John Rawls, Godfather of Bioethics.
John Rawls
bioethics
neoliberalism
public reason
speech acts
Journal
The Hastings Center report
ISSN: 1552-146X
Titre abrégé: Hastings Cent Rep
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 0410447
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
11 2021
11 2021
Historique:
entrez:
14
12
2021
pubmed:
15
12
2021
medline:
18
1
2022
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
At a time when ethical and political philosophy were thought passé, John Rawls gave serious attention to ethical questions, providing them with a renewed academic legitimacy. This helped fields of practical ethics such as bioethics become established in higher education and in public affairs. This essay addresses the influence Rawls has had on bioethics through both the style and the substance of his ethical argumentation. The essay argues that his distinctive rhetorical strategy and tone attempted to rein in the scope of normative commitments in order to make an equilibrium between refined understandings of freedom and equality possible and sustainable. Bioethics has been strongly influenced by this approach to maintaining social stability in a liberal society that has become highly stratified and culturally diverse. Bioethics continues to echo the Rawlsian call for a calmly reasoned political life but finds that call increasingly difficult to answer.
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
51-53Informations de copyright
© 2021 The Hastings Center.
Références
For a refresher course on Rawls's work, see S. Freeman, “Introduction: John Rawls-an Overview,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. S. Freeman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1-61.
J. Kniess, “Health Justice and Rawls's Theory of Justice at Fifty: Will New Thinking about Health and Inequality Influence the Most Influential Account of Health Justice?,” Hastings Center Report 51, no. 6 (2021): 44-50.
See J. D. Arras, Methods in Bioethics: The Way We Reason Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
J. G. Finlayson and F. Freyenhagen, “Introduction: The Habermas-Rawls Dispute-Analysis and Reevaluation,” in Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political, ed. J. G. Finlayson and F. Freyenhagen (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1-24.
For two critical discussions of Rawls on this point, see P. Miller, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (London: Verso, 2005), 103-12, and S. S. Wolin, Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 260-82.
On what I mean by “architectonic” theorizing, see B. Jennings, “Relational Ethics for Public Health: Interpreting Solidarity and Care,” Health Care Analysis: Journal of Health Philosophy and Policy 24, no. 4 (2019): 4-12.
T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).