Category: Musings (Page 9 of 18)

Stem cell therapy remains a form of treatment

27 February, 2017 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

There is a picture of stem cell therapy: It is in harmony with the body’s own way of functioning. Damaged tissue is regenerated as the body always regenerates tissue: through stem cells maturing into new body cells.

Patients can then hope for a body without a trace of disease: a healed body that takes care of itself as a healthy body does. It is almost as if we were not dealing a treatment at all, for the body restores itself, as it always does.

Stem cell therapy is certainly an important step towards effective treatment of several currently incurable diseases. The methods can also be said to be based on the body’s own way to regenerate tissue.

Nevertheless, I think we should emphasize that stem cell therapies are treatments next to others, with risks and benefits. Cells are transplanted into patients whose immune system can react. The implants may need to be checked regularly, or even be replaced. The transplantation can go wrong. And so on.

Stem cell therapy does not “transcend” all disease treatment hitherto by supporting the body’s own way of healing itself. We are still dealing with treatments of patients, rather than with “salvation from disease.”

Rhetoric of salvation is dangerous. It invites magicians and our faith in them. It justifies sacrifices to the benefit of Mankind. It disturbs our judgement.

Pär Segerdahl

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Not just facts, ideas are also needed

8 February, 2017 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

When fraudulent “academic” journals publish articles without proper peer review. When websites online spread fake information. When politicians talk about alternative facts. Then undeniably, one feels a need for a general tightening up.

A possible problem in this reaction is that we castrate ourselves. That we don’t dare to propose and discuss ideas about the situation we are in. That we don’t dare to think, interpret and analyze. Because we fear being found guilty of error and of contributing to the scandalous inflation of facts and truths.

We hide ourselves in a gray armor of objectivity. In order not to resemble what we react to.

But why do these tendencies occur now? Is it about the internet? Is it about neglected groups of citizens? Is it about economic and political shifts in power?

In order to understand this complex situation and act wisely, we need not just facts but also good questions, thoughts, interpretations and analyses of the situation. If we take that task seriously, we also take relevant facts seriously when we discuss the ideas.

If we react with hypercorrection, with an armor of correctness, we risk repressing our questions about how we should think about our situation. We repress our uncertainty: the motive for thinking, interpreting and analyzing.

Pär Segerdahl

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How should we think about it?

24 January, 2017 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Much debated issues tend to be about how we should view important matters that are also multi-faceted. The school system is important. But there are many ways of thinking about the importance of education; many ways of reasoning about how it should be designed to carry out the important tasks that we think it has.

So how should we think about it?

The question is reflexive. It is about the matter, but also about how the matter should be described. How should we reflect important things in our ways of reasoning about them? It is in this reflexive dimension that we are debating school, health care, freedom of speech, or the ethics of stem cell research. It is a difficult to navigate dimension. We easily go astray in it, but we can also try to find our way in it and become wiser.

Philosophers have felt particularly responsible for this reflexive dimension. They have been thinking about how we think about things, if I may put it that way. They have been thinking about thinking. I do it now, by trying to understand debated issues in terms of a difficult to navigate reflexive dimension. I do not know how successful my attempt is. The risk is that what I call a reflexive dimension appears like a separate realm of pure ideas about things (absolute principles for how we should think).

I do not want to reinvent Platonism. I just want to point out that when we debate something, we reason not only about the matter, but also about how we reason about it. We work on ourselves. Debates that lack such self-awareness tend to be dogmatic and less fruitful.

A name for work on self-awareness could be self-criticism, or thinking. I believe it makes a difference if conversations in a society are marked by the attitude that “the matter” also includes ourselves. Responsibility has its origin in that attitude.

Pär Segerdahl

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The pharmaceutical industry and altruism

16 January, 2017 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

I am currently thinking about a common gut reaction to the pharmaceutical industry. I sometimes have this reaction too, so this is an examination of my own reaction.

The reaction is a feeling of discomfort, when a central actor in the management of something as important as human health and disease is a multibillion-dollar industry with profit as overall goal.

Is it really possible to combine such a businesslike aim with a genuine desire to cure the sick?

Let us compare with another industry that radiates more compassionate desire to cure, namely, alternative medicine. Here too products are sold to people with various ailments. There is clearly a market and a business mindset. Yet the actors on this market radiate more love of mankind. It can sometimes even appear as if the products were manufactured and sold out of pure goodness!

What makes these business practices seem imbued with good will to cure? I suggest that it depends on the strong belief in the healing effects of the products. I do not deny that many of the products have beneficial effects. My point is only that beliefs about good effects are at the forefront and can make the provision of the products appear like an ethical act of noble actors.

