1 - Moral Bodies: Epistemologies of Embodiment

Summary

Understanding is always against a background of what is taken for granted, just relied on.

– Charles Taylor, “To Follow a Rule”

A naturalized bioethics involves taking a more skeptical look at things that mainstream bioethics tends to take for granted. As Margaret Walker writes in the Introduction to this volume, naturalized bioethics grasps that “ethical theories often deceptively abstract selectively from social realities and may idealize moral positions and powers that characterize those socially privileged” and, most significantly, that this idealization has effects on moral perceptions and judgments. As moral thinking is not disconnected from other kinds of thinking that we engage in, we need to be scrupulously self-aware — more than most of us can hope to be — to avoid importing taken-for-granted assumptions about knowledge and value into our moral thinking as well.

An early consequence of this kind of bias, as feminist bioethicists were among the first to point out, is the exclusion of the viewpoints of certain social actors from serious bioethical discussions. In general, the voices of women, ethnic or cultural minorities, the very young and the very old, the minimally educated, and others are absent or underrepresented in mainstream bioethical discourse. This exclusion occurs through two main conceptual moves: the move of commonality, which claims that any or all of these viewpoints are adequately represented by other spokespeople (so that a white person can “speak for” a black person, or a man for a woman) because the moral views and values of these different agents still have enough in common; and the move of marginality, which makes the opposite claim that in fact these viewpoints are so marginal as to be not only numerically insignificant but also too whacky to take seriously.