Pragmatist Ethics for a Technologica1 Culture the International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics

Pragmatist Ethics for a Technologica1 Culture The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics

VOLUME 3

Editors

Michiel Korthals, Dept. ofApplied Philosophy, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands Paul B. Thompson, Dept. of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, U.S.A.

Editorial Board

Timothy Beatley, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, U.S.A. Lawrence Busch, Dept. ofSociology, Michigan State University, Lansing, U.S.A. Anii Gupta, Centre for Management in Agriculture, Gujarat, India Richard Haynes, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Florida, Gainesville, U.S.A. Daryl Macer, The Eubios Ethics Institute, University ofTsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan Ben Mepham, Centre for Applied Bio-Ethics, School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Loughborough, United Kingdom Dietmar Mieth, University ofTiibingen, Tiibingen, Germany Egbert Schroten, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands PRAGMATIST ETHICS FORA TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE

Editedby Jozef Keulartz Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands Michiel Korthals Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands Maartje Schermer University ofAmsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Tsjalling Swierstra Twente University, Enschede, The Netherlands

"Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V. A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4020-1115-3 ISBN 978-94-010-0301-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-010-0301-8

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 2002 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permis sionfrom the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. CONTENTS

Contributors ix

Acknowledgements xv

Introduction xvii

PART 1: PROLOGUE

Chapter 1: Ethics in a Technological Culture 3 JOZEF KEULARTZ, MICHIEL KORTHALS, MAARTJE SCHERMER AND TSJALLING SWIERSTRA

PART 2: TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS

Chapter 2: Pragmatic Resources for Biotechnology 25 LARRY A. HICKMAN

Chapter 3: Philosophical Tools and Technical Solutions 37 HUB ZWART

Chapter 4: How Pragmatic Is Bioethics? 41 MAARTJE SCHERMER AND JOZEF KEULARTZ

v vi PRAGMATIST ETHICS FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE

Chapter 5: Healthcare as a Relational Practice: A Hermeneutic-Pragmatic Perspective 69 GUY WIDDERSHOVEN AND LIEKE V AN DER SCHEER

PART 3: THE STATUS OF PRAGMATISM

Chapter 6: A Modest Proposal: Methodological Pragmatism for Bioethics 79 ANDREW LIGHT

Chapter 7: Methodological Pragmatism in Bioethics: A Modest Proposal? 99 BARTGREMMEN

Chapter 8: Pragmatic Epistemology and the Activity of Bioethics 105 GLENN MCGEE

Chapter 9: Pragmatism and Pragmata 119 PETER-PAUL VERBEEK

PART 4: PRAGMATISM AND PRACTICES

Chapter 10: A Multi-Practice Ethics of Domesticated and "Wild" Animals 127 MICHIEL KORTHALS

Chapter 11: Weak Ethics, Strong Feelings 143 HANS HARBERS

Chapter 12: Pragmatism for Medical Ethics 151 GERARD DE VRIES

Chapter 13: Competitiveness, Ethics and Truth 165 JAN VORSTENBOSCH

Chapter 14: A Pragmatist Epistemology for Adaptive Management 171 BRYAN G. NORTON

Chapter 15: How Much Doubt Can a Pragmatist Bear? 191 HENK VAN DEN BELT CONTENTS Vll PART 5: DISCOURSE ETHICS AND DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Chapter 16: Pragmatism, Discourse Ethics and Occasional Philosophy 199 PAUL B. THOMPSON

Chapter 17: Minimalism with a Vengeance 217 PIETER PEKELHARING

Chapter 18: Moral Vocabularies and Public Debate 223 TSJALLING SWIERSTRA

Chapter 19: Debating Pragmatism 241 REIN DE WILDE

PART 6: EPILOGUE

Chapter 20: Pragmatism in Action 247 JOZEF KEULARTZ, MICHIEL KORTHALS, MAARTJE SCHERMER AND TSJALLING SWIERSTRA CONTRIBUTORS

Gerard De Vries is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Technological Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Dean of the Amsterdam Graduate School for Humanities. He has published widely on philosophy of science, science studies, and in particular on the social, cultural and ethical aspects of science and medicine. His books include Gerede Twijfel - Over de rol van de medische ethiek in Nederland [Reasonable Doubt - On the Role of Medical Ethics in the Netherlands, 1993] and Zeppelins - over filosofie, technologie, cultuur [Zeppelins - On Philosophy, Technology and Culture, 1999]. E-mail: [email protected]

Rein De Wilde is Professor in Philosophy at the University of Maastricht. His research interests include the history and philosophy of the future, and the philosophy of science and technology. Currently he works on a book on the rise of the expert or knowledge society. Recent publication: De voorspellers. Een kritiek op de toekomstindustrie [The Forecasters. A Critique of the Future-industry, 2000]. E-mail: [email protected]

