Table Of Contenti
Methods in Bioethics
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Methods in Bioethics
The Way We Reason no W
John D. Arras
Edited by
James Childress and Matthew Adams
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1
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To My Family:
My wife, Liz Emrey
My daughters, Melissa and Marina and their husbands, Mark and Jeff
My grandchildren, Luke, John, Grace, Gabriel and Alex
My brother, Dr. Ernest E. Arras, whose provocative and thoughtful discussions
about bioethics sparked this book
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“So I sat there and smoked my cigar until I fell into a reverie. Among others I
recall these thoughts. You are getting on, I said to myself, and are becoming
an old man without being anything, and without really taking on anything.
Wherever you look about you on the other hand, in literature or in life,
you see the names and figures of the celebrities, the prized and acclaimed
making their appearances or being talked about, the many benefactors of
the age who know how to do favours to mankind by making life more and
more easy, some with railways, others with omnibuses and steamships,
others with the telegraph … then suddenly this thought flashed through my
mind: You must do something, but since with your limited abilities it will be
impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the
same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, take it upon yourself to make
something more difficult. This notion pleased me immensely …”
soren kierkegaard, trans. Alastair Hannay, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 156–7.
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Contents
Editorial Note ix
Preface xv
1. Principlism: The Borg of Bioethics 1
2. A Common Morality for Hedgehogs: Bernard Gert’s Method 27
3. Getting Down to Cases: The Revival of Casuistry in Bioethics 45
4. Nice Story, but So What? Narrative and Justification in Ethics 75
5. Dewey and Rorty’s Pragmatism and Bioethics 100
6. Freestanding Pragmatism in Bioethics and Law 138
7. A Method in Search of a Purpose: The Internal Morality of Medicine 155
8. One Method to Rule Them All? Reflective Equilibrium in Bioethics 175
9. Concluding Reflections: Method in Bioethics— The Very Idea 203
Index 213
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Editorial Note
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The late John d. arras was a rigorous scholar, brilliant teacher, remarkable col-
league, generous collaborator, eager and witty conversationalist, splendid human
being, and a great friend to many. At the height of his powers, unbowed by an
assortment of ailments, he died suddenly and unexpectedly on March 9, 2015, at
age sixty-n ine. At the time of his death, he was the William and Linda Porterfield
Professor of Bioethics, Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Public Health Sciences,
and a core faculty member of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities in
the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia (UVA). He was also a long- time
fellow of the Hastings Center, a major research center in bioethics.
A native Californian, John completed his undergraduate studies in philoso-
phy and French at the University of San Francisco; his collegiate years included a
year at the Institute of European Studies and University of Paris. He received his
Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1972. While completing his
doctorate, he and his wife, Liz Emrey, served as Peace Corps volunteers in Sierra
Leone. After teaching philosophy at the University of Redlands for a decade, he
taught bioethics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-M ontefiore Medical
Center in the Bronx for fourteen years.
In 1995, following a national search, John was appointed to the newly estab-
lished Porterfield Chair in Bioethics at UVA. Given a mandate to develop an under-
graduate program in bioethics, he did so with a flourish, involving faculty from
several departments in building a model interdisciplinary program that earned
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