Moral questions are getting more complex, and productive moral conversation is getting harder to find. This is not the situation that everybody hoped for. There has long been a vague promise that science, technology, and democracy might gradually make moral questions and conversations easier. The research from various scientific disciplines clearly has relevance for moral values, but as this research gets more sophisticated so do the moral questions it elicits, and moral conversations are having a hard time keeping up. Technology has certainly brought the world into greater interaction, but that has not made productive moral conversation more common. In fact, as the world becomes more interconnected, people are discovering just how significant are the moral disagreements they have with other people and that there is no simple resolution to most of them.1
Democracy also complicates things. Under democratic ideals, individuals are valuable in and of themselves and deserve discretion over how they live their lives. Within quite broad social limits, this effectively allows each person to determine what he or she accepts as the morally right thing, and so democracies have become societies filled with moral authorities all who believe their personal moral values are the right ones.
One might think that an increasing awareness of moral diversity would prompt people to become more circumspect about whether they have the right answers to moral questions, but instead moral certainty prevails. It appears not just among religious folk who find their moral resolve emboldened by authoritative traditions and the support of similar-minded community members,2 but also among many scientific folk, who have become ever more convinced that science has provided indubitable answers to human questions about value.3 This moral certainty often empowers a frenetic moral indignation that intensifies the intractability of moral disagreements.4
Five Styles of Moral Deliberation
Perhaps if there existed a group of specialists who were trained to resolve these moral disagreements, then they could provide the means to bring some clarity and accord to things. Indeed, there is such a specialization, and it is called applied ethics, but one will be disappointed if one hopes it will bring clarity and order. Applied ethics experiences the same sort of problems with moral conversation as the world at large, but it certainly is the right place to start a discussion of what is at the core of the difficulties.
Applied ethics appeared as a distinct intellectual discipline 50 years ago, primarily in the USA, as rising moral complexity created the need for intellectual clarity. Mounting concerns over social issues such as the War in Vietnam and racial equality filled the attention of a variety of professionals and intellectuals. Medical practitioners were especially interested in finding answers to the conflicts they were experiencing between medical science and patient autonomy and social utility. The techniques of law and moral philosophy with their objective and rationalist approaches to deliberation quickly became the most influential in the burgeoning field.5 But from the outset there was a variety in approach, with many methods being reactions to others or representing the specialized techniques of a particular professional discipline. The resulting styles of deliberation may be discussed under the five following headings.
Applied Philosophical Deliberation
The majority of intellectual reflection on ethical deliberation has sought to take the resources of moral philosophy and apply them to the analysis of ethical issues,6 but there is considerable disagreement about how this is to be done. Many philosophers of applied ethics will take as their task the application of general moral theory to particular ethical problems. The most common method, at least ideally, entails the application of moral principles, usually duty oriented ones or utilitarian ones, to the issues. Duty oriented deliberation considers which moral duties are applicable to a case, and whether there are priorities among them.7 Consequences of actions have no direct bearing on moral judgments. Utilitarian deliberation, on the other hand, considers how individual or social utility may be maximized in choice outcomes.8 Rules have no direct bearing on a moral outcome, unless one appeals to the utility resulting from following a particular rule. In both applications, the reasoning process is scrutinized for logical consistency and conceptual clarity, and empirical data is used, if used at all, only to contextualize the issue under analysis. A clear demarcation between facts and values is retained, along with an attempt to remain aloof from parties and issues in the case, with the goal that the conclusion of the deliberation has a moral justification that has the same rational necessity as logic and mathematics.
Two alternatives to these standard approaches came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Casuistry experienced a revival under the influence of Stephen Toulmin and Albert Jonsen. It deliberates over a moral case by attending to significant details of the case and identifying arguments and maxims that apply to those sorts of cases. Appeals are made to paradigm cases that have established moral precedent for the current case.9 Principlism, which is primarily associated with the work of Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, espouses four ethical principles: autonomy, beneficience, nonmaleficience, and justice. Arguing that these principles are drawn from the tradition and practice of healthcare, Beauchamp sees them not primarily as norms to be applied, but as guidelines that prove helpful in shaping policy. The act of ethical deliberation involves discovering imaginative ways of specifying these principles in application to a case and balancing the conflicting interests that result.10 Although a mainstay of biomedical and clinical ethics, this style has had an influence across all subdisciplines of applied ethics.