Bart Gremmen is Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy at Wageningen University and Director of the Centre for Methodical Ethics and Technology Assessment of Wageningen UR (META). He is co-founder of the International Society for Hermeneutics and Science (ISHS). He is interested in nature development, food, biotechnology and genomics. His recent work is about the precautionary principle, riskperception, de-domestication, sustainability, and the societal aspects of genomics. E-mail: Q~n.gn

Bans Barbers, farmer's son, trained as sociologist, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Groningen. His field of research and education is philosophy of science and technological culture. Recent publications are

ix x PRAGMATIST ETHICS FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE about the material embodiment of sociality and normativity in daily practices. He is also editor of the Dutch journal for empirical philosophy, Krisis.. E-mail: [email protected]

Larry A. Hickman is Director of the Center for Dewey Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Southern lllinois University Carbondale. He is the author of Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture (2001), John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology (1990), and Modern Theories of Higher Level Predicates (1981). He is the editor of Reading Dewey (1999), The Essential Dewey (with Thomas Alexander, 1999), The Correspondence of John Dewey (1999, 2001), and Technology as a Human Affair (1990). He has served as president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology and is currently president of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. E-mail: [email protected]

Jozef Keulartz is Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Wageningen. He has published extensively in different areas of social and political philosophy, environmental ethics and nature policy. His books include Die verkehrte Welt des Jurgen Habermas [The Topsy-Turvy World of Jurgen Habermas.1995] and Struggle for Nature - A Critique of Radical Ecology (1998). He is co-editor of Foucault herdenken [In Memory of Foucault, 1995] and Museum Aarde [Museum Earth, 1997]. E-mail: [email protected]

Michiel Korthals is Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Wageningen. His academic interests include the Frankfurter Schule, especially the work of Habermas, American Pragmatism, bioethics, food ethics and environmental ethics. His bookpublications include: Duurzaamheid en democratie [Sustainability and Democracy, 1995], Philosophy ofDevelopment (1996, with Wouter van Haaften and Thomas Wren) and Tussen voeding en medicijn [Between Food and Medicine, 2001]. E-mail: mi~ru.d.kQrt.b~~.@!!lg.!f.W~g=1JI.JM.

Andrew Light is Assistant Professor in the Applied Philosophy Group at New York University, as well as research fellow at the Institute for Environment, Philosophy & Public Policy at Lancaster University (U.K.). Light is the author of over fIfty articles and book chapters on environmental ethics and philosophy of technology, and has edited or co-edited thirteen books, including Environmental Pragmatism (1996), Social Ecology after Bookchin (1998), Technology and the Good Life? (2000), Beneath the Surface: Critial Essays on Deep Ecology (2000), and Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice (2002). Light is also co-editor of the journal Philosophy and Geography. E-mail: @.Q~W.Jjght(a)ID'.u.edJ! CONTRIBUTORS Xl

Glenn McGee is the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Bioethics. He is both Associate Director for Education and a Professor of Bioethics, Philosophy and History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in the USA. His training is in classical American philosophy (Vanderbilt), and his recent books include Pragmatic Bioethics, The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetics, Who Owns Life? and The Human Cloning Debate; in addition he has authored more than 200 articles in philosophical, scientific and medical journals. E-mail: [email protected]

Bryan G. Norton is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is author of Why Preserve Natural Variety? (1987), Toward Unity Among Environmentalists (1991), and Searching for Sustainability (forthcoming). He is editor of The Preservation of Species and co• editor of Ethics on the Ark (1995) and Wolves and Human Communities (1999); Norton has contributed to journals in philosophy, biology, and environmental management, and served on the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee of the EPA Science Advisory Board and on the Board of Directors of Defenders of Wildlife. E-mail: [email protected]

Pieter Pekelharing is a Lecturer in Ethics and Political and Social Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy in the University of Amsterdam. He is currently writing a book on social and political philosophy. He is interested in theories of agency, in issues of justice, and in models of associative and deliberative democracy. E-mail: pekelh(whum.uva.nl

MaaI1je Schermer is a physician and ethicist. She is working as a post-doc researcher in the fields of applied ethics and medical ethics at the Universities of Wageningen and Amsterdam. She also works as an advisor for the Center for Ethics and Health of the Netherlands. Her fields of interest include empirical ethics research and health care policy. Recently she published The different faces of autonomy. Patient autonomy in ethical theory and hospital practice (2002). E-mail: maartjc.schermer(iilhum.uva.nl

