What Can Political Philosophers Learn From Bioethicists?

One of the interesting things about working in the interstices between two disciplines is that it makes it easier to see the blindspots that characteristically blight those working in each. What is obscured from one's view by one disciplinary paradigm is revealed in plain view by the other. With this in mind, my next two posts will aim to show suggest what political philosophers could helpfully learn from bioethicists, and (next time) what bioethicists could helpfully learn from political philosophers.

The most important thing that political philosophers could learn from bioethicists is how to go about applying abstract normative theories to the real world. Before you've actually tried to do this, it's easy to assume that theory construction is the hard part, and that application of the theory should either be an afterthought, or even left to nonphilosophers. To pick a somewhat arbitrary number though I hope not too inaccurate number, I would estimate that currently 90% of the intellectual effort in analytic political philosophy goes into theory construction.

There are two main problem with this approach. First is that it is simply false to claim that it is easy to apply normative theories to concrete reality. Any normative theory we will attempt to apply will either be consequentialist or nonconsequentialist. If it is consequentialist, then we face two problems: first, how to operationalise our account of the maximandum (e.g. how do we measure pleasure, or preference satisfaction or whatever we think the good to be). And second, how can we be in an epistemological position to be even tolerably certain that Policy A will create a greater balance of good over harm than any of Policies B, C or D? (This difficulty has been brought home to me by work on the ethics of intellectual property. Most people assume that, for example, patents are justified on consequentialist grounds: i.e. that it is better than any other policy for society as a whole if we allow inventors to claim a temporary monopoly on the usage of their invention, in order to encourage further research. However, the research that would support such a claim has simply never been done, and so we are simply not in a position to say whether patents are in general justified in consequentialist terms. More on this here.)

Nonconsequentialist approaches are also very difficult to apply, but for a different reason. Nonconsequentialist approaches face the difficulty that the principles which political philosophers tend to defend are not nearly specific enough to guide policy making in a determinate fashion. (Norman Daniels writes about this problem interestingly and honestly in Justice and Justification. As you'll probably know, Daniels was a student of Rawls. He decided to apply Rawls' Theory of Justice to Healthcare, initially thinking that this would be a rather easier task than it in fact turned out to be. As Daniels soon discovered, Rawls' theory as it stood said nothing about health and healthcare, other than making the very unhelpful assumption that the contractors would be healthy over a normal lifespan! So Rawls' theory needed to be extended and specified: but it wasn't even clear to Daniels where he should place health in a Rawlsian system - as an additional primary good; to be covered by the opportunity principle; or by the difference principle. And once he decided to account for health with the opportunity principle, a whole host of other problems of specification presented themselves).

The second objection to the lack of focus on application, is somewhat more polemical. Making the world a more just place simply ought to be part of what political philosophers take themselves to be doing; and they can only do this if they focus on solving problems as we face them in the real world. (As Dewey put it in The Need for a Recovery in Philosophy, "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.")

Just to make this point a bit more contentious, I now present the Parable of the Bridge Builders.

Arthur was a goodly man from the town of Strife. One day he decided to build a bridge so that the residents of Strife could more easily cross over the river to the Promised Land. So he called all the town's bridge builders to assemble, and arranged for each of them to put their case.

First up were Pragmatic Builders. They said, "We won't try to build you the best possible bridge, but we'll build you a solid and sturdy bridge that can carry people over to the Promised Land, come rain, come shine. And to make it easier, we'll build on the foundations of the old bridge, and use the same types of timber that have been used before."

Next up were Ideal Theory Constructions. Their foreman (a good but diffident man called Rawls) said: "I don't want to build you the best bridge that can be made now, out of the materials to hand. I have a plan for the very best sort of bridge there could possibly be, given the nature of the human beings it must carry, and the sorts of materials we might plausibly be able to use." He handed over a 587 page book containing his plan.

Last up were Fact Free Builders. Their foreman, a clever witty man named Cohen said: "I want to go further. It's not enough to give you a plan for the best sort of bridge, given human nature, and the sorts of materials we might be able to use. I'm interested in the very best bridge, period. And the very best bridge cannot depend on any facts about what human beings are like, or what materials are available."

On hearing this, Arthur said to the builders: "I see how the Pragmatic Builders' bridge might help people cross the river to the Promised Land. But I don't see how yours will help".

Rawls said, "Building good bridges is very hard. In order to understand how to build good bridges, we need to abstract from some of the problems we face in building real bridges. Once we understand how to build ideal bridges, then we should perhaps be able to say something more plausible about how to build bridges designed for the real world."

Cohen said, "I'm interested in the ideal bridge. Of course, given the kinds of people we are, and given our circumstances, there may be good reason to go for the Pragmatic Bridge now. But it's important that we be aware precisely in what ways the Pragmatic Bridge falls short of the Perfect Bridge".

On hearing this, Arthur retained the Pragmatic Builders, as the people were crying out to reach the Promised Land.