The pharmaceutical industry is different from alternative medicine partly through being prohibited from being permeated with beliefs about the healing effects of the products. It is actually illegal for the pharmaceutical industry to act as nobly and compassionately as the actors within alternative medicine. It could invite quackery.

The pharmaceutical industry operates on a highly regulated market. There is specific legislation for pharmaceutical products and special authorities supervising the industry. Satisfying the quality and safety demands often requires decades of research and development. This means huge investment costs, which presupposes profits.

This is how we have solved the problem of providing safe and effective treatments through the health care system. By having a pharmaceutical industry that is not permeated with good faith and good intentions, but instead is highly regulated and supervised. The products must satisfy the quality requirements, period. Beliefs and good intentions are irrelevant.

Research, industry and healthcare together constitute a regulated system for managing health and disease. Within this system, researchers can be driven by curiosity, and industry by profit, while doctors want to cure their patients, and research participants want to support research that could lead to more effective treatments.

The point I am trying to make is that the gut reaction probably overlooks just this division of motives: In order for a whole system to work for the good, not every actor in the system needs to place good intentions first. It can rather pose a risk for the entire system.

There is no reason to glorify the pharmaceutical industry. Rather there are reasons to question it, for example, the marketing of products, which sometimes tries to create the faith that is prohibited in the development and approval of the products.

The industry is not altruistic. It is driven by profit. But through its place within the system it can make altruism and good will possible.

Pär Segerdahl

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The brain develops in interaction with culture

16 November, 2016 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

The brain develops dramatically during childhood. These neural changes occur in the child’s interaction with its environment. The brain becomes a brain that functions in the culture in which it develops. If a child is mistreated, if it is deprived of important forms of interaction, like language and care, the brain is deprived of its opportunities to develop. This can result in permanent damages.

The fact that the brain develops in interaction with culture and becomes a brain that functions in culture, raises the question if we can change the brain by changing the culture it interacts with during childhood. Can we, on the basis of neuroscientific knowledge, plan neural development culturally? Can we shape our own humanity?

In an article in EMBO reports, Kathinka Evers and Jean-Pierre Changeux discuss this neuro-cultural outlook, where brain and culture are seen as co-existing in continual interplay. They emphasize that our societies shape our brains, while our brains shape our societies. Then they discuss the possibilities this opens up for ethics.

The question in the article is whether knowledge about the dynamic interplay between co-existing brains-and-cultures can be used “proactively” to create environments that shape children’s brains and make them, for example, less violent. Environments in which they become humans with ethical norms and response patterns that better meet today’s challenges.

Similar projects have been implemented in school systems, but here the idea is to plan them on the basis of knowledge about the dynamic brain. But also on the basis of societal decision-making about which ethics that should be supported; about which values that are essential for life on this planet.

Personally I’m attracted by “co-existence thinking” as such, which I believe applies to many phenomena. For not only the brain develops in interaction with culture. So does plant and animal life, as well as climate – which in turn will shape human life.

Maybe it is such thinking we need: an ethics of co-existence. Co-existence thinking gives us responsibilities: through awareness of a mistreated nature; through awareness of our dependence on this nature. But such thinking also transcends what we otherwise could have imagined, by introducing the idea of possibilities emerging from the interplay.

Do not believe preachers of necessity. It could have been different. It can become different.

Pär Segerdahl

Evers, K. & Changeux, J-P. 2016. “Proactive epigenesis and ethical innovation: A neuronal hypothesis for the genesis of ethical rules.” EMBO reports 17: 1361-1364.

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What is the risk?

2 November, 2016 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

To communicate about genetic risk with patients, we need to know how people think about risk and that experts and people in general often think differently.

A common feature, however, is this: Risk has to do with future adverse events. We talk about the risk of getting sick. But we rarely talk about the risk of getting well. We must then imagine people who value their disease (perhaps to avoid enrollment in an occupation army).

The expert’s concept of risk presupposes the negative value, but does not delve into it. It focuses on the probability that the unwanted event will happen (and how certain/uncertain the probability is).

For patients, however, the value aspect probably is more in focus. A couple learning about a 25% risk of having a child with a certain disability probably considers how bad such impairment would be: for the child and themselves. Maybe it isn’t so bad? Perhaps there is no great “risk” at all! They evaluate the risk scenario rather than calculate the probability.