Tsjalling Swierstra is Assistant Professor in Technology Ethics at Twente University. He published De sofocratische verleiding [The Sophocratic Temptation, 1998], a study in the complex relationship between ethics and democracry. In Kloneren in de polder [Cloning in the polder, 2000] he reconstructed the public debate in the Netherlands that followed upon the presentation to the public of Dolly in 1997. In 2001 he co-authored Nieuwe voortplanting. Het afscheid van de ooievaar [New Reproduction: Goodbye to the Stork]. Currently he is working on a study of the ethical and political implications of genomics. E-mail: [email protected] xii PRAGMATIST ETHICS FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE

Paul B. Thompson holds the Joyce and Edward E. Brewer Chair in Applied Ethics at Purdue University, where he is also Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Food Animal Productivity and Well-Being in the Department of Animal Science. He has wide ranging interests in philosophical issues related to agriculture and environment, and has also published theoretical papers on the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics of risk. He is the author of Agricultural Ethics: Research, Teaching and Public Policy (1998) and the co-editor of The Agrarian Roots ofPragmatism (2000). E-mail: paultCWpurdue.edu

Lieke Van Der Scheer is the author of Ongeregelde moraal: Dewey's ervaringsbegrip als basis voor een nieuwe gezondheidsethiek [Unregulated Morality: Dewey's Concept of Experience as Basis for a New Health Care Ethics, 1999]. At the present time, she is engaged in postdoctoral research regarding the theory and methodology of empirical ethical research. E-mail:lvd.<;cheer(ZvphiLkun.nl

Henk Van Den Belt is Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Wageningen. His central interests are science and technology studies (STS), nature policy, animal welfare and food ethics. His thesis Spirochaetes, Serology and Salvarsan: Luwdig Fleck and the construction of medical knowledge about syphilis (1997) offers a constructivist analysis of several episodes in the development of biomedical science. From 1999 to 2001 he took part in the large• scale project on the history of technology in the Netherlands in the 20th century, to analyze the use of theory on technology and society in technological history. E-mail: henk.valldellbelt@..!lgJf.wag-ur.nl

Peter-Paul Verbeek is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Twente. His field of research and education is the philosophy of technology. He recently published a book on the mediating role of artifacts in the technological culture, De daadkracht der ingen [The Pertinence of Things, 2000]. E-mail: IU)_,~_,~,Y«Ib~~k@Wll1W_,1J_tw:~l}t~_,lJl

Jan Vorstenbosch is a philosopher and ethicist, currently working as Associate Professor for Applied Ethics at the Department of Philosophy at Utrecht University. He is also a senior researcher at the Centre of Bioethics and Health Law of the same university. He has worked and published on research ethics and animal ethics, especially animal biotechnology and on the ethics of technology. He has also published articles on moral epistemology and moral methodology. E-mail adress:jan.vorstenboschCWphil.uu.nl

Guy Widdershoven is Professor of Ethics of Health Care at the University of Maastricht. His main theoretical interest is to contribute to the development of alternative approaches to bioethics (hermeneutic ethics, narrative ethics, ethics of care. He wrote chapters in international books and articles in international journals. CONTRIBUTORS Xlll

In 2000 he published a Dutch handbook on ethics of health care, Ethiek in de kliniek [Ethics in the Clinic]. E-mail: [email protected]

Hub Zwart is Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Science, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Nijmegen. His books include: Ethische consensus in een pluralistische samenleving [Ethical Consensus in a Pluralistic Society, 1993] and Technocratie en onbehagen [Technocracy and Discontent, 1995], a book on Michel Foucault. His current research topics include the history and future of the research animal and the history and future of scholarly publishing. E-mail: haezwart(wscLkun.nl ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This publication was carried out within the framework of the Incentive Program Ethics and Political Issues, which is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

xv INTRODUCTION

This collection is the result of research carried out within the framework of the Incentive Program Ethics and Political Issues, which is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The aim of this research was to find and develop a form of ethics tailored to the moral problems and social conflicts that are typical for an entirely technological culture like ours. Our modem technological culture has a highly dynamic character: old ways of life are continually being replaced by new ones, norms and values are constantly being put up for discussion, and we regularly fmd ourselves confronted with new moral problems. However, neither traditional philosophy nor current bioethics seem to possess a vocabulary that can accommodate this dynamic character adequately. This is due to the fact that bioethics has little insight into the moral significance of technological artifacts and systems. To remedy this blind spot, it would be necessary for bioethics to open up the "black box" of technological design and development. In this respect bioethics could learn a lot form modem science and technology studies (STS). While classical philosophy of technology considered technology and culture as each other's opposites and could see the notion of a "technological culture" only as an oxymoron, science and technology studies have, from the outset, placed the interplay of technology and culture at the center. STS adhere to the assumption that there is a "co-evolution of technology and society". On the one hand, technological developments take place in a social field of influence and are the outcome of negotiations in which many different actors are involved. On the other hand, the successful introduction of technological artifacts depends on certain changes in the fabric of society. Technological artifacts carry a script or a scenario within them; they require particular role patterns and role divisions and lay down a specific "geography of responsibilities". Science and technology studies seem to offer the necessary scope for the normative assessment and the democratic control of technological developments. However, these studies exhibit an agnostic or even antagonistic attitude towards ethics. They describe and analyse the emergence of norms and values in the same

