Tollefsen C
Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, Columbia 29208, USA.
J Med Philos. 2000 Feb;25(1):77-106. doi: 10.1076/0360-5310(200002)25:1;1-V;FT077.
Recent work done at the intersection of classical American pragmatism and bioethics promises much: a clarified self-understanding for bioethics, a modus vivendi for progress, and liberation from misguided and misguiding theories and principles. The revival of pragmatism outside bioethics in the past twenty years, however, has been of a distinctly anti-realist orientation. Richard Rorty, for example, has urged that there is no objective truth or good for philosophy to be concerned with. I ask whether the work in Pragmatic Bioethics follows this perilous Rortyan trend. It will move towards anti-realism if its account of the good abandons any notion of truth or objectivity, and if, in its discussion of specific problems, it divides these problems into public and the private, urging consensus as the goal of the one, and an unconstrained notion of happiness as the goal of the other. In a final section, I suggest that bioethics done in the spirit of Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty might have much to offer to those dissatisfied with anti-realism.
为生物伦理学带来更清晰的自我认知，为进步提供一种临时妥协的方式，并摆脱误导性的理论和原则。然而，在过去二十年里，实用主义在生物伦理学之外的复兴呈现出明显的反现实主义倾向。例如，理查德·罗蒂就主张，哲学无需关注客观真理或善。我探讨了实用主义生物伦理学的研究是否遵循罗蒂这种危险的倾向。如果它对善的阐述摒弃了任何真理或客观性的概念，并且在讨论具体问题时，将这些问题划分为公共问题和私人问题，把达成共识作为前者的目标，把不受约束的幸福概念作为后者的目标，那么它将走向反现实主义。在最后一部分，我认为，秉持罗伊斯《忠诚哲学》精神开展的生物伦理学，或许能为那些不满反现实主义的人提供很多有价值的东西。