How can we understand this value aspect, which risk presupposes and patients ponder? Ulrik Kihlbom at CRB asks the question in an article in the Journal of Risk Research.

Kihlbom describes two common ways of understanding value. The first is in terms of preferences. People have different preferences. Most prefer health before sickness, but occasionally someone may prefer disease. Value lies in satisfying these preferences, whatever they are. There is then only one value: preference satisfaction. The problem is that we can object that these preferences are not always reasonable or well informed. Additionally, patients can adapt to their illness and prefer their lives as much as healthy persons prefer their lives. Is it valuable to satisfy even such preferences?

Not surprisingly, the other way of understanding value is more objective. Here one assumes that value depends on how well certain basic human capabilities are supported. Such as being able to use one’s senses, imagine, think, play, be healthy, etc. Here there is a more objective measure of value. The problem is the authority the measure is given. May not a person lack some of these capabilities and still live a full and dignified life? Who decides which capabilities should belong to the measure?

Actually, I would say that both proposals impose a measure of value. Preference satisfaction is, of course, a general measure too.

Kihlbom proposes a third way of understanding value. No measure of value is imposed and value is not separated from that which has value. If someone gets cancer, the negative value lies already in the disease, so to speak. A person who knows what cancer is does not ask: “Why is it bad to get cancer?” And hardly anybody would answer: “Because it frustrates my preferences” or “Because it prevents me from flourishing as a human being.”

Knowing what disease is means knowing that it is bad. It is part of the point of the word. To exclaim, “I’m so sick!” is to complain (not to rejoice). The value lies in the phenomenon itself and in the word. If some people still value their disease (perhaps to avoid military service), the value lies in the situation where the disease can appear as a good thing.

This is probably how people approach genetic risk information: What does this mean in my life? How bad is it? They immerse themselves in the value aspect, which the numerical probability presupposes. The 25-percent risk of having a child with a certain disability leads to concerns over what such a life might turn out to be like; how it can be described; how it can be valued.

So what should we keep in mind in genetic risk communication? The novelty about genetic risk information is not only that patients get difficult to interpret percentages of probability. The scenarios are new. These scenarios can involve time perspectives that extend throughout one’s future life, even to future generations. They can be about diseases and treatments that we do not know what it means to live with.

We evaluate risks daily (like the risk of missing the train), but here patients encounter novel risk scenarios that are difficult to evaluate. If I understand Kihlbom right, he thinks that the challenge is not only to explain probabilities to patients. The challenge is not least that of talking with patients about these new risk scenarios: about how they react to them in terms of value, how they describe them as “catastrophic” or “not so bad.”

Patients need support to evaluate genetic risk scenarios reasonably; not only to understand probabilities.

Pär Segerdahl

Kihlbom, U. 2016. “Genetic Risk and Value.” Journal of Risk Research, DOI: 10.1080 / 13669877.2016.1200653

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Did medicine save the life of ethics?

18 October, 2016 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

About thirty-five years ago, Stephen Toulmin wrote an article on the topic: How medicine saved the life of ethics. I think it is still worth reading.

Toulmin argued roughly as follows:

During the first six decades of the 1900s, ethics wasn’t feeling well at all. One might say that it suffered from moral aphasia: it couldn’t talk sensibly about real ethical problems.

While moral philosophers were preoccupied with formally specifying what distinguishes moral questions and judgements in general, without taking sides on specific ethical issues, ethics debaters outside of academic philosophy were trapped in the opposition between dogmatism and relativism.

Dogmatists referred respectfully to universal principles and authoritative religious systems, while relativists and subjectivists dismissed the absolute claims with reference to anthropological and psychological findings about differences in people’s attitudes.

In short, while philosophers analyzed what characterizes morality in general and left living ethical issues to their fate, dogmatists and relativists fought fruitlessly about whether these issues have absolute answers, based on universal principles, or if the answers are relative to cultural and individual factors.

In this near-death state, medicine came to the rescue. Medical practices gave rise to very definite ethical questions that insisted on answers and guidance. When philosophers in the 1960s began to pay attention to these issues, ethics was rescued from the life-threatening condition in which it found itself.

Toulmin suggests that medical ethics saved the life of ethics through four resuscitation efforts:

By focusing on situations, needs and interests, which are more objectively given than the attitudes, feelings and desires that anthropology and psychology were interested in. Whether a person’s actions threaten another’s health can be discussed in objective terms, as opposed to questions about habits and tastes.

(Here I think of the emergence of empirical ethics, where more objective aspects of ethical problems are explored in various kinds of studies.)