xvii xviii PRAGMATIST ETHICS FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE empirical and objective way as the construction of facts and artifacts - without reference to intentions or reasons, but only in terms of allies and opponents, strategic negotiations and tactical manoeuvres. It is clear that a stalemate is reached: while bioethics has to a large extent remained blind to the normative impact of technological artifacts, science and technology studies are characterized by a certain hostility towards ethics. This impasse can, we believe, be broken by a re-evaluation of pragmatism. Pragmatism shares with science and technology studies its central insight in the co-evolution of technology and society, but it differs from STS in that it gives serious ethical consideration to the associated normative implications. In order to substantiate this claim we have first sketched the contours of a pragmatist ethics, which is better equipped to dealing with the problems of a technological culture than are traditional forms of ethics. In the Prologue, "Ethics in a Technological Culture: A Proposal for a Pragmatist Approach", we explore the problems and perspectives of a pragmatist alternative to traditional ethics. Pragmatist ethics does imply a number of interconnected changes of emphasis: from epistemology to methodology, from product to process and, above all, from justification to discovery. The tasks for pragmatist ethics include: describing problem translations, sketching possible future scenarios and developing new moral vocabularies. This fIrst sketch was presented as a discussion paper to six experts in the fIelds of pragmatism, STS and/or bioethics, with the request to write an elaborate reaction. These six papers were supplemented with three more papers of our own, in which the fIrst sketch of a pragmatist ethics is further developed. This total of nine papers formed the subject matter for a two-day workshop ("Conference on Bioethics and Pragmatism") held in June 2001 in Wageningen, The Netherlands. The results of this workshop have been collected in this volume. The volume consists of the nine papers, all with brief comments by one of the conference participants. Our fIrst discussion paper forms the prologue, while as an epilogue we have added an extensive evaluation and processing of the results of the workshop. Apart from the Prologue and the Epilogue, this volume consists of four parts: "Technology and Ethics", "The Status of Pragmatism", "Pragmatism and Practices", and "Discourse Ethics and Deliberative Democracy".

1. TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS

The part on technology and ethics opens with a paper by Larry Hickman. In this paper Hickman wants to show that if we take seriously the core claims of pragmatism, especially those advanced by John Dewey, then we will begin to develop a new vocabulary to deal with issues involving technology. Hickman calls to mind the determination which with classical pragmatists rejected the metaphysical idea that there are transcendental truths or the religious idea that there are revealed truths. Although it is by now old news that the pragmatists were anti-foundationalists, Hickman's reminder is by no means superfluous because foundationalism is still very much alive. It flourishes in some INTRODUCTION xix branches of environmental philosophy where foundations are searched for in the earth, not in the sky. It also plays an important role in popular debates concerning biotechnology. Hickman is convinced that so long as we continue to appeal to foundations, whether such foundations be projected up into the sky or planted down in the earth, the problems and prospects of our rapidly changing technological landscape will not be adequately addressed. Hickman defends a version of experimental naturalism or instrumentalism, that centres on the notion of technology in the broad sense in which Dewey used it, namely as the study of our tools and techniques. Hickman demonstrates the relevance of Dewey's concept of the thought experiment as a "dramatic rehearsal" for problem solving and decision making in bioethics by exploring the case of genetic screening.

In his comments on Larry Hickman, Hub Zwart compares the methodology of Dewey with that of Michel Foucault. He points out a number of similarities, the most important one being the vehement rejection of all forms of foundationalism, but he also stresses that there is a big difference with respect to the ultimate goal of philosophical inquiry. Rather than looking for tools that may help us to find solutions to certain problems, Foucault's philosophy tends to focus on the social and epistemological conditions that allow certain problems and solutions to emerge. In his contribution further on in this volume, Gerard de Vries also underlines that, according to Foucault, the philosopher's job is a 'transcendental' one.

