Society's Choices Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine (1995) / Chapter Skim
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Public Moral Discourse
Public Moral Discourse
Pages 215-240
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From page 215... ...
But I shall argue that these differences are relatively superficial and that how ethics commissions address and reason about moral issues is not fundamentally different from the method, when it is properly understood, of moral philosophy in addressing substantive moral issues of practice and policy. I shall show as well the respects in which this method can provide solutions to moral issues in public policy, or more specifically the respects in which an ethics commission's process of public moral reasoning warrants the claim that the substantive conclusions reached by that process are justified.
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From page 216... ...
A part of the influence of the President's Commission's work on this issue derived from its prestigious nature as a nationally constituted body, as has no doubt been true of other ethics commissions. But the influence of its recommendations also derived
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From page 217... ...
These roles too, of coursewhether sharpening the issues or forging consensus—require providing the ethical analysis and arguments which either sharpen the issues or on which a new consensus might rest. Consensus building, broadly understood, is an important part of each of these four different aims of ethics commissions.
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From page 218... ...
The second view understands moral considerations, as well as the method of moral reasoning employing those considerations, to be only a part of the overall considerations relevant to evaluation of public policy. In this latter view, moral philosophers and the methods of moral philosophy may analyze the morality of some policy, but overall policy analysis and evaluation must take into account additional nonmoral considerations such as economic costs, political feasibility, legal constraints, and so forth.
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From page 219... ...
The typical object of moral evaluation by ethics commissions, namely one or another public policy, does not entail a fundamental difference in the moral principles or reasons used in making the evaluation, or in the methodology of moral reasoning and argument employed. There is reason then to remind ethics commissions to attend to the broader social and legal context of the ethical issues they address.
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From page 220... ...
That view rejects a conception of ethical analysis which encompasses these economic, political, and legal considerations, and restricts the ethical analysis only to the distinctly ethical considerations. It follows from this that the ethical recommendation on policy in a particular area cannot be an "all things considered" recommendation regarding the policy, what John Rawls claimed forjustice in characterizing it as the "final court of appeal" in practical reasoning.5 Instead, in this second view of the restricted scope of ethics commissions' concern, the ethical analysis takes account of only some considerations relevant to what policy should be.
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From page 221... ...
The same will be true of moral judgments about the public policies that ethics commissions address; for example, apparently nonmoral considerations (financial costs) are morally relevant to the moral question of how much equality of opportunity (the moral consideration)
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From page 222... ...
Membership of Ethics Commissions The principal ethics commissions in the United States in recent decades were deliberately established with widely diverse members. Typically, only a small minority of members are professional ethicists or moral philosophers with extensive professional training in ethics and moral philosophy.
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From page 223... ...
Deduc~v~sm Some believe the method of reasoning by which public ethics commissions address ethical issues in public policy is different from the method of moral reasoning in moral philosophy from a mistaken view about the latter. In this view, which I shall call deductivism, the philosophical approach to moral reasoning in applied and policy contexts ideally consists in employing the true or correct moral theory and principles, together with the empirical facts relevant to their application, to deduce logically the correct moral conclusion for the case or policy in question.
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From page 224... ...
Is deductivism a feasible and defensible account of how moral reasoning is and should be done either in policy contexts or in moral philosophy? One obvious problem is that it does not seem an accurate account of how ethics commissions in fact function.
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From page 225... ...
A final important barrier to deductivism is that, even if there are basic moral truths, there is no agreement or assurance that they are to be found or established at the level of general moral principles or theories, which through application could then transfer their truth to conclusions about particular policies which ethics commissions address. Deductivism as a method of moral reasoning takes a position on how the justification of moral judgments is secured that is commonly called foundationalist.
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From page 226... ...
Par~cularism The polar extreme position about moral reasoning and moral knowledge orjustification I shall call particularism. It holds that moral reasoning in practical and policy contexts begins and remains with the specific concrete case under consideration.
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From page 227... ...
Because particularism locates moral knowledge only at the level of particular judgments and confines moral reasoning only to the particular case, it seems to provide no standard for determining which particularjudgments are true when they cannot all be true. But the most serious difficulty for particularism is that it is incompatible with the very process of giving reasons for moral judgments at all.
