Introduction: What Good Is Philosophical Bioethics?

Abstract

What ails philosophical bioethics? That may seem an odd query. No field within contemporary philosophic practice is more widely debated or more fraught with practical implications beyond the discipline’s narrow academic pursuits. Today, philosophers-cum-bioethicists serve on ethics boards, consult with advisory committees, and seek to influence public policy on a broad range of biomedical practices, from stem cell research to end-of-life care. Yet even a cursory examination of the research articles and textbooks produced by these bioethicists reveals nothing distinctively philosophical about their evaluations. Their ethical analyses emphasize the same range of practical considerations as those offered by physicians, psychologists, nurses, and even political scientists and theologians — themselves all turned would-be bioethicists. Analyses which apply a specific type of philosophical ethics — for example utilitarian, or virtue-based, or deontological, or pragmatic — too, typically involve not matters of grand philosophical import, but the more mundane and narrowly confounding questions of how to apply generic moral principles such as beneficence and justice to specific cases.