rorty postmodern bourgeois liberalism pdf file

I am referring to postmodern relativism, a philosophy that seems capable of undermining any meaningful basis for belief, yet incapable in moral philosophy of providing a workable substitute.

One might ask, then, what is the basis for using four principles to guide ethical decisions? Perhaps the two authors are seeking to escape what is, I think, the bane of useful decision-making in fields like medicine, fields that require real decisions affecting the lives of real people. Beauchamp and Childress refer to mid-level principles. This is not at all the underlying method of the purveyors of “principlism,” however. Physicians who invoke the four principles presume that theirs is a deontological approach grounded in universal values. Such has been the case since Beauchamp and Childress published the first edition of their classic text, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, in 1979 ( 1). Compassion, caring, and respect for human dignity are needed as guides in addition to justice, beneficence, nonmaleficence and respect for autonomy.īeneficence, nonmaleficence, justice and respect for autonomy, these four principles are widely accepted by the medical community to underlie medical ethics. The foundation of medical ethics should be that doctors altruistically respond to their patients’ suffering using scientifically acceptable modalities. Patients experience real suffering and seek effective cures, treatments, palliation and solace. Real doctors adopt a scientific paradigm that assumes an objective reality. The flaw in their approach is failure to conform to real doctors’ and patients’ experiences.

Alternatively, principlism’s architects, Beauchamp and Childress, suggest a constantly evolving reflective equilibrium with some basis in common morality as a workable framework for twenty-first century bioethics.

Even America’s foremost public philosopher, Richard Rorty, whose pragmatism might suggest a philosophy of commonsense, seems to be swimming in the postmodern swamp. This absence of foundations reflects the general intellectual climate of postmodern relativism. Principlism, the predominate approach to bioethics, has no foundational principles.

Rorty postmodern bourgeois liberalism pdf file