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This is the first book in bioethics that explains how it is that you actually go about doing good bioethics. Bioethics has made a mistake about its methods, and this has led not only to too much theorizing, but also fragmentation within bioethics. The unhelpful disputes between those who think bioethics needs to be more philosophical, more sociological, more clinical, or more empirical, continue. While each of these claims will have some point, they obscure what should be common to all instances of bioethics. Moreover, they provide another phantom that can lead newcomers to bioethics down blind alleyways stalked by bristling sociologists and philosophers. The method common to all bioethics is bringing moral reason to bear upon ethical issues, and it is more accurate and productive to clarify what this involves than to stake out a methodological patch that shows why one discipline is the most important. This book develops an account of the nature of bioethics and then explains how a number of methodological spectres have obstructed bioethics becoming what it should. In the final part, it explains how moral reason can be brought to bear upon practical issues via an 'empirical, Socratic' approach.
List of contents
- 1: How to find your footing in bioethics
- Part I: Bioethics
- 2: What is bioethics?
- 3: Good bioethics
- Part II: The spectres of bioethics
- 4: Four spectres of bioethics
- 5: The fact value spectre
- Part III: The methods of bioethics
- 6: Empirical, Socratic bioethics
- 7: What is an ethical argument?
- 8: Speculative argument and bioethics
- 9: Drawing distinctions: defining, reclaiming and analysing moral concepts
- 10: Drawing distinctions: novel, sublime and slippery moral concepts
- 11: What it is to reason about ethics
About the author
John McMillan is a professor in the Bioethics Centre, Division of Health Sciences, at the University of Otago.
Summary
This is the first book that explains how you actually go about doing good bioethics. John McMillan develops an account of the nature of bioethics; he reveals how a number of methodological spectres have obstructed bioethics; and then he shows how moral reason can be brought to bear upon practical issues via an 'empirical, Socratic' approach.
Additional text
McMillan presents an innovative, historically aware, and zeitgeist-capturing manifesto for contemporary bioethics ... Overall, this book serves not only as a fresh foundation on which bioethicists from all disciplines can build, but as a provocative challenge to traditional theory-laden ways of "doing bioethics."
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I hope that this book becomes required reading for all students writing essays in bioethics, at the very least at postgraduate level. It should help to dispel the current confusion between the normative and descriptive aspects of the discipline. Alastair Campbell, Institute of Medical Ethics, UK
