Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Theor Med Bioeth. 2021 Aug;42(3-4):155-168. doi: 10.1007/s11017-021-09549-w. Epub 2021 Nov 30.
Can discussion with members of the public show philosophers where they have gone wrong? Leslie Cannold argues that it can in her 1995 paper 'Women, Ectogenesis and Ethical Theory', which investigates the ways in which women reason about abortion and ectogenesis (the gestation of foetuses in artificial wombs). In her study, Cannold interviewed female non-philosophers. She divided her participants into separate 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice' groups and asked them to consider whether the availability of ectogenesis would change their views about the morality of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. The women in Cannold's study gave responses that did not map onto the dominant tropes in the philosophical literature. Yet Cannold did not attempt to reason with her participants, and her engagement with the philosophical literature is oddly limited, focussing only on the pro-choice perspective. In this paper, I explore the question of whether Cannold is correct that philosophers' reasoning about abortion is lacking in some way. I suggest that there are alternative conclusions to be drawn from the data she gathered and that a critical approach is necessary when attempting to undertake philosophy informed by empirical data.
公众讨论能让哲学家发现自己的错误吗？在 1995 年的论文《女性、体外生育与伦理理论》中，哲学家莱斯利·坎诺尔德（Leslie Cannold）对此进行了探讨，该论文研究了女性在堕胎和体外生育（人工子宫中胎儿的孕育）方面的推理方式。在她的研究中，坎诺尔德采访了一些非哲学家女性。她将参与者分为“支持生命”和“支持选择”两个独立的群体，并询问她们，体外生育的出现是否会改变她们对处理意外怀孕的道德看法。坎诺尔德研究中的女性给出的回应与哲学文献中的主流观点并不一致。然而，坎诺尔德并没有试图与她的参与者进行推理，而且她对哲学文献的参与也非常有限，只关注支持选择的观点。在本文中，我探讨了坎诺尔德关于哲学家在堕胎问题上的推理存在某种缺失的观点是否正确。我认为，从她收集的数据中可以得出其他结论，并且当试图用经验数据来进行哲学研究时，批判性的方法是必要的。