In the second large contribution to the part on technology and ethics, Maartje Schermer and Jozef Keulartz take the case of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) to explore the consequences and effects a new technique can have on society and the way traditional bioethics deals with technological developments. They analyze the shifts in moral responsibilities and social roles and relationships that IVF has caused and give an overview of the debate on IVF as it has taken place in the field of bioethics. Though this debate does already show some pragmatist traits, Schermer and Keulartz propose a more explicitly pragmatist approach and demonstrate what this would imply for the debate on IVF. Schermer and Keulartz focus on the novel character of IVF and show the emergence of a new entity ("the embryo"), of a new medical practice (productive in stead of curative) and of new (family) relationships. The embryo as a new subject, resulting from the separation of the embryo from the body of its mother, has been discussed at length in bioethics. This was not the case, however, with respect to two other main issues that were raised by IVF. The first issue concerns the sheer endless possibilities for creating new (family) relationships as a result of the division of biological motherhood into genetic and gestational motherhood. They signal the need to rethink the social, moral and legal basis of family relationships and the meaning of concepts like family and kinship. However, these questions have received rather fragmented and one-sided attention in bioethics. Schermer and Keulartz claim that a pragmatist ethics would argue for an open and creative view on new family constructions and arrangements. xx PRAGMATIST ETHICS FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE

The second key question that is raised by IVF concerns the shift from private procreation to public reproduction. With IVF, Schermer and K.eulartz notice, medicine literally became productive, for it created new life. The emergence of a new "practice" within medicine, a practice that can be characterized by the fact that it treats people's desires and not their diseases has gone largely uncommented. A pragmatist ethics would emphasize the necessity to create new concepts or a new vocabulary, to define new (social) roles and responsibilities and to develop new rules guiding this practice.

In their comments on Schermer and Keulartz, Guy Widdershoven and Lieke van der Scheer point to the individualistic bias of bioethics. Schermer and Keulartz only notice this bias in passing, without giving it proper consideration in discussing the central issues of the IVF debate. That is why, according to Widderhoven and Van der Scheer, their evaluation of this debate is not entirely convincing. To shed new light on the main issues of the IVF debate, they argue for a "hermeneutic-pragmatic" approach that fits in with the tradition of the "ethics of care" and that focuses on the vulnerability and interdependency of human life.

2. THE STATUS OF PRAGMATISM

With regard to the status of pragmatism there is considerable difference of opinion between the two main contributors, Andrew Light and Glenn McGee. Light is rather skeptical about the proposal of Keulartz et al. for a pragmatic reform in applied ethics. Such a reform is neither a necessary prerequisite to focus one's attention on technology, nor to advocate the virtues of open and public debate. With reference to arguments provided by Jonathan Moreno, Light contends that as a form of applied ethics, bioethics is already pragmatic: it is a social activity, strives for solutions, relies on experience and is policy-oriented. To adequately apply a moral theory in practice to actual problems in the real world some form of casuistry is required, and it is this commitment to casuistry that accounts for the inherent inclination to a pragmatist methodology in bioethics. But embracing such an inherent methodological pragmatism does not at all compel us to have recourse to the teachings of Dewey, James, Pierce or Rorty. Quite the contrary, Light insists, we better refrain from such an explicit reference to more pure philosophical versions of pragmatism. Given the disdain for pragmatism of the classical American variety in graduate schools of philosophy, attempts to convert our colleagues to an explicit pragmatist approach would all be highly counter• productive. Moreover, promoting pragmatism vIs-a-vIS consequentialists, deontologists, or principalists, would come down to a retreat into metaethics and would not contribute to the resolution of any problem at hand. Absorbed in purely philosophical disputes, one tends to forget that more often than not there is little disagreement on ends. Where convergence on practical ends occurs pragmatists would be ill advised to keep on sparing with other philosophers on issues of disagreement but should join forces to achieve their common aim. In this situation the public task of the philosopher is to articulate the arguments that INTRODUCTION xxi will most effectively morally motivate policy makers and the general public to accept that end. Light stresses that this public task of philosophers sometimes calls for a form of what he calls "moral translation", that is to say the translation of their views into a language that resonates with the moral intuitions of the broader public.

Bart Gremmen opposes Light's general claim that good bioethics is necessarily pragmatic. Moreno's arguments only show that bioethics as a form of applied ethics is always involved in some kind of practice. Now the problem with the different schools in bioethics, according to Gremmen, is that they exhibit an individualistic bias, an observation already made by Widdershoven and Van der Scheer. As a consequence of this bias they are insufficiently equipped to operate on the level of practices. To alter this situation Gremmen encourages us to develop the concept of practice. In this respect especially Alasdair MacIntyre already has done some groundwork, but Gremmen is skeptical about his emphasis on virtue ethics and argues instead for a more pragmatic elaboration of the concept of practice.

