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Living with Pirates

Common Morality and Embodied Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2013

REBECCA KUKLA
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Type
The Great Debates
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 75 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

Notes

1. And practical ethics more generally, presumably. Beauchamp, TL, Childress, JF. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. 6th ed.New York: Oxford University Press; 2009Google Scholar. The theory has developed over time, and Beauchamp has added further refinements in a few follow-up articles.

2. See note 1, Beauchamp, Childress 2009, at 2.

3. See note 1, Beauchamp, Childress 2009, at 3.

4. See note 1, Beauchamp, Childress 2009, at 387.

5. See note 1, Beauchamp, Childress 2009, at 389. Although I focus in this article on Beauchamp and Childress’s version of common morality theory, they are not the only ones to fly under this banner. In particular, Bernard Gert has long defended a quite different “common morality” account of the foundations of bioethics. See, for instance, Gert, B. Common Morality: Deciding What to Do. New York: Oxford University Press; 2007Google Scholar; Gert, B. Morality: Its Nature and Justification. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press; 2005.Google Scholar

6. See note 1, Beauchamp, Childress 2009, at 3–4.

7. Common morality, for them, also includes other principles, as well as ideals and virtues (see note 1, Beauchamp, Childress 2009, at 2, 395–6).

8. Veatch, R, ed. Is there a common morality? Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 2003;13(special issue)Google Scholar; Strong, C, ed. Exploring questions about common morality. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 2009;30(special issue)Google Scholar. Tom Beauchamp has an article in the Kennedy Institute special issue entitled “A Defense of the Common Morality.”

9. See, for instance, Turner L. Zones of consensus and zones of conflict: Questioning the “common morality” presumption in bioethics; and DeGrazia D. Common morality, coherence, and the principles of biomedical ethics. Both in: Veatch, R, ed. Is there a common morality? Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 2003;13(special issue)Google Scholar:193–218 and 219–30, respectively. Arras J. The hedgehog and the Borg: Common morality in bioethics; Strong C. Exploring questions about common morality; and Wallace K. Common morality and moral reform. All in: Strong, C, ed. Exploring questions about common morality. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 2009;30(special issue)Google Scholar: 11–30, 1–9, and 55–68, respectively. Rauprich, O. Common morality: Comment on Beauchamp and Childress. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 2008;29Google Scholar.

10. This option is raised only indirectly in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, but it is implicit here, for example: “To the extent that we can envisage circumstances in which human society is better served by substantively changing or abandoning a norm in the common morality, change in the common morality could occur and would seem to be warranted” (see note 1, Beauchamp, Childress 2009, at 389).

11. See note 1, Beauchamp, Childress 2009, at 395–6.

12. That we universally die before we hit 130 does not make this a good thing. More pertinently, that various probabilistic and statistical fallacies are nearly universally employed doesn’t make them good reasoning.

13. Ruth Macklin makes this point in detail in Macklin R. A defense of fundamental principles and human rights: A reply to Robert Baker. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 1998;8:403-22.

14. See note 1, Beauchamp, Childress 2009, at 400

15. See note 9, Arras 2009 and Rauprich 2008.

16. See note 9, Rauprich 2008, at 60.

17. See note 9, Arras 2009, at 19–20.

18. Scully J. Moral bodies: Epistemologies of embodiment. In: Lindemann H, ed. Naturalized Bioethics: Toward Responsible Knowing and Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2009:34–5.

19. Jeffrey Brand-Ballard argues that common morality itself is deeply inconsistent—that is, that we have universally held moral commitments that are in tension with one another. Brand-Ballard, J.Consistency, common morality, and reflective equilibrium. In: Veatch, R, ed. Is there a common morality?Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 2003;13(special issue):231–58.Google Scholar

20. In several of his writings, John Haugeland explores how regional worlds may collapse and “die” as their webs of commitments prove to be practically unsustainable. For instance, see Haugeland, J. Truth and rule-following. In: Haugeland J. Having Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1997Google Scholar. Haugeland J. Truth and finitude. In: Malpas J, Wrathall M, eds. Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2000. Haugeland J. Dasein Disclosed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2013.

21. See note 18, Scully 2009.

22. Although, even here, despite Nazi propaganda to the contrary, the failure of Nazis to share a habitus with Jews was not complete. We know that there were many moments of human response and furtive normative transactions even in the midst of moral breakdown of mythic proportions.

23. In finding common morality in our embodied practices rather than our explicit beliefs, I break from other common morality theorists. Rauprich, for example, thinks that what we do—as opposed to what we believe—cannot be relevant to common morality:

The “morality shared in common” should be understood, in my view, as shared moral beliefs rather than shared moral behaviour, because for the purpose of moral reasoning and theory construction it seems more relevant what people believe about how one should act rather than how they, in fact, act. Suppose, for instance, that some people commit adultery although they believe it to be immoral. If the other members of the society share this conviction (but not necessarily the behaviour), then the rule to be faithful is part of the common morality, although adultery happens, in fact, in that society. (See note 9, Rauprich 2008, at 48.)

I think this argument rests on an implausibly attenuated understanding of what it is that we do. We don’t merely commit adultery, in flagrant conflict with our beliefs. Rather, we (often) gossip about and shun those who commit adultery, we manifest guilt for committing adultery, we bring up that adultery in couples’ therapy sessions and divorce courts, and even while committing adultery we (typically) act in all sorts of ways that display our understanding that we are doing something morally transgressive. Indeed if people did not behave in any way that manifested their recognition of the force of a norm, then we ought to interpret them as not actually believing in it, regardless of what they profess to believe. In sharp contrast to Rauprich, I would argue that in fact actions are what do the bulk of the work in settling the content of common morality.

24. There is of course plenty of moral philosophy that does attempt this. Much of ethics famously, or infamously, proceeds by way of intuitions about obscure counterexamples that are disconnected enough from real life that our lived daily normative habits and responses are not helpful tools. I am not a fan.

25. Attentive readers may notice that I have offered a Hegelian account of normative legitimacy; universality; sittlichkeit; the inescapability of contingent, found normative life; and the possibilities for its rational reform.

26. This is a contentious claim on my part. One might think that Jesus, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, serves as an example of a genius moral outlier. But I think we overestimate the moral innovativeness of such figures. If we could not have recognized their principles, judgment, and actions as moral—or at least comprehensible—within our own normative framework, we would not have held them up as moral exemplars. Only insofar as they shared a habitus with us could we recognize their acts and statements as peaceful, kind, just, etc. And of course, it took time in each of their cases for it to be commonly recognized that they were moral innovators as opposed to incomprehensible threats to the established moral order.