Speculative Argument and Bioethics

Speculative reason is an important aspect of practical reason and one of the core activities in Socratic moral reason. Speculating, or posing ‘what if?’ questions when reasoning about ethics can take a number of forms and these are some of the most useful methodological tools for bioethics. Perhaps the most common form of speculative reason for bioethics is the argument from analogy, which involves comparing an ethical response to one situation with our response to another similar situation to see whether we are consistent in our ethical judgment. Speculative reason can aim at deepening our moral understanding by making the implications of ethical choices more vivid. A third form of speculative reason is what I call an intuition pump. Speculative reason is used to tease out intuitions about a possible but hypothetical situation in order to advance our ethical thinking about similar cases. Finally, speculative reason can have a more heuristic function in that it encourages us to think about an area of ethics in a different way.