5 - Elusive Lines, Slippery Slopes, and Moral Principles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Why is his nature so ever hard to teach
That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?
(Robert Frost, A Further Range)
Already in discussing biological and ethical issues I have offered some remarks, explicitly or implicitly, that were critical of some of our ways of thinking about life and ethics. Now I continue on to discuss some important aspects of how our language and our use of it can affect the quality of our thinking about biological, bioethical, and other matters, sometimes for the worse. I will not explore this topic in full depth. That language affects our thinking is not news. Many volumes can and have been written on this topic, and I have contributed to their number. My purpose here is to highlight important ways in which our language and our use of it can influence and often muddle our thinking about bioethical issues. More broadly, it is not just a matter of language but of the broader conceptual schemes within which we use language. In the discussion I pay particular attention to issues about where lines are to be drawn, and about what have become known as slippery slope arguments. Such matters are of immense moment wherever we are trying to make important decisions about what to do, but our particular concern in this chapter is with their immense moment in the practice of bioethics. We shall see this importance not least in connection with questions of euthanasia and abortion, which I introduce by way of example. In this chapter, though, I will not draw moral conclusions about these very important moral subjects. My endeavor here is to shed some light on issues of lines and slopes. This will be useful when we do consider these and many other topics.
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- Information
- A Life-Centered Approach to BioethicsBiocentric Ethics, pp. 83 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010