By analyzing concrete cases, instead of striving towards the universal principles to which dogmatists referred. Toulmin compares medical ethics to medical practice. Diseases described only in general terms become abstract and without specific relevance: they acquire practical relevance only for health professionals who learned the art of identifying real-life cases of the diseases. The same applies to ethics, which requires an art of identifying real-life cases of, for example, “disrespect”; otherwise ethical concepts become abstract and without practical significance.

(Here I think, among other things, of the emergence of ethics rounds in the ethics training of healthcare staff.)

By focusing on professional activities, giving rise to definite responsibilities and duties. To understand our duties to each other, we cannot assume an abstract image of humans as individuals. We live in communities and act in forms of life that shape our obligations. Issues in medical ethics are often about obligations shaped by professional roles and contexts.

(Here I think of the previous blog post, about boundaries between public health and healthcare, which sometimes might be transgressed. Practices such as research, healthcare and industry shape different types of obligation and responsibility, which it sometimes can be difficult to keep separate or balance.)

By reintroducing assessments of equity and personal relationships in ethics, assessments of how the circumstances alter the cases. What, in a doctor-patient relationship, is a routine examination, can outside of this context give us reason to speak of an assault. Circumstances alter the cases, and Toulmin compares medical ethics with how courts make assessments of what is just and reasonable between people, given what we know about them.

(Here I think of how medical ethics increasingly is done in dialogue with patients, health professionals and researchers, to better understand the circumstances.)

– Why do I find Toulmin’s article worth reading today?

Among other things, because it provides a broad and realistic description of ethics as a practice and art, in time and in particular contexts, partly comparable to the doctor’s or the lawyer’s practice and art. The article also makes the development of bioethics understandable, such as the emergence of empirical ethics, of ethics rounds, and of the endeavor to work in dialogue with stakeholders and with the professions.

The article also nuances a simplified understanding of how ethical questions are answered. We are inclined to think that empirical studies give us the facts. Then we add general moral principles and derive the ethical conclusions. This could resemble a relapse into dogmatism, where religious principles have been replaced by secular philosophical principles.

Finally, I want to mention that the article sheds light on a problem that we encountered in some empirical studies lately. Colleagues have made ethical education interventions in different healthcare professions. The participants appreciated the practical exercises and found them instructive. But no clear effect of the exercises could be measured by comparing results of knowledge tests before and after the interventions.

Toulmin’s description of how medicine saved the life of ethics may suggest an explanation. The exercises were practical and concerned cases with which the participants were familiar. But the knowledge tests were formulated roughly in those general terms which constituted such a large part of the illness of ethics. The interventions might have been vitalizing, but not the method of measurement.

Pär Segerdahl

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Intending a philosophical system as the truth of life

15 August, 2016 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

What a joy it is to read a real philosopher! This summer I read David Hume and was puzzled by this question: Why is Hume so stimulating to read, when the experts’ comments to his philosophical system are so tedious? If the system is what’s important, shouldn’t the exposition of the system by knowledgeable commentators be just as stimulating?

Is it because Hume’s writes so beautifully and vividly? But even Kant is philosophically more stimulating than the experts’ comments on Kant, and he isn’t known for writing well. What is it that withers away when a philosopher’s system is expounded?

Hume wants to demonstrate how to think about life. The commentator rather wants to establish how to talk about Hume’s system, as one of several historically given systems. The commentator has a bourgeois function: a philosophical grammar teacher who provides instructions for how to reason correctly as a Humean, as a Kantian, as a Husserlian.

I want to say: the scholar’s exposition stands to the philosopher’s work as a grammar book to a living language. What made it so joyful to read Hume was precisely this: spending some time with native speaker; hearing philosophy actually being spoken and thought.

What is it that flourishes in Hume’s philosophical language, but withers away in the scholarly exposition of his system?

I’d say: Hume’s meaning the system as the truth of life. In Hume, life is in focus, not only the system as a conceptual apparatus. Hume’s system germinates in an attempt to intellectually make sense of life. Hume must laboriously make each new thought evident as a true thought about life. The scholar need not make this risky work, but can confidently present the system as a conceptual apparatus that simply exists. Dubious details should, of course, be pointed out and discussed, but doubting the whole project isn’t the commentator’s task. The system was for God’s sake published in the eighteenth century and is much talked-about!

Hume lives more dangerously: “Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning.” This he writes under the heading, “Conclusions of this book,” where one would expect a victorious summary of the system. How could Hume be unsure of his own system, even in the conclusions? It is his creation! Isn’t he its ultimate authority?