With respect to the status of pragmatism in applied ethics in general and in bioethics in particular, Glenn McGee takes a view that is contrary to Light's. Whereas Light urges us to refrain from explicit recourse to pragmatism and from philosophical exegesis of classical texts, McGee is alarmed precisely by the circumstance that pragmatism in bioethics and other forms of applied ethics is divorced from the epistemological problems at the core of classical American philosophy. The focus on the issues at hand should not go at the expense of a careful treatment of the problem of foundations. Of course a pragmatist conception of epistemology is quite different from the Cartesian conception. For pragmatists, McGee claims, knowledge is not grounded by some pre-given reality apart from experience, but is, quite the reverse, formed and textured by experience. Following Edmund Husserl and Richard Zaner, one of the pioneers of bioethics in the 1970s, McGee gives a phenomenological account of experience as the "everyday" experience of the common world. This experience mostly goes unnoticed and it is, according to Zaner, an important task of a phenomenological epistemology to make this implicit experience explicit. An important method to make explicit what has hitherto been implicit is what Zaner calls "aporia", a "dis-engaging" from the concerns of the moment and the assumptions that characterize everyday life, mostly provoked by a breakdown of current rules and common routines. What an epistemological inquiry would require is systematically to persevere in this kind of disengagement and methodically to explore what then is disclosed to us. Some such method is also needed in bioethics if we want to examine the fundamental assumptions we make in our everyday deliberations and negotiations at bedside rounds, case conferences, et cetera. If we neglect to carry out this kind of epistemological inquiry, McGee warns us, we run the risk that pragmatism in bioethics will degenerate into a dressed-up form of relativism.

Peter-Paul Verbeek supports McGee's plea to take seriously the role of experience in pragmatist epistemology. But unfortunately, Verbeek maintains, in McGee's XXll PRAGMATIST ETHICS FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE phenomenological account there is no room for the important insight in the technologically mediated character of experience. This insight plays a significant role in contemporary phenomenological studies, especially those of Don Ihde. Biomedical technologies, like cr-scans, powerful microscopes, and ultrasonography, are no neutral "intermediaries", but actively help to shape our experience of an unborn child for instance or of being pregnant. Therefore pragmatism in bioethics cannot do without careful attention to the technological instruments that co-produce the experience and knowledge on the basis of which deliberations are performed and decisions are made.

3. PRAGMATISM AND PRACTICES

The main contributions to the part on practices deal with animal ethics, medical ethics, and environmental ethics, and are inspired by the works of MacIntyre, Foucault and Aldo Leopold successively. In his contribution, Michiel Korthals criticizes two dominant trends in animal ethics from a pragmatist perspective. First, animal ethicists usually judge animal well-being with reference to ''wild'', non-domesticated animals or animals in their "natural" habitat, i.e., the habitat that animals are supposed to have occupied, before humans interfered. Second, in their ethical deliberations and decision-making about the treatment of animals, most animal ethicists tend to neglect the social and cultural context of these animals. The various schools of animal ethics can be criticized not only because of these problematic assumptions but also because of their inability to adequately deal with the ethical dilemmas that are continuously raised by the human treatment of animals, such as the dilemma between the welfare of the individual animal and the viability of the population or the ecosystem, or the dilemma between animal well-being and a healthy and ecologically sound environment. To tackle these and other dilemmas adequately, Korthals proposes an approach that takes into account the various practices in which the interaction between animals and humans takes shape. Following MacIntyre, Korthals defines practices as social activities with their own good, standards, values and goals, skills or excellences, and typical forms of organization. He distinguishes five human-animal practices: livestock including working animals; companion animals, including pets and animals used for sport, recreation and entertainment; captive animals (zoo animals); de-domesticated animals or wild animals affected by man; and [mally animals used in experiments. The fruitfulness of this multi-practices approach is that it takes into account the diversity and dynamics of the contexts in which animals are living and are managed by humans. It is in fact a bottom-up approach because it doesn't impose abstract principles or values on the participants in these diverse practices, but takes their ethical intuitions as starting-point for the design and development of standards of animal care and their incorporation in guidelines of good practice. Moreover, Korthals' approach not only pays attention to the dynamics within practices but also to the dynamics between practices. It is this inter-practices dynamics, Korthals INTRODUCfION XXlll contends, that puts the emergence of ethical complications and controversies in a new light.

Hans Harbers fully sympathizes with Korthals' mUlti-practices approach to animal ethics, but he wants to push this pragmatist approach one step further by adding more historical and contextual detail. To illustrate his point, Harbers goes back to the farm where he grew up in the fIfties and sixties. He shows that his father's farm was in fact a practice comprising a diverse set of human-animal relations and concludes that it is impossible to distinguish different practices as clearly as Korthals wants it. The circumstances and considerations that organize practices, Harbers goes on to argue, are far more heterogeneous than Korthals suggests. Therefore the developments within and between practices will be less predictable and more contingent as well. This, Harbers concludes, calls for a still more modest and minimal approach to animal ethics than Korthals proposes.

