Postponed

Dave will begin by outlining some familiar problems with relating academic bioethics to practical policy making, such as technical language, implausible recommendations, abstract problems and thought experiments. Dave then construes practical ethics as a form of advice and suggest ethicists have a responsibility to avoid both bad advice and bad advising. Inasmuch as the advice must be feasible there is a problem with the relation between normative ethics and the empirical matter of general support for the former’s recommendations. He will criticise an overly simple model of this relation. There is a likely lack of congruence between what practical ethics thinks justified and what would be legitimate or politically stable. Dave will then suggest and evaluate three possible solutions to the problem: public education; moral compromise; ethical expertise.

He will conclude with a thought about the way in which those in academic bioethics work and its unsuitability for making effective policy.

And will be summarising some arguments and thoughts from three published papers:

 

• ‘Philosophical Advice’ Philosophy 2021: 1-21

 

 

• ‘Moral Compromise’ Philosophy 87(3) July 2012: 403 – 420

 

 

• ‘Ethical expertise: the good citizen and the good agent,’ Zeitschrift Fur Ethik und Moralphilosophie 3(2) 2020: 337-344