How experience confronts ethics.

Full Abstract

Analytic moral philosophy's strong divide between empirical and normative restricts facts to providing information for the application of norms and does not allow them to confront or challenge norms. So any genuine attempt to incorporate experience and empirical research into bioethics--to give the empirical more than the status of mere 'descriptive ethics'--must make a sharp break with the kind of analytic moral philosophy that has dominated contemporary bioethics. Examples from bioethics and science are used to illustrate the problems with the method of application that philosophically prevails in both domains and with the conception of rationality that underlies this method. Cues from how these problems can be handled in science then introduce summaries of richer, more productive naturalist and constructivist accounts of reason and normative knowledge. Liberated by a naturalist approach to ethics and an enlarged conception of rationality, empirical work can be recognized not just as essential to bioethics but also as contributing to normative knowledge.

Author information

Author/s: Hoffmaster, Barry (B); Hooker, Cliff (C);

Affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. choffmas(-atsign-)uwo.ca

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Review

Journal: Bioethics (Bioethics), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-May; vol 23 (issue 4) : pp 214-25

Dates: Created 2009/04/02; Completed 2009/08/07;

PMID: 19338522, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 8/21/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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