In his paper on the emerging practice of predictive medicine, Gerard de Vries argues with Glenn McGee that it is an important task of a pragmatist epistemology to make explicit what has hitherto been implicit. Whereas McGee goes back to the phenomenological reflections of Richard Zaner, De Vries follows Robert Brandom who made an interesting attempt at a pragmatic reconstruction of Kant's transcendental method. However, like Hub Zwart De Vries draws most of his inspiration from Michel Foucault who's archeological and genealogical methods are considered by De Vries as historicized versions of Kantian critique. According tot De Vries, the normative framework of modem medicine is made up of three basic ideas: scientific realism, the dualism of fact and value, and the principle of individual autonomy (and "informed consent"). From a Foucauldian perspective, the rules and regulations that follow from these basic assumptions should not be taken at face value, as is common practice among medical ethicists, but should instead be considered as suitable objects of philosophical analysis themselves. In his book on the birth of the clinic, Foucault tries to uncover the cognitive, cultural, social and physical conditions that make the understanding and functioning of these rules and regulations possible in the first place. Modem clinical medicine is constituted by a specific conception of disease, a specific relation to the body and its interior, a specific relation between physician and patient, et cetera. As De Vries points out, these "conditions of possibility" change with the shift from clinical to predictive medicine that is going on at present. This shift towards predictive medicine includes a reorientation of goals (from cure to prevention), the emergence of a statistical style of medical reasoning and of concepts of health and disease that replace the old clear-cut distinction and dichotomy between the normal and the pathological by a continuum. This shift, however, not only involves a radical reconceptualization of health and disease, it also includes far-reaching changes in the distribution of roles and responsibilities of physicians and their patients and also in the social organization of the health care system at large. Because they require the introduction of a new system of moral and legal checks and balances, these changes, De Vries argues, will profoundly affect medical ethics as well. xxiv PRAGMATIST ETHICS FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE

Jan Vorstenbosch' comments on De Vries' paper all center around the consequences for moral theory of a practice-related view on cognitive and normative issues. H we believe that moral truth can only be judged with reference to some existing practice, like De Vries seems to suggest, than the possibilities of moral critique are severely limited. As a result of this belief, Vorstenbosch suspects, De Vries tends to underestimate the novel and radical character of the moral challenges that could be raised by the shift from curative to preventive medicine, and he in fact ends up with a defense of an ethical framework that is not very different from what mainstream medical ethicists might endorse

Bryan Norton sketches a pragmatist epistemology that is adequate to Adaptive Management, a specific approach to environmental monitoring and management. He examines how Adaptive Management can deal with uncertainty with regard to the effects of current actions on future developments and on sustainability. Adaptive Management can be characterized by three central commitments, a commitment to an experimentalist method of inquiry, a commitment to examine the impacts of our actions on multiple scales of time and space, and a commitment to examine each problem in its local context. In short, Adaptive Management is an experimental, multi-scalar, place-based management. To illustrate the pragmatists' approach that Adaptive Managers can adopt as a working epistemology, Norton invokes the metaphor of Otto Neurath's ship. According to Neurath, improving our knowledge is similar to repairing a ship on high sea, which can only be done plank-by-plank. This metaphor captures perfectly the pragmatist idea of the piecemeal improvement of our beliefs, an idea that diverges considerably both from Cartesian rationalism and logical empiricism. In the last part of his contribution, Norton explores the relationship between Adaptive Management, Darwinist thought and pragmatism. He wants to show that Adaptive Management can be understood as a form of cultural evolution that structurally mimics natural evolution. Furthermore, Norton wants to show that Adaptive Managers, from AIdo Leopold on, have explicitly appealed to pragmatist ideas and ideals in support of their plans and activities. This historical argument gives indirect evidence of the closeness of the relationship between Adaptive Management and Darwinian thought by relating Adaptive Management to pragmatism, the most important philosophy associated with the ideas of Charles Darwin.

Henk van den Belt objects to the fact that Norton compares pragmatism only to Cartesian rationalism and logical positivism. By confining himself to these two philosophical positions Norton secures a far too easy victory for pragmatism. Compared to another non-foundationalist philosophy like Karl Popper's critical rationalism, Van den Belt claims, Norton's brand of pragmatist epistemology displays at least two flaws. First, Van den Belt points out that Norton's use of Neurath's metaphor is badly inconsistent. Second, vis-a-vis critical rationalism, Norton's epistemological reflections appear remarkably anachronistic because they leave no room for persistent scientific disagreement or irresolvable value pluralism. INTRODUCTION xxv

