Hoffmaster Barry, Hooker Cliff
Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
Bioethics. 2009 May;23(4):214-25. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2009.01709.x.
Analytic moral philosophy's strong divide between empirical and normative restricts facts to providing information for the application of norms and does not allow them to confront or challenge norms. So any genuine attempt to incorporate experience and empirical research into bioethics--to give the empirical more than the status of mere 'descriptive ethics'--must make a sharp break with the kind of analytic moral philosophy that has dominated contemporary bioethics. Examples from bioethics and science are used to illustrate the problems with the method of application that philosophically prevails in both domains and with the conception of rationality that underlies this method. Cues from how these problems can be handled in science then introduce summaries of richer, more productive naturalist and constructivist accounts of reason and normative knowledge. Liberated by a naturalist approach to ethics and an enlarged conception of rationality, empirical work can be recognized not just as essential to bioethics but also as contributing to normative knowledge.
分析道德哲学在经验与规范之间的强烈划分，将事实限制于为规范的应用提供信息，而不允许事实去直面或挑战规范。因此，任何将经验和实证研究纳入生物伦理学的真正尝试——赋予经验比单纯“描述性伦理学”更高的地位——都必须与主导当代生物伦理学的那种分析道德哲学彻底决裂。来自生物伦理学和科学领域的例子，用以说明在这两个领域中哲学上占主导地位的应用方法以及作为该方法基础的理性概念所存在的问题。从科学领域处理这些问题的方式中得到的线索，进而引出了对更丰富、更具成效的自然主义和建构主义关于理性与规范知识的阐述的总结。通过自然主义的伦理学方法和扩展了的理性概念获得解放后，实证工作不仅可以被视为生物伦理学必不可少的部分，而且还能为规范知识做出贡献。