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From page 228... ...
Some, at least partial or fragmentary, moral theorizing is an unavoidable part of moral reasoning, of making and offering reasons for moral judgments in practical and policy contexts. What level of generality the reason-giving process in fact reaches on a particular occasion of moral reasoning or disagreement will depend both on theoretical factors, such as how deep and general the parties' reasons for their positions are, and on practical factors, such as how deep one's own uncertainty or another's challenge goes on the issue in question.
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From page 229... ...
I want now to address the problem of justification more directly. If not deductivist or particularist, what method or process of moral reasoning could ethics commissions use that would warrant a claim that their conclusions are morally justified?
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From page 230... ...
A third aspect of considered moral judgments and the critical screening process which produces them is that the process of considering alternative positions and evaluating the reasons that support them on any issue typically has both an intrapersonal and an interpersonal component. It will often begin as an intrapersonal process as one initially thinks about the issue oneself; but then it should expand to an interpersonal process as well, because we know from experience that our moral vision is often enlarged
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From page 231... ...
While the domain of a maximally comprehensive moral theory would be all possible objects of moral evaluation, most people at best hold less comprehensive theories, or what are partial theories or theory fragments from the more comprehensive perspective. This means that, although deductivism may be mistaken in holding that moral reasoning and justification begin from a moral theory already and independently established as true and which then could be somewhat mechanically applied to particular cases, it is correct that at least parts or fragments of moral theories are either implicitly or explicitly appealed to in reasoning about particular cases.
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From page 232... ...
Our moral conviction about the case or policy is then principally derived from our conviction about the more general reason or principle. Different moral judgments about particular cases or policies as well as different general moral principles are held with different degrees of conviction by any individual, even at the end of the critical screening process.
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From page 233... ...
Besides this role in reflective equilibrium, general moral principles and theories also play a more direct role in justifying moral judgments about particular cases or policies which is analogous to how scientific theories provide explanatory force to a domain of phenomena. A central function of theories in natural and social science is to provide order and structure to a body of observations or data about the world that would otherwise be merely a large set of unconnected data.
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From page 234... ...
This critical screening process, even in its ideal form, never warrants absolute certainty about any particular moral judgment that could put it beyond further question. While this ideal of considered moral judgments in reflective equilibrium is never fully achievable in practice, it is useful nevertheless because it specifies an ideal process by which all possibly relevant reasons and arguments available to anyone and bearing on a moral issue can be given due consideration; the shortcomings and more restricted focus of moral reasoning in the real world can be measured against this ideal.
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From page 235... ...
We noted above that one respect in which general principles and theories help justify particular moral judgments is by showing them to be made from a coherent and unified moral conception. There are two further respects in which moraljudgments that have survived the critical screening process and reflective equilibrium are justified.
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From page 236... ...
Relativism and the Subjec~v~qr of Moral.Judgments Is the method of moral reasoning that I have sketched for use both by individuals and by public ethics commissions objectionably relativist? Moral relativism is usually understood as the view that different incompatible moral beliefs can be true for different individuals, groups, or societies.
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From page 237... ...
The same is true for groups of people living together in a society, and for bodies they establish like ethics commissions to help them address moral issues of public policy. Choice of and commitment to a way of life in this broad sense cannot in the end be avoided, and different individuals can choose and pursue different ways of life.
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From page 238... ...
This is a qualification on the account of public moral reasoning on policy questions sketched above for ethics commissions, since the full exploration of one's reasons for one's moral positions and judgments will take one deeply into the details of one's comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral views. To appeal to those comprehensive views is to go beyond what should be the basis of public policy.
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From page 239... ...
The first is that the process of public moral discourse in which an ethics commission engages is not fundamentally different in its nature from the moral reasoning in which individual members of the society engage in public and private contexts. The second point is that while the process of public moral discourse, even properly carried out, does not guarantee the truth or correctness of the conclusions it yields, it can provide us with a warrant for accepting them as Justified basis for public policy.
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From page 240... ...
9. Thomas Nagel has stressed this point in "The Fragmentation of Value," in Moral Questions.
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