This Is Bioethics. Udo Schüklenk. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Udo Schüklenk
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Медицина
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781118770733
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Henry Sidgwick also offers a good discussion of the problems surrounding ethical arguments based on ‘God’s will’, nature and abnormal in his Methods of Ethics52 (Sidgwick 1907, Book 1, Chapter VI, §1– §2). Give these a read if time permits.

      3.32 A naturalistic fallacy is committed when we deduce – always falsely – from the way how things are how they ought to be. So, when people say that reproductive human cloning or IVF – i.e. a new way of making babies – is unnatural or abnormal, and therefore wrong, they have committed such a fallacy (Pence 1998). We cannot deduce a moral ought or should from a description of something that merely is. Even if we accepted that these technologies are unnatural – and, arguably we should not even do that – it would not follow that their use is unethical. If we did agree with such a faulty line of reasoning we would quickly find ourselves in a precarious situation where, for consistency’s sake, we would have to object to the use of most human invented technologies. Radiation therapy for various cancers, or MRI scans are no more natural by that definition of naturalness.

      3.34 Among others this was lamented by Adam Schulman, a contributor to an anthology on bioethics and human dignity produced by former US President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics. In his chapter Schulman analyses promising existing normative foundations for the concept of human dignity, and concludes that they all fail. Schulman takes this challenge as a kind of a conceptual call to arms: ‘In short, the march of scientific progress that now promises to give us manipulative power over human nature itself … will eventually compel us to take a stand on the meaning of human dignity, understood as the essential and inviolable core of our humanity’ (Schulman 2008, 17). Ruth Macklin has taken a different approach. She argues in a much‐discussed article in the British Medical Journal that a close inspection […] shows that appeals to dignity are either vague restatements of other, more precise, notions or mere slogans that add nothing to an understanding of the topic’ (Macklin 2003). In her view, in secular bioethics at least, talk of human dignity merely means respect for personal autonomy.

      3.35 David A. Hyman agrees, he writes:

      … in every generation, philosophers, ethicists, religious figures, politicians, and professional worrywarts have cited human dignity as a reason to restrict innovation or prohibit it outright. Consider a few examples. Galileo was forced to recant his heliocentric views because the Roman Catholic Church had already embraced the Ptolemaic system as more consistent with Biblical revelation and with man's dignity as God's creation. Indoor plumbing, the printing press, skyscrapers, the suburbs, automobiles, television, the Sony Walkman™, and the franchise for women were all met with the objection that they were inconsistent with human dignity. The Industrial Revolution, which laid the foundation for the modern world, was criticized because machines were expected to destroy human dignity.

      (Hyman 2003)

      [i]n documents like these [UN declarations, covenants] key terms are deliberately kept vague, since one can only secure an agreement among so many parties at the price of a certain ambiguity. If one were to specify the meaning and grounding force of human dignity, it might be at odds with some parties' deeply entrenched opinions and beliefs. In this case the whole project might fail. Accordingly, there is no explicit attempt to clarify or justify human dignity in these documents.

      (Sensen 2011)

      3.38 In bioethical discourse dignity often means one thing and its opposite. Unsurprisingly, given its vagueness, human dignity is deployed in ethical, political, and even legal contexts in support of diametrically opposing points of view. For instance, both proponents as well as opponents of assisted dying deploy the human dignity trope for their respective ends. The rhetorical tool of human dignity pervades many public policy debates and it is present in many other spheres of social life. Authors often use it to cloak potentially controversial moral considerations in the language of dignity.

      3.40 Nazi arguments are not arguments that Nazis necessarily have defended or put forward. Nazi arguments in bioethics, but not just in bioethics, are primarily deployed to end a particular debate or argument. After all, if a point of view is analogous to something the Nazis did or propagated, it is highly likely that there is a serious flaw in it. Equally, if a particular course of action would lead us down a slippery slope toward something akin to the crimes the Nazis committed, we would also have good reason to not seriously consider that course of action. The utilitarian Peter Singer, an influential secular Jewish philosopher, was accused of promoting points of