Re-Reasoning Ethics

The Rationality of Deliberation and Judgment in Ethics

Barry Hoffmaster, Cliff Hooker, Arthur L. Caplan

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780262345644
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics in Medicine

In Re-Reasoning Ethics, Barry Hoffmaster and Cliff Hooker enhance and empower ethics by adopting a non-formal paradigm of rational deliberation as intelligent problem-solving and a complementary non-formal paradigm of ethical deliberation as problem-solving design to promote human flourishing. The non-formal conception of reason produces broader and richer ethical understandings of human situations, not the simple, constrained depictions provided by moral theories and their logical applications in medical ethics and bioethics. Instead, it delivers and vindicates the moral judgment that complex, contextual, and dynamic situations require.

Hoffmaster and Hooker demonstrate how this more expansive rationality operates with examples, first in science and then in ethics. Non-formal reason brings rationality not just to the empirical world of science but also to the empirical realities of human lives. Among the many real cases they present is that of how women at risk of having children with genetic conditions decide whether to try to become pregnant. These women do not apply the formal principle of maximizing expected utility (as advised by genetic counselors) and instead imagine scenarios of what their lives could be like with an affected child and assess whether they could accept the worst of these scenarios.

Hoffmaster and Hooker explain how moral compromise and a liberated, extended, and enriched reflective equilibrium expand and augment rational ethical deliberation and how that deliberation can rationally design ethical practices, institutions, and policies.

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• I Ethics and Reason
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Difficulties of Applied Ethics
• 3 The Problems Generalized, Diagnosed, and Reframed in a New Account of Reason
• 4 The Problems Resolved in a New Account of Reason
• 5 The Process of Ethical Resolution: Using the Resources of Nonformal Reason
• II Ethics as Design
• 6 Ethics as Design and Its Two Distinctive Methods
• 7 Designing Deliberation
• 8 Designing Practices, Institutions, and Processes
• 9 Designing Policies
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Series Information