatric practice reflects the hegemony of the DSM model of human emotional distress. Algorythms are used to decontextualize complaints of distress and classify them into distinct categories of "disorders" based on the presence or absence of specific "symptoms." This is usually followed by the prescription of psychotropic drugs. Such a reductionistic perspective and its mechanical approach to diagnosis and treatment have far reaching epistemological and moral consequences. In this article I address the moral issue from the postmodern ethic articulated by philosopher and theologian John Caputo, which he calls a "poetics of obligation." This position argues for the restoration of respect for the singularity, uniqueness and complexity of each doctor-patient encounter. I further argue for a disempowering of medical model psychiatry and a retrieval of an eclectic holism in psychiatric discourse.
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In this paper I examine the epistemology and ethics of consensus, focusing on the ways in which decision makers use/misuse ethical expertise. The major questions I raise and tentative answers I give are the following: First, are the 'experts' really experts? My tentative answer is that they are bona fide experts who often represent specific interest groups. Second, is the experts' authority merely epistemological or is it also ethical? My tentative answer is that the experts' authority consists not only in their command over specific matters of fact and/or value, but also in their ability to achieve 'consensus' about what is 'true'/'false', or 'right'/'wrong'. Third, should the authority of expertise be limited? My tentative answer is that it should be limited in the area of facts but especially in the area of values. Persons who are ethics 'experts' must be particularly careful to practice an ethics of persuasion rather than an ethics of compulsion. Their role is not to force their group consensus upon decision makers' individual moral perceptions and deliberations; rather it is to help decision makers come to their own conclusions about what they ought to do.
For years analysts have recognized the error of assuming that experts in medical science are also experts in deciding the clinically correct course for patients. This paper extends the analysis of the use of the consensus of experts to their use in public policy groups such as NIH Consensus Development panels. After arguing that technical experts cannot be expected to be expert on public policy decisions, the author extends the criticism to the use of the consensus of experts in estimating facts to provide a basis for policy decisions. It is argued that to the extent that (a) experts' views regarding a body of facts can be expected to correlate with their values relevant to those facts; and (b) the values of experts differ from the values of lay people, even the estimates of the facts given by the consensus of expert panels can be expected to differ from the estimates lay people would have given had they had the relevant scientific expertise.
It is commonly held that National Health Service (NHS) workers are under a moral obligation not to go on strike, because doing so might well result in people's dying. Unless sainthood is demanded, however, this position is untenable: indeed, those most vociferously pursuing it are often those who bear the greatest responsibility, on their own grounds, for needless death and suffering.
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The Vatican Instruction on reproductive technologies and the OTA report, Infertility, both use "rights" language to advance quite different views of the same subject matter. The former focuses on the rights and welfare of the embryo, and the protection of the family, while the latter stresses the freedom and rights of couples. This essay uses the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeffrey Stout to consider the different traditions grounding these definitions of rights. It is proposed that a potentially effective mediating language could be that of "human nature", and argued that donor methods raise more serious moral objections than homologous ones.
Several scholars have recently criticized the dominant emphasis upon mid-level principles in bioethics best exemplified by Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics. In Part I of this essay, I assess the fairness and cogency of three broad criticisms raised against 'principlism' as an approach: (1) that principlism, as an exercise in applied ethics, is insufficiently attentive to the dialectical relations between ethical theory and mortal practice; (2) that principlism fails to offer a systematic account of the principles of non-maleficence, beneficence, respect for autonomy, and justice; and (3) that principlism, as a version of moral pluralism, is fatally flawed by its theoretical agnosticism. While acknowledging that Beauchamp and Childress's reliance upon Ross's version of intuitionism is problematic, I conclude that the critics of principlism have failed to make a compelling case against its theoretical or practical adequacy as an ethical approach. In Part II, I assess the moral theory developed by Bernard Gert in Mortality: A New Justification of the Moral Rules, because Gert has recommended his approach as a systematic alternative to principlism. I judge Gert's theory to be seriously incomplete and, in contrast to principlism, unable to generate coherent conclusions about cases of active euthanasia and paternalism.
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