A Philosopher Account

          In the introduction to his edited volume Bioethics[1], the philosopher John Harris claims that the medical rules of professional conduct (that is, traditional medical ethics) are a normative system essentially lacking reflection, which is apparent as soon as we attempt to make inquiries into the moral justification of their contents. Traditional medical ethics evolved and now constitutes one of the two origins of bioethics, as the author identifies them. The second origin is moral philosophy. Whereas some of the authors in the literature do not make this distinction, and some use the terms interchangeably (the distinction is accepted in most of the literature, however), in Harris's account medical ethics and bioethics do not identify with one another: while the former refers strictly to matters of medicine and health, the latter may include other issues too, as are environmental ethics, the ethics of sexuality and reproduction, the ethics of genetic choice and manipulation, and the ethics of scientific research. Although placing traditional medical ethics along moral philosophy as origins of bioethics, and although conceding that many disciplines are involved in bioethics, Harris insists that "the central method of bioethical inquiry is moral philosophy" and that bioethics is "a branch of applied ethics which is characteristically informed by multidisciplinary expertise and findings"[2]. Such a claim is not without controversy, and representatives of the other disciplines involved in bioethics (such as theologians, lawyers, health care professionals, sociologists, anthropologists) either do not accept it[3], or reject the field of philosophical bioethics as altogether misguided, morally dubious, methodologically inconsistent[4], precisely on the grounds of its philosophical nature. The most 'complete' and a classical of these criticisms is that philosophers stand aside and formulate judgements from their 'ivory tower'. This type of criticism is presented and analysed in Samuel Gorovitz's article Baiting Bioethics. As Gorovitz explains it, it claims that

the philosopher who espouses stringent standards of informed consent, with no concession to the realities of clinical practices, deserves the scorn of physicians treating patients who may be dysfunctional with fear, pain, or drunkenness, or who otherwise fail to fit the bioethicist's naïve vision of the rational patient[5].  

However, as Gorovitz further suggests, it may be unfair to philosophers to cast so malicious a verdict on their activity. As with other areas of the philosophy of sciences, philosophical medical ethics becomes ever more 'medically literate', and, he argues, it is now current practice that philosophers be informed of the various details of the problems they deal with.

[1] John Harris, Introduction: The Scope and Importance of Bioethics, in John Harris (ed.), Bioethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001:3.

[2] Ibidem note 5.

[3] See for instance Rebecca Bennett & Alan Cribb, The Relevance of Empirical Research to Bioethics: Reviewing the Debate, in Matti Häyry & Tuija Takala (eds.), Scratching the Surface of Bioethics. Amsterdam, Editions Rodopi, 2003. The authors argue against such a model of bioethics, and in favour of an alternative model, which is in their view the correct one, and which 'makes justice' to its multi-disciplinary components.

[4] See for instance Samuel Gorovitz, Baiting Bioethics, Ethics 1986; 96; 2, who presents and then analyses such criticisms addressed to philosophical bioethics.

[5] Ibidem: 362.