Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6367

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Publication type: Journal Article

Pauer-studer H.
Public Reason and Bioethics
Medscape General Medicine. 2006;8(4):13. 2006; 8:(4):13
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/544483_print

Full text:

Pauer-Studer H.
Public Reason and Bioethics
Medscape General Medicine. 2006;8(4):13.
Posted 10/17/2006
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/544483_print

Introduction

Bioethics has been established as a prominent philosophical discipline.
Philosophers have commented on bioethical issues in publications, lectures,
and as members and critics within ethics committees. Furthermore, they have
been analyzing the problems and have presented suggestions for legal
regulations. Even though the philosophical contribution to the public debate
about bioethics is impressive, philosophical approaches concerning this
problem area have not been concerned enough with the fact of pluralism (ie,
with the fact that we live in a value pluralist society whose members adhere
to divergent philosophical and religious doctrines). The fact of pluralism
is taken into account; however, most of the time it is assumed more or less
that agreement can be achieved by a proposal of a solution as long as this
is justified on the basis of a philosophically well-founded theory.
Basically it is not considered whether barriers arise out of a commitment of
the members of a society to different philosophical or religious doctrines,
barriers that prevent agreement.

Nobody else has taken the philosophical challenge through the fact of
pluralism so seriously as John Rawls. With his conception of political
liberalism, Rawls proposed a theory about what a society is supposed to do
in order to take value pluralism into account and still be able to develop a
political solution for fundamental questions. Rawls never commented on
questions about bioethics other than 2 exceptions. The exceptions are in a
footnote concerning the question of abortion in his book Political
Liberalism[1,2] and Rawls’s signing of the Philosophers’ Brief, the 1997
amicus curiae petition of leading moral philosophers to the US Supreme
Court, with the plea to recognize a constitutionally guaranteed right to
assisted suicide.³ However, I think Rawls’s conception of political
liberalism provides valuable information about how a democratic society
should deal with bioethical questions.

After some short remarks in regard to the methodological self-perception of
bioethics, I will elucidate the central conception of Rawls’s political
liberalism, the conception of the public use of reason. I argue for an
extended understanding of Rawls’s definition of public reason so that this
ideal is also binding for the discussion of bioethical questions in ethics
committees. Finally, I will discuss the resulting consequences for the
methodological framework of bioethics and for the role of members in ethics
committees.