Abstract
My problem is how should we approach the concrete moral problems that arise in medicine, law, management or engineering in a pluralistic society — in what follows I shall concentrate upon medicine, but my concern is basically with the whole spectrum presented by the term “professional ethics”. My thesis is that we shall not be in a position to discuss the moral problems of professionals until we get clear about “where ethics comes from” as one concerned scholar put it1 — something that modern philosophy is generally confused about — and something that the very notion of ‘applied’ ethics confuses. My suggestion is that we have much to learn from the example of the Hastings Center (Briarcliff, N.Y.), with respect to handling problems of professional ethics. My assumptions are, first, that philosophers — as Alasdair Maclntyre has long insisted — for the most part confuse the ethical issues they would illuminate by endeavoring to supply theoretical solutions to practical problems, and, second, that this confusion is rooted in an erroneous notion of how concepts function, namely, in the idea that concepts have meaning prior to their application.
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Notes
Carl Elliott: “Where Ethics Comes from and What to Do about It”, in: Hastings Center Report, 22, 4, 1992, pp.28-35. I have drawn my examples liberally from this publication.
Aristotle sets these assumptions out in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics The commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on this material is also a valuable source for understanding the Aristotelian conception of ethics.
Charles Sanders Peirce: “The Essentials of Pragmatism”, in: Justus Buehler (ed.): Philosophical Writings of Peirce,New York: Dover 1955, p.261. Cf. We are too apt to think that what one means to do and the meaning of a word are quite unrelated meanings of the word “meaning”, “The Principles of Phenomenology”, ibid,p.91.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophische Untersuchungen,I, § 43. “Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache.”
See Alasdair Maclntyre: “How Virtue Becomes Vice”, in: Encounter, July 1975, pp. 11 - 17.
The classical exposition of the notion of an essentially-contested concept is William Gallie: “Essentially-Contested Concepts”, in: Proceeedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56, 1955-1956. See also my Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy, Dordrecht: Kluwer 1989, passim.
Elliott: “Where Ethics Comes from and What to Do about It”, op. cit., p.28.
Ibid.
I have learned much about professional problems in management from Professor Albert Danielsson of Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology. Danielsson also emphasizes how arriving at an adequate description of an enterprise’s problem is virtually identical with arriving at a solution.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Blue and Brown Books, New York: Harper 1965, pp. 18.
Gordon M. Goldstein: “In a Changing World, a New Dawn for Ethics”, in: New York Times, April 11, 1993.
For an excellent account of the functioning of the Common Law see Edward Levi: An Introduction to Legal Reasoning,Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1949. The following passage from Levi’s opening remarks is worth quoting here: The pretense the [Common] law is a system of known rules applied by a judge […] has long been under attack. In an important sense legal rules are never clear, and, if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible.
See Stephen Toulmin: The Uses of Argument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1957, and Stephen Toulmin, Richard Rieke and Allan Janik: An Introduction to Reasoning, New York: Macmillan 1977. I have learned very much about the Hastings Center, and, generally, about the sort of hermeneutic midwifery that I describe here in the course of my collaboration with Stephen Toulmin over the last twenty-five years.
This case is most eloquently argued by Alasdair Maclntyre in: After Virtue, London: Duckworth 1981.
John Courtney Murray: We Hold These Truths, Garden City: Doubleday 1960, p. 131.
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, II, 2.
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Janik, A.S. (1994). Professional Ethics ‘Applies’ Nothing. In: Pauer-Studer, H. (eds) Norms, Values, and Society. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2454-8_15
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