Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Biomedical Ethics Research Group, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia.
Monash Bioeth Rev. 2020 Dec;38(2):129-145. doi: 10.1007/s40592-020-00115-z.
Bioethicists often defend novel practices by drawing analogies with practices that we are already familiar with and currently tolerate. If some novel practice is less bad than some widely-accepted practice, then (it is argued) we cannot rightly reject it. Using the bioethics literature on xenotransplantation and interspecies blastocyst complementation as a case study, I show how this style of argument can go awry. The key problem is that our moral intuitions about familiar practices can be distorted by their seeming normality. When considering the ethics of emerging technologies and novel practices, we should remain open to the possibility that our moral views about familiar practices are mistaken.
生物伦理学家经常通过将新颖的实践与我们已经熟悉并目前容忍的实践进行类比来为这些实践辩护。如果某些新颖的实践比某些广泛接受的实践的坏处更少，那么（有人认为）我们就不能正确地拒绝它。我将使用关于异种移植和种间胚胎互补的生物伦理学文献作为案例研究，展示这种论点风格是如何出错的。关键问题是，我们对熟悉实践的道德直觉可能会被它们看似的正常性所扭曲。在考虑新兴技术和新颖实践的伦理问题时，我们应该对我们对熟悉实践的道德观点可能存在错误持开放态度。
