Bioethics and Three Rival Versions of the Enlightenment

Randall Colton

Bioethics and Three Rival Versions of the Enlightenment

Randall Colton

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Tristram Engelhardt's bioethics for moral strangers takes its starting point from his diagnosis of the failure of the Enlightenment project. L. B. McCullough, in "A Critical Appraisal of Engelhardt on the 'Enlightenment Project,'" attempts to undermine Engelhardt's project by refuting that starting point and offering an alternative narrative.1 McCullough identifies two distinct Enlightenment projects and argues that only one of them-the only one that Engelhard considers-fails, whereas the second offers a promising path toward a transcultural account of morality. Engelhardt's narrative in Foundations of Bioethics does lack sufficient complexity, but McCullough's criticism and alternative fail to prove finally convincing, in part because he does not satisfactorily justify his interpretation of Engelhardt and in part because he and Engelhardt, in Foundations, make similar faulty assumptions about Enlightenment distinctives.

Bioethics and Three Rival Versions of the Enlightenment: McCullough, Engelhardt, and MacIntyre Tristram Engelhardt’s bioethics for moral strangers takes its starting point from his diagnosis of the failure of the Enlightenment project. L. B. McCullough, in “A Critical Appraisal of Engelhardt on the ‘Enlightenment Project,’” attempts to undermine Engelhardt’s project by refuting that starting point and offering an alternative narrative. Laurence B. McCullough, “A Critical Appraisal of Engelhardt on the ‘Enlightenment Project,’ At the Foundations of Bioethics and Biopolitics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (NY: Springer, 2015) 3-12. McCullough identifies two distinct Enlightenment projects and argues that only one of them—the only one that Engelhard considers—fails, whereas the second offers a promising path toward a transcultural account of morality. Engelhardt’s narrative in Foundations of Bioethics does lack sufficient complexity, but McCullough’s criticism and alternative fail to prove finally convincing, in part because he does not satisfactorily justify his interpretation of Engelhardt and in part because he and Engelhardt, in Foundations, make similar faulty assumptions about Enlightenment distinctives. McCullough strives to show that, despite his vigorous denunciations of the Enlightenment, Engelhard has both too narrow a view of it and, at the same time, a deep commitment to it. According to McCullough, Engelhardt’s account of the Enlightenment project presents it as an effort, based on an exalted view of “Reason,” to use the “logic of discovery” in a “quest for certainty” about a content-full, universal morality as a path to peace. McCullough, 5. The logic of discovery implies a reliance on an explicit rational method guaranteed to produce conclusions of universal and certain force. Though such methods could take various forms, McCullough demonstrates Engelhardt’s commitment to a Kantian, transcendental method, McCullough, 9-10. and thus presents Engelhardt’s bioethic “as itself very much an Enlightenment project.” McCullough, 4. With Engelhardt, McCullough denies the success of all Enlightenment projects of this type—including Engelhardt’s own. But McCullough also rejects Engelhardt’s conclusion that the failure of this kind of Enlightenment program entails the triumph of nihilism. See H. Tristram Engelhardt, The Foundations of Bioethics, 2nd ed. (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996) 66. He turns instead to the Scottish and English Enlightenments for a project that advances a “logic of invention” in a quest for “reliability,” rather than certainty, and bases itself on sympathy or intuition, rather than Reason. McCullough, 6-8. Since this “responsibility ethics” aims at successfully guiding action towards morally serious, i.e., ameliorating, ends, it does not need the certainty sought by the other Enlightenment project. Nor does it require an exaltation of reason, which it understands instead as a tool used in a rough and informal way, reliably identifying actions that will tend to improve human life. Since this approach does not pursue certainty, McCullough believes it escapes Engelhardt’s attacks on Enlightenment ethics. Finally, McCullough argues that his alternative is especially suitable for medicine and bioethics, because both of those disciplines seek reliable action guidance more than epistemic certainty. McCullough is surely right that Engelhardt’s view of the Enlightenment is too narrow. Perhaps surprisingly, one way to see that is to contrast Engelhardt’s treatment of the Enlightenment with Alasdair MacIntyre’s, to whom Engelhardt frequently appeals. McCullough associates MacIntyre with “an older historical scholarship that held that there was indeed a cultural phenomenon called the Enlightenment that was essentially the same everywhere in the West,” pointing out that more recent scholars have demonstrated that “there were multiple national enlightenments.” McCullough, 9. To careful readers of MacIntyre, this must sound implausible. In After Virtue, MacIntyre does use the phrase “the Enligtenment Project,” even including it in the title for his fourth chapter. But in the opening pages of that very chapter, MacIntyre details some of the differences between the French, Greman, Scottish, English and even Danish versions of that project. Moreover, he recognizes that not all these different forms of the project focused on Reason as their keystone, as Kant did. Instead, he interprets Kierkegaard as placing the will in that position and finds Diderot and Hume focusing on desire and passions, showing how each of these views originated as a response to the prior. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) 39-50. Further, MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? advances his critique of the Enlightenment project almost entirely in terms of Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment. Both Engelhardt and McCullough fail to offer accounts of the Enlightenment as rich or as complex as MacIntyre’s. Though noting Hume as a critic of what he takes to be the Enlightenment project, Engelhardt, 23. Engelhardt roots his attempt to save a shred of the project firmly in the thought of Kant and Hegel, See, for example, Engelhardt, 94-97. without much attention to competing theories that all belonged to the age of Enlightenment. Likewise, though McCullough recognizes two basic schools of Enlightenment thought, he evinces no grasp of their place in a larger conversation. Hume and Price are not just alternatives to Kant; they are the predecessors to whose apparent failures Kant was responding. The reality of this larger conversation gives credibility to MacIntyre’s identification of a unified, though internally complex, Enlightenment project. He argues plausibly that what bound these conversation-partners together was a “systematic attempt to discover a rational justification for morality.” MacIntyre, 39. After all, even Hume attempted to argue for his theory that the passions, not reason, were at the center of the moral life. Engelhardt grasps this unity but overlooks the Enlightenment’s complexity; McCullough recognizes the complexity but misses the unity. Consequently, Engelhardt blames the failure of the Enlightenment project on the inherent limits of reason, and McCullough thinks the project can be saved by turning to a Humean, non-rationalist Enlightenment. