This Is Bioethics. Udo Schüklenk
produced by the Canadian federal research funding agencies for health research, the natural sciences and engineering as well as the humanities and social sciences.
3.21 These guidelines are binding regulatory documents for researchers funded by these agencies, not merely expressions of good intentions or an ethics wish‐list of a kind.
3.22 You might want to investigate in what roles bioethicists function in your national medical association, research funding agencies and the like.
3.23 In the next section we will introduce some common patterns of argument that you will come across in bioethics and we will demonstrate where, and how they fall short. The kinds of common fallacious arguments that you can find in bioethics are arguments flagged prominently in any number of critical thinking or rhetoric textbooks. This section is not meant to replace these textbooks (e.g. Hunter 2009; Vaughn 2010). Its objective is to red‐flag arguments that you should be concerned about when you come across them in bioethics related articles, whether in academic journals or in the news media.
3.5 Common Arguments in Bioethics
3.24 Some arguments are treated as if they were ‘knock‐down’ arguments. So what is a ‘knock‐down’ argument? In simple terms, it is an argument that is regarded as decisive. Nathan Ballantyne has examined definitions of knock‐down arguments and suggests that they are arguments that ought to bring about agreement, were everyone to understand them, while lacking ‘defeaters’ for thinking they understand (Ballantyne 201344). In other words, they are not aware of good reasons for rejecting the argument. There is a view, however, that there are no knockdown arguments in philosophy – everything is open to question ‐ and thus in bioethics in so far as it is a sub‐branch of philosophy, but certain arguments are used as if they were knockdown arguments.
3.25 Sometimes this amounts simply to giving a proposed intervention or policy a description, such as ‘that would count as eugenics’, the implication being that eugenics is something to which no right‐thinking person would subscribe (see the section on slippery slopes, below). Alternatively, someone might say ‘That would be unlawful’. But in ethics, what is unlawful is not the end of the story as we saw in Chapter 1. What the law should be is the important question.
3.6 Playing God
3.26 The view that one should not ‘play God’ is commonly expressed in situations where one person or group of people is making decisions about the lives of others (such as whether they should live or die), or using new technologies that go beyond what humans have been able to do before, for example, using gene editing techniques to ‘design’ future children. When we start to look into exactly what is meant by ‘playing God’, however, we are forced to ask if there is anything to it more than mere rhetoric. Is it actually an argument at all, let alone a knockdown one? A generous interpretation, which does not dismiss it entirely, is that it is shorthand for different kinds of claims (Gillon 199945). In the first type of case, where someone has the power to decide whether another should live or die, it expresses a point about equality, that it is wrong for someone to consider themselves to be sufficiently superior to another to take a decision about the worthwhileness of another’s life. This is at least an understandable argument, but it fails to deal with the fact that sometimes decisions about whom to save are inescapable, although it may be claimed that such decisions do not inevitably involve decisions about the value of another’s life.
3.27 In the second type of case, ‘playing God’ may be regarded as a warning about the possible adverse consequences of ‘going too far’. In this sense it is closest to what are arguably the roots of the ‘playing God’ argument, the notion of ‘hubris46’ in Greek mythology. Individuals who displayed hubris, or excessive pride, were liable to severe punishment for putting themselves on a par with the gods and trying to rise above the proper limits of human beings. Arguments about interfering with nature (see below), and opening ourselves and the planet to unforeseeable risks, express similar concerns.
3.28 In this sense the ‘playing God’ argument may reduce to a type of consequentialist argument, advising us to be aware of dangerous consequences when taking decisions in conditions of uncertainty. There are well established strategies for assessment and management of risks in such circumstances, but the fact that in dealing with new developments there are many ‘unknown unknowns’ remains for some a matter of considerable concern.
3.7 Unnatural and Abnormal
3.29 In public debates about the introduction of new technologies you will frequently come across arguments of the kind that the use of certain technologies is variously ‘unnatural’ or ‘abnormal’, and that that establishes their moral wrongness. Historically we have seen this initially not so much in the context of technologies but in the context of opposition to homosexuality. The view expressed here was that homosexuality is morally objectionable because it is seen as unnatural and/or abnormal. But what is meant by unnatural or abnormal? Homosexuality is something that occurs in nature, both human (Crooks and Baur 2014) as well as non‐human (Sommer 2006) It is something that does not violate the laws of physics, so it definitely is a natural thing. What proponents of the view that homosexuality is unnatural really mean is that in their view homosexuality violates their normative understanding of what human nature should be like. Influential thinkers as varied as the Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas47 (1225–1274) and enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant48 (1724–1804) have tried to deliver rationales in support of such an understanding, with limited success (Soble 200349).
3.30 Similar problems arise in arguments involving claims of abnormality. Normality describes nothing other than a statistical average. And while it is true that homosexuality is not your average expression of sexuality, it’s also true that describing that tells us nothing about the morality, or the desirability or otherwise of homosexuality. People driving Rolls Royce motorcars, flying on private jets, or those owning golden Rolex wristwatches are all abnormal, compared to the average person driving a car, flying on a plane, or owning a watch. None of that tells us anything about the morality of owning luxury cars and watches or flying on a private airplane. The reason for this is that these types of arguments commit a naturalistic fallacy.
3.31 David Hume 50, one of the most influential philosophers of the English‐speaking world, argued in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) that it is ‘altogether inconceivable’ (and a logic error) to form or derive value judgments from facts alone. According to this view empirical premises cannot give rise to normative conclusions (Hume, T3.1.1.27). There is a great entry51