Four Spectres of Bioethics

Abstract

Bioethics continues to be frustrated by dubious methodological habits and assumptions that it would be much better off without. This chapter describes four of the five methodological spectres that continue to frustrate bioethics. The first is the ‘moral mantra mistake’, which is the problematic way in which principles can be recited as if their mere utterance justified a moral position. The ‘tedious theory tendency’ refers to the assumption that moral theories are the route by which we can understand how we reason about ethics. Theoretically driven approaches to bioethics overdetermine the answer to an ethical question, so they are like a ‘sausage machine’ that converts a range of substances into a single output. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, there is a tendency for some disciplines to plead that their discipline is fact crucial for bioethics, and that idea is what I call ‘the snooty specialist spectre’.