Title: Negotiating Bioethical Conflicts - Is Procedural Ethics the Answer?
Jacquelin Chin
Center for Biomedical Ethics
This paper will consider the problem of value pluralism and disagreements over the use of science and technology, deploying the biomedical sciences as a heuristic. Wide recognition of the intractability of bioethical debates today has led to a claim that ethical convergence or consensus will be possible only at the procedural level, but no agreement on substantive values in bioethics can be expected.
The inadequacies of liberal constructions of procedural ethics (e.g. Utilitarian, Kantian, Rawlsian) have led scholars to describe new forms of proceduralism in bioethics. For example, in 2006, contributors to a volume entitled Global Bioethics edited by H. Tristram Engelhardt announced the "collapse of consensus" and the impossibility of a global bioethics, advocating (instead) hermeneutically-driven narratives as an ethically laudable procedure for discovering shared grounds for the purpose of forging tolerance/understanding/agreement/cooperation in the face of moral diversity. Even this approach collapses, as sharp but courteous disagreements emerge among commentators in that volume.
Are all proposals for procedural ethics a) ultimately mere disguises for non-neutral substantive ethical outlooks, or b) mere procedures and hence powerless to overcome moral disagreement? Can we give sense to a genuinely serviceable procedural ethics - or something like it - that can do real work in the area of conflict resolution? I shall argue that the notion of 'improving ethical judgement' is needed in an account of procedural ethics, i.e., that procedural ethics should be instrumental to ethical growth within moral communities. Developing hermeneutical sensitivity is part of its account, but also such things as understanding how different kinds of norms interlock, and a recognition that achieving justice between moral strangers is likely to depend on a wide range of non-ethical resources.