Discourse ethics is a methodology framed to compensate for the cold and calculating style many find in all four of the above approaches. Instead of focusing on the content of ethical deliberation, this method focuses on the requirements for the process of deliberation. Primarily connected with the philosophical work of JĻrgen Habermas, it seeks to embody and extend the ideals of the Western enlightenment and liberal democracy. Embracing the reality of diversity and emphasizing individual autonomy and human interaction, the method is constructed as a means to respect individual perspectives while establishing universally agreed upon claims for what is right through the free participation of all affected parties in moral conversation.11
While the above approaches frame ethical deliberation as decisions about specific dilemmas, virtue ethics focuses on the character of the actor and the inclination of actors to seek out excellence in the midst of a moral community. Specific rules or principles are not the primary interest. Instead, the central question is how a virtuous person would act in a particular case. This approach is notable because of its efforts to retrieve communal emphases in ethical analysis.
Massive amounts of talented intellectual energy have been expended in applying these methodologies to specific issues in the last 50 years, but none of the approaches escape severe criticism. The impersonality and abstraction connected with the deontological and utilitarian approaches are troubling to many, as well as the feeling that they are not particularly helpful in considering specific ethical cases because they cannot leap the chasm between theory and practice.12 Critics of casuistry worry that it holds unstated theoretical assumptions and its appeal to intuitive judgment in the selection of details, maxims, and relevant cases can uncritically reinforce established ethical norms.13 Critiques of principlism note that it tends to retain much of the abstraction of moral theory, doesnāt necessarily yield very specific conclusions, and provides no clear guidance on how to resolve the inevitable conflicts between the principles.14 A few efforts have been made to utilize discourse ethics in areas like bioethics and business ethics, but these remain very broad and only suggestive, and it is not clear that it can provide helpful conclusions.15 And virtue ethics remains open to charges of cultural relativity in its pronouncements, and there still is no clear technique for interpreting and applying the injunction ādo the virtuous thing.ā
Empirical Deliberation
The impact of empiricism, particularly empirical science, in defining the modern Western world cannot be overemphasized. It transformed an intellectual landscape characterized by narrow rationalism and arbitrary superstition into one rooted in systematic physical experiments and arguments based on sensory evidence. It spawned technologies that have alleviated human suffering and created a higher standard of living for many portions of the human population. Although it has been applied across all intellectual disciplines, empiricism retains a persistently awkward relationship to ethics. Anyone who attempts to use empirical data in ethical reasoning may be accused of committing the so-called naturalistic fallacy. This is the logical mistake of trying to generate an ethical obligation from a description of reality. One must keep facts and values separate, and empirical science can therefore have little or nothing to say about ethical values. Indeed, many versions of empirical science continue to give some lip service to this distinction, by claiming that they are just looking for empirical facts and are not value driven. But in spite of this disavowal, empirical descriptions of truth have been so powerful and productive that almost everyone in Western civilization assumes at least an implicit connection between empirical findings and ethical value, although they find it difficult to explicate.
An empirical orientation in ethics gained considerable momentum in the 1990s, particularly in bioethics and clinical ethics. Often called empirical ethics or evidence-based ethics, or in some manifestations pragmatic ethics, the approach argues that a variety of data are critical to the framing of ethical responses, and points out that philosophical efforts in ethics often have ignored empirical evidence in framing ethical solutions. The relevant data might include, in the case of clinical ethics, for example, not just the study of what treatments tend to work best or what diagnostic procedures are more painful or intrusive than others but also the cultural beliefs of patients about medical treatment and doctor-patient relationships, the tendencies of patients to prefer certain ethical outcomes, and the actual results that have been achieved by different ethics policies. This data can provide new insights into the shape of what ought to be done and may even give birth to ethical norms that are counter to established ethical or medical traditions.16
Many are leery that empirical approaches smuggle in unstated assumptions and value judgments. For example, the assumption that the most important human values can be described and captured by empirical investigation is highly limiting and potentially dangerous. Indeed, practitioners of empirical disciplines often fail to admit the limits of their work, assuming that the method can discern all the workings of the universe,17 that solutions to problems will have empirical form, and that it is easy to avoid human bias in shaping the results of empirical investigations.
Instrumental Deliberation
Instrumental reason looks for the most efficient way to achieve desired ends and often takes the form of active and rational problem solving. In regard to practical ethic...