4. DISCOURSE ETIlICS AND DELffiERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Paul Thompson pleas for an occasional and provisional conception of pragmatic philosophy, by discussing a number of theses concerning the role of doubt, experience, truth and Habermas' proposal for discourse ethics. He starts with Dewey's pragmatism, as the pragmatism that is the most important for practical ethics. Dewey's argument for reconstruction in philosophy becomes an argument for a rehabilitation of occasional philosophy and a correlative displacement of philosophy as a professionalized discipline. Thompson carefully argues that pragmatism involves ameliorative and stepwise responses to problems. First he rejects grand theory, a move that pragmatism shares with all forms of postmodernism. Second, there is a conception of inquiry grounded in genuine doubt. This targets pragmatic inquiry to specific problems and interprets inquiry as having an inherently ameliorative function, rather than one of building large edifices or hierarchies. There are problems where waiting on a solution can itself be a problem. Furthermore, James pleads for an existential conception of experience, which recommends a different kind of amelioration in resolute attentiveness to the day-by-day. Finally, there is Peirce's suggestion that truth itself can be understood as the cumulative endpoint of such piecemeal, problem-focused inquiries. Paul Thompson discusses at length the merits and the difficulties of Habermas' work on discourse ethics. According to Habermas, the moral right, like the scientific truth, is the agreement that will be reached if all parties participate in patient and honest reason giving, argumentative exchange and critique, unconstrained by the exigencies of time, money and physical exhaustion. Valuable though it is as a general moral guideline, the flaw in discourse ethics, according to Thompson, lies exactly in its tie to an ideal discourse situation, as characterized in Habermas' theory of communicative action. As Foucault has shown, discourse is never purely communicative, but always involves strategic elements. That's why, according to Thompson, his work should be seen as part and parcel of a pragmatist practical ethics that is sensitive to the strategic potential of explicitly normative discourse. Furthermore, Thompson points out that any actual proposal that stipulates rules and procedures is itself bound up by considerations of time and place and will therefore be open to re-evaluation and revision. Instead of an ultimate definition we only have a ''working understanding" of what a fair, non-coercive and open discourse should look like under the best approximation of ideal conditions.

Pieter Pekelbaring welcomes the pragmatist tum in discourse ethics advocated by Paul Thompson. He objects to the Kantian propensity in Habermas' brand of discourse ethics to separate universally valid norms from values that have only a limited validity relative to particular forms of life. Pekelbaring observes a tendency in Habermas' discourse ethics to degrade values to mere expressions of personal or collective preferences and to deprive them of their capacity to provide us with reasons. Particularly with respect to bioethical issues, this tendency is dangerous xxvi PRAGMATIST ETHICS FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE because it impoverishes the debate and reduces value discussions to sheer negotiations of differences between particular life worlds.

Tsjalling Swierstra analyzes two public debates in the Netherlands on new medical technologies, the so-called New Reproductive Technologies (NRTs) on the one hand, cloning on the other. First a pragmatist approach to ethical questions and dilemma's is briefly sketched. At the center of this approach is the notion of a moral vocabulary, understood as a situated response to specific, local practical questions. Swierstra shows that such vocabularies need not remain confined to their context of invention, but can sometimes be transported successfully to other contexts. Two of such vocabularies determine the public controversies studied. The "vocabulary of normative nature" centers on the notion that a life should be lived in obedience to rules which are sometimes understood to be laid out by God, but always as embedded in nature. The rivaling "vocabulary of self-determination" centers on the ideal of an autonomous life, designed freely by the person who has to live it. The only restriction accepted within this vocabulary is that the freedom of the one should not lead to the harming of another. Swierstra shows that there exists a fundamental asymmetry between the two vocabularies: the vocabulary of self• determination not only proves to be the dominant one, but it succeeds in banning the proponents of the vocabulary of normative nature from the public arena by systematically privatizing their arguments. However, both vocabularies are shown to be relatively powerless to steer the course of medical technology-development. Swierstra ends by formulating some pragmatist suggestions to remedy the impotence of both vocabularies by taking into account their original contexts of invention, and to open up new avenues for communication between their proponents.

Rein de Wilde observes two gaps or contradictions in Swierstra's paper. First, his implicit preference for a "content" instead of an "instrument" approach to vocabularies goes against the grain of the pragmatic tradition. This approach suggests a holistic worldview in which foremost vocabularies act, not people. According to pragmatists from Dewey to Hacking however, people are never completely determined by their worldviews. Second, this non-pragmatic element of reification can also be found in Swierstra's treatment of technology: despite his declaration that technological developments are always man-made, technologies are still presented as ready-made forces we can either accept or reject.

As is clear from this brief outline, the present volume contains a rich variety of issues and perspectives. In the Epilogue, we will lay bare some interesting connections between the various contributions. We will elaborate on some common themes and further develop the thoughts and ideas that were presented in the fIrst discussion paper, resulting in a systematic overview of the tasks and tools of a pragmatist ethics for a technological culture.

Jozef Keulartz