To all list members
Since the New Scientist article I have been looking at the whole Peter
Singer issue including his own work. Whilst looking at his Personhood
argument I came across an interesting criticism in the book;
The Philosophical Disease Bioethics, Culture and Identity by Carl Elliot
A very interesting book it looks at the state of principle based
bioethics and how suh a method of bioethics is wrong.
However in it, was to me an interesting criticism of Personhood. Elliot
disagrees with an method of philosophy which involves defining a thing
such as evil or person and then asking the question "how do we deal
with this thing?" He is in short an antifoundationalist. Any attempt
to define person as Singer and Joseph Fletcher does and then say from
that definition how we should treat persons will be inadequate because
our langauage for defining anything is inadequate and the definition
will effect the way we decide to 'deal with person'. Indeed the way we
decide to treat persons will probably be contained within the
definition and effect the definition itself. In short our langauge is
too inefficient, effected by culture and personal prejudice for this
task. We should therefore drop any foundationalist arguments in ethics
because the foundations wil always be questionable.
Hope you find that of interest.
Michael
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