The point is precisely that Hume means his system as the truth of something bigger and more difficult to survey. The system is about life itself. What if it fails! What if there is an error in the connection to what the system should be the truth about!

So my question is: How does one mean a philosophical system as the truth of life? Does one make a heroic effort to speak faithfully as a Humean, always calculating “what Hume would have said”? If you wish to become a Humean, you will probably have do something like that. But it wouldn’t suffice for Hume. The system must really be connected to life itself. The thoughts must really be true thoughts about life. This must be scrupulously ascertained, at each new step. Hume continuously makes this work. He takes responsibility for the system vis-à-vis life. He ensures that it satisfies his extraordinary demands as a sincere thinker.

I am prepared to admit that Hume’s thoughts are connected to life. This connection makes his language flourish as a philosophical language. My question is what the connection looks like and how he interprets it.

This post now takes a new turn. After having expressed the joy of reading Hume as a thinker with a living, flourishing philosophical language, I will place a question mark where commentators don’t usually place their question marks. I place my question mark not inside the system, but in Hume’s intending the system as the truth of life. I place my question mark outside of the scholarly focus on the system itself.

When I read Hume, I also find a sort of profound comedy in his work. Not in the system, but in his thinking. What is comical resides in Hume’s utterly honest claims on the system; in his systematic, causal interpretations of the psychological observations he makes. Hume’s explanation of why we feel pride in certain situations, for example, differs from the explanations we normally would give in the same situations.

We can explain: “No wonder he is proud of that chair; it is beautiful and he spent weeks at designing it!” Hume would explain: “No wonder he is proud of the chair; it has qualities that cause pleasure and it has a relationship to the person.”

The combination of “qualities in the object that cause pleasure” and “relationship to the person” must cause pride – according to the principles of Hume’s system. Hume’s explanation is super-general and uses the concepts and rules of the system. He can repeat exactly the same explanation every time someone is proud.

Hume’s systematic explanation of pride has a point that we can all recognize. Suppose I said: “I am so proud of this chair!” But when you ask, “Have you made it yourself?” I answer, “No, I haven’t seen it before, whose is it?” – You wouldn’t understand how I can be proud of a completely foreign chair!

“I cannot be proud of something that doesn’t have a relation to me.” This could serve as a reminder of a pattern in pride as human phenomenon. But Hume interprets this observation as if he glimpsed an underlying causal mechanism – “in the human mind” – which explains why pride isn’t caused in such situations.

This duality is an important reason why it is such a joy to read Hume. His system is based on fine observations of psychological traits of human life, sometimes almost like in a Jane Austen novel. But he interprets his observations as glimpses of general mechanisms – “in the human mind” – that cause these traits.

Here we have the connection to life, and also Hume’s interpretation of it! Hume interprets his observations of traits of human life as if they revealed underlying causal mechanisms (“in the human mind”) that cause these traits. The interpretation provides intellectual control over life, as if no significant feature of life could surprise Hume anymore.

I’ve noted all instances of, “No wonder, then, …” in Hume’s work. There are many! They occur when he has described an everyday phenomenon of life (such as a situation where someone is proud) and used the system to explain it. The system allows him to wander through life and exclaim, “No wonder!” before every characteristic trait he sees. – Life intellectually explained!

I thus find an unstated dualism in Hume’s thinking:

Phenomena of life / Underlying system

This dualism isn’t part the system and is therefore not in focus for the scholar who expounds the system. The dualism is located in Hume’s claim on the system as the truth of life. It is resides in Hume’s thinking, in his conscientious work to make the system true about life. It is the taken for granted form of systematic philosophical thought.

The dualism intellectualizes life as if it borrowed its traits from general principles. This tendency to always take what is general for what is primary and fundamental – as underlying life – is an intellectual instinct that I believe that today’s philosophy should scrutinize and overcome.

It is about rescuing the connection to life, clearly discernible in Hume’s thinking, from the interpretation of it as a connection to an intellectualized source of all phenomena of life. The connection needs to be rescued, so that those who philosophize about life, as Hume did, can mean their observations as observations of life; rather than as life-penetrating insights into an underlying primary order, which only would be a repetiton, in sublimated form, of what was seen.

The obstacle on our path is that this new question mark, placed not in the system but in the claim on it as the truth of life, will be incomprehensible to experts in the field. Philosophy can flourish again only by freeing itself from the current scholarly grip on it.

Pär Segerdahl

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Research ethics is not only protection ethics

6 June, 2016 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Systems for ethical review of research would never have been developed if it were not for the need to protect research participants from being exploited, exposed to excessive risks, or injured.

