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Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Bioethics

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Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Bioethics i WITTGENSTEIN AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF BIOETHICS REFLECTIONS ON SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS THINKING IN MODERNITY Matthew S. Vest, M.A. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Theology and Religious Studies October, 2017 ii ABSTRACT This thesis argues that bioethics emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s not as a novel way to engage new technological or social ethical questions of life (bios), but rather as a late, post-Enlightenment secular phenomenon. In particular, bioethics seeks to adopt a methodology of theorizing on morality that is prominent in modern science, and this is a strategy that I contest by following Wittgenstein’s critique of scientific theorizing. Wittgenstein’s later exercises with language present a critical and clarifying way to identify the immanent and self-referential schema of principlism in bioethics. Additionally, I show how Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy as a skillful and therapeutic activity rather than a cognitive content is informative for bioethics. Hence, I suggest that in pre-modern, traditional eras—or even in many contemporary non- Western global sectors—bioethics largely would be indistinct from religious and theological dogma and practices. I argue that the modern mind prioritizes material causality, leading to a moral techne that divides spirit from matter, vios from bios. Within such a schema, nature—and especially the medicalized human body—is managed, produced, and constructed. Furthermore, I argue that Wittgenstein gestures towards an ancient transcendent way beyond the modern division of vios and bios, and that a full vision of seeing life may be glimpsed through an apophatic epistemology that guides one towards an understanding of ethics itself as a form of apophatic and embodied knowledge. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Prof. John Milbank and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham for the opportunity, support, and guidance that enabled this doctoral exercise to come to fruition. Prof. Milbank has been a source of kind encouragement and creativity. A special gratitude goes to the leadership, faculty, staff, and students of the Center for Bioethics and the Division for Bioethics (BMEA) at The Ohio State University for the chance to read, teach, and engage bioethics directly. Countless discussions, seminars, and lectures with students and colleagues have shaped the direction of this thesis significantly. To the Texan physician and gentleman farmer, Samson Ryan Nash, a friend and brother through personal, professional, and spiritual journeys of life—much has indeed changed since first meeting in Birmingham more than a dozen years ago. Many thanks for the shared life and numerous conversations over bourbon. I am grateful to New College Franklin—not forgetting the early Bannockburn years— and especially to Dean Greg Wilbur for the years of friendship and collegiality since I showed up in Franklin first in 1999. NCF taught me much regarding Wendell Berry’s wisdom: “Education is the superstition of modernity.” Long live the pachyderm. I am indebted to two friends and sponsors who wish not to be named but who have offered generous financial support for the past four years. Their generosity and desire to further the Orthodox Church will not be forgotten. To my family, deepest thanks. My parents, Richard and Janet; my siblings, Rich and Johanna, Ryan, Paul and Kaitlyn, Katie, and Christy; my grandparents, and especially Pop who taught me much about prayer. Many thanks as well to Dan and Mary, Jeremy and Megan, and Nate and Rachel, and all the cousins. A very special gratitude to: Jered Faires, Br. Peter Junipero Hannah, Dr. Elizabeth Blettner, Dn. Ed and Myrna Martin, Tom and Sylvia Singleton, Ryan and Sarah Nash, Reader Herman and Susan Engelhardt, Jeff and Martha Condra, Hieromonk Herman, and all the faithful at St Ignatius, St. Katherine the New Martyr, St. Symeon, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, and St. Anthony Orthodox parishes. May God grant you many years. Finally, to Leah, my lovely and adventurous wife, and my boys, Jude and Lucas, all of whom know me inside and out and yet still love me. Ti amo alla famiglia. iv CONTENTS Introduction: The Puzzle of Bioethics—And Why Is Bioethics So Boring? ........1 1. A Secular Phenomenon: The Birth of Bioethics After God .............................. 10 1.1 Roots of Liberal Politics 1.2 Philosophy of Medicine, Medical Ethics, & Bioethics 1.3 Bioethics as Applied Secular Philosophy 2. Whose Language? Philosophers, Priests or Bioethicists? .............................. 54 2.1 Biopolitics: Bioethics as Jurisdictional Techne 2.2 Shifting Language Games: From Theology to Bioethics 2.3 Tar-Baby Principlism: The Pragmatism of Shifty Language 3. Collapsing Theory: The Limits of Scientific Thinking ................................. 100 3.1 Bridging the Wittgensteins 3.2 Wittgenstein’s Neo-Kantian Grammar? 3.3 Language as Therapy 3.4 Ethics without (Theoretical) Philosophy 4. Bioethics as Modus Vivendi: Thin Possibilities ............................................... 169 4.1 Engelhardt’s Narrative of Thin, Secular Bioethics 4.2 Modus Vivendi & The Therapeutic Aims in Wittgenstein & Engelhardt’s Critical Mapping 4.3 Secular Bioethics & Reasonable Discourse 5. Why Bioethics Has Failed Savulescu: A Utilitarian Case Study .................. 216 5.1 Denying Scientific Progress—and Good Philosophy? 5.2 Transhumanism’s Enlightenment Roots 5.3 Savulescu’s Nietzschean Language Game 5.4 Moral Enhancement Serving the Posthuman God 6. Bios & Vios: A Pedagogical Change to the Form of Bioethics ....................... 253 6.1 Identifying Scientific Bioethics: Trans-Science & the Form of Bioethics 6.2 Beyond Scientific Bioethics: Wittgenstein’s Religious Way of Thinking 6.3 Ethics as Apophatic Knowledge & Asceticism Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 315 v Abbreviations BB The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. CV Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright & H. Nyman, trs., P. Winch, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. LE Lecture on Ethics, 1st ed., Established Text of the Lecture, MS 139b Normalized, eds., E. Zamuner, E. Di Lascio, & D. K. Levy, eds., Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 42-51, 2014. Pages cited in this thesis follow the original page turns cited in Zamuner, Lascio, & Levy in square brackets. OC On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, trs., D. Paul & G. E. Anscombe, New York and Evanston: J. & J. Evanston, 1969. PI Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte, trs., P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte, eds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2009. PP Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment [previously known as ‘Pt. II’ of Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte, trs., P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte, eds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2009. PR Philosophical Remarks, trs., R. Hargreaves & R. White, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975. RF Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, trs., R. Rhees, from Philosophical Occasions, ed. J. C. Klagge & A. Nordmann, Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993, 115-155. RW Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. R. Rhees, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. T Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trs., C.K. Ogden, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999. VC Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. B. McGuinness, trs., J. Schulte & B. McGuinness, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979. MS refers to all unpublished material compiled in the Wittgenstein Nachlass. vi Just because our moral philosophers knew the facts of morality only very approximately in arbitrary extracts or in accidental epitomes – for example, as the morality of their environment, their class, their church, the spirit of their time, their climate and part of the world– just because they were poorly informed and not even very curious about different peoples, times, and past ages – they never laid eyes on the real problems of morality; for these emerge only when we compare many moralities. In all ‘science of morals’ so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies, as it were. — Wittgenstein, PI 133 I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition [Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur DICHTEN]. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby also revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do. — Wittgenstein, CV 24 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUZZLE OF BIOETHICS—AND WHY IS BIOETHICS SO BORING? Thomas Kuhn’s significant work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (4th ed., 2012), profoundly challenges the notion that science progresses in a linear, evolutionary manner. Kuhn instead proposes that scientific knowledge grows through a series of shifting “paradigms” when the accepted “normal science” of a certain time is questioned and then overthrown by a new theory. This alternating phase of theoretical progress is an era of “revolutionary science” that
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