Hoffmaster Barry - Re-Reasoning Ethics: The Rationality of Deliberation and Judgment in Ethics

Re-Reasoning Ethics

Basic Bioethics

Arthur Caplan, editor

A complete list of the books in the Basic Bioethics series appears at the back of this book.

Re-Reasoning Ethics

The Rationality of Deliberation and Judgment in Ethics

Barry Hoffmaster and Cliff Hooker

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hoffmaster, C. Barry, author.

Title: Re-reasoning ethics : the rationality of deliberation and judgment in

ethics / Barry Hoffmaster.

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2018. | Series: Basic bioethics |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017038168 | ISBN 9780262037693 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Ethics. | Bioethics. | Medical ethics. | Judgment (Ethics) |

Reasoning.

Classification: LCC BJ1031 .H74 2018 | DDC 170/.42--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038168

ISBN: 978-0-262-03769-3

EPUB Version 1.0

Contents

Preface

This ethics book is unique. Its content is different and distinctive. It is not about the moral theories that are taught in philosophy courses and written about in philosophy journals. (We use ethics and morality interchangeably.) Moral theories are comprised of principles, and moral reasoning is taken to consist of applying those principles to the facts of problems to deduce right answers. The descriptions of problems are brief, and the resolutions that are logically derived are necessary, certain, and universal. That theoretical depiction of ethics is attractive, but it is too simple, too spare, and too abstract. Telling the truth, for example, can be a challenge. You adhere to principles of telling the truth and preserving life, but you encounter a situation in which lying is needed to save a life. What is the right thing to do? Abide by the principle that prohibits lying or abide by the principle that prohibits killing? Which is the right moral principle, and why is it the right moral principle? More generally, how is the right moral theory to be determined?

This book is about real moral problems that are complex, contextual, and dynamic, how these demanding problems are framed, examined, and settled, and how those analyses, constructions, and resolutions can be rational. The conception of ethics presented here is unusual because it is empirical and naturalistic. Examples of moral issues are taken from research in anthropology and sociology. But how can such a depiction of ethics be normative? By recognizing what orthodox moral philosophy ignores: moral judgment. Determining which principles, values, and facts are relevant requires judgment; resolving conflicts between principles and values requires judgment; and applying general concepts to particulars requires judgment. Judgment is ubiquitous in our lives, and ethics is no exception. The normativity of ethics inheres in good judgment, and good judgment emanates from well-designed, rational processes of deliberation. This book is about nonformal reason, a more expansive conception of rationality that is different from and independent of the formal reason of logic and mathematics and that suffuses our lives. Re-reasoning ethics is about forming rational processes of deliberation that produce rational judgments. That is the best that finite, fallible human beings can do.

This book is the culmination of a decades-long collaboration between two philosophers in different fields, one who specializes in bioethics (BH) and the other who specializes in philosophy of science (CH). The common enterprise is not surprising, however, because both the rationality of bioethics and the rationality of science is the nonformal reason that fosters good judgment.

The book has two parts. The first part, Ethics and Reason, develops the unrecognized nonformal reason that instills a different, augmented rationality into ethics. It is presented by example and by showing how the resources of nonformal reason operate in science, a paradigm of rationality. The second part, Ethics as Design, explains how moral compromise and a liberated, extended, and enriched reflective equilibrium are used in designing ethical decision making and how deliberation, practices, institutions, and policies are designed. The contents of the chapters are summarized below.

Chapter 1. Introduction. Women who are at risk of having a child with a genetic condition were interviewed about how they deliberated about whether to try to get pregnant. This research provides a real, illuminating example of decision making. The womens genetic counselors believed that the women should decide by applying the principle of maximizing expected utility to their situations. The women disavowed that approach. Instead, they imagined scenarios of what it might be like for them and their family to live with an affected child, and they assessed their reactions to those scenarios. For moral philosophy, by contrast, applying principles is the rational way to decide. Beginning with this example, this book will explain how the deliberation these women undertake is quintessentially rational.

The next two chapters show that the logic-based approach of formal reason creates parallel problems in ethics and in science.

Chapter 2. The Difficulties of Applied Ethics. Real cases are used to show that there is much more to ethics than reaching decisions based on deduction from principles and rules. Because the meanings of crucial terms in norms, such as euthanasia and autonomy, are indeterminate, they have to be clarified and specified. When principles and rules conflict, how is the one that prevails to be determined? What makes a problem a moral problem, and what does being a moral problem mean? After nonformal reason is introduced in chapter 4, chapter 5 discusses how it can manage several of the cases presented in chapter 2.

Chapter 3. The Problems Generalized, Diagnosed, and Reframed in a New Account of Reason. The problematic features of moral situations revealed in chapter 2 have exact counterparts in scientific research. Given that, it is not unreasonable to expect them in every domain. Their appearance in science makes it especially clear that the problem is located in the common conception of reason as logic that currently underlies both ethics and science. To prepare the way for examining the nature of an appropriate rational procedure, chapter 3 surveys the received Western tradition of characterizing rationality formally; then it explains why this conception of rationality cannot handle serious problems and why a radically different approach is required. The natural framework for addressing these matters is a philosophical naturalism that recognizes that humans are fundamentally finite and fallible but possess a powerful ability to learn. This start refocuses rationality around intelligent problem solving.

The following two chapters develop a nonformal conception of rationality, first for science (where the issues are more cleanly drawn) and then more broadly.

Chapter 4. The Problems Resolved in a New Account of Reason. Deliberative judgment formation, or simply judgment, is a core human skill that is largely irreplaceable by rational formalisms. Indeed, it is required to create those formalisms. Judgment is rationally learnable and improvable like other skills; and, like all intelligent creatures, humans need abundant practical experience with contextual problem solving for judgment formation to be sufficiently relevant, attentive, perceptive, and judicious to support intelligent problem solving. Equally telling for the role of judgment, even in learning about our norms, is that norms and normative methods have been massively elaborated historically in both science and ethics as experience has been gained, as is characteristic of knowledge and skills that have to be acquired by the human species through learning. Rationality can itself be learned and improved through experience in problem solving, for example, in the way an experienced lawyer powerfully marshals precedents and analogies. The same self-improvement characterizes an increasingly powerful scientific method, the spread of institutional ethical resolution processes, and so on.