Considering how several research scandals strengthened this protection motive, it is easy to believe that protection is the sole aim of research ethics. This is not the case.

The starting point has always been that research is something worthwhile; something ethically important. Medical research provides knowledge that can lead to better diagnoses and more effective treatments. The humanities and social sciences can provide knowledge that supports more informed debates and more thoughtful political decisions.

Ethics review is about striking a balance between ethical values. Are the risks in proportion to the value of the research? Are the risks minimized, or can the research questions be examined more safely? Are research participants properly informed about the research purpose and the risks that participation might entail? Do they get the opportunity to freely decide whether to participate or not?

The “novelty” of research ethics is thus the balancing of ethical values. It’s not that ethical values are turned against research, for research itself is regarded as an ethical value. Also researchers are learning to balance values when they plan their research. The balancing is done not only in the review system, then, but pervades research itself more and more.

Doing the balancing is rarely easy. Moreover, as already mentioned, it is easy to overlook the starting point: that research is regarded as a value. This invites interpreting research ethics as pure protection ethics, which threatens to make ethics review one-sided.

For these reasons, well-written manuals are needed for members of ethical review boards, and for researchers. Manuals that not only inform about regulations and legislation, but also discuss the difficulties of balancing ethical values, and highlight how research ethics is “balance ethics” and not just protection ethics (except when protection law applies).

A new book, Balanced Ethics Review (Springer 2016), by Simon N. Whitney, is such a manual. It is written from within the American review system. But by openly discussing the difficulties of balancing ethical values, and by bringing to the fore how research ethics functions as “balance ethics,” the book has greater universality. – Perhaps precisely where the need for guidance is greatest.

Pär Segerdahl

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Oppositional words simplify thought: A or B?

3 May, 2016 / Pär Segerdahl / 0 Comments

Parties can stand in opposition to each other. But so can words. The word good stands in opposition to the word bad; the word right to the word wrong. And in everyday talk, the word human stands in opposition to the word animal.

Oppositional words are efficient in conversation. If I tell you that I saw an animal, you immediately know that it wasn’t a human I saw. Oppositional words are splendid communicational instruments. They enable quick inferences, like the one about what I saw and didn’t see.

However, oppositional words are not always good to think with. This sounds odd, because we associate thinking with inferences. If oppositional words support inferences, shouldn’t they be absolutely essential to thinking?

The problem is that oppositions support quick inferences, when we need slow ones. They assume a given order, when we need to explore a neglected order.

This we felt intensely at the seminar last Monday, when we discussed empirical ethics. More and more bioethicists do empirical studies (questionnaires, interviews, etc.) of how people look at medical research and care. Based on the empirical studies they then develop normative conclusions, for example, about how ethical guidelines should be formulated.

Empirical ethics thereby seems to sin against a fundamental opposition: that between is and ought. If it is a fact that people from time immemorial cut off the hands of thieves (and thought one should do so), it still does not follow from this fact that one ought to cut off the hands of thieves.

One might say: the is/ought-opposition supports quick inferences about what kind of inferences one cannot make: from an is an ought cannot be extrapolated.

Empirical ethics immediately appears like a ridiculous error. Nothing normative can be derived from mere facts disclosed by surveys and interviews. If such inferences nonetheless are made, they are illegitimate. Empirical studies drain bioethics of normativity, by scooping out of the wrong well.

But is this an accurate description of empirical ethics? Is it just a mistake; like trying to scoop water out of a dry well?

It is easy to accuse empirical ethics in terms of the is/ought-opposition. This makes it seductively easy to think that the only way of defending empirical ethics is by either showing that it honors the is/ought-opposition or rejecting the opposition as false.

– As if oppositions had to be either true or false: another opposition!

You notice here how oppositional words, which work well in conversation, push our thoughts now in this direction, now in that. Instruments that support us when we talk can give us paralyzing shocks when we think. (Don’t try to talk your way out of philosophical problems!)

The discussion about empirical ethics is likely to continue at the seminar. I’m looking forward to it.

Pär Segerdahl

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Category: Musings (Page 9 of 18)

Stem cell therapy remains a form of treatment

Not just facts, ideas are also needed

How should we think about it?

The pharmaceutical industry and altruism

The brain develops in interaction with culture

What is the risk?

Did medicine save the life of ethics?

Intending a philosophical system as the truth of life

Research ethics is not only protection ethics

Oppositional words simplify thought: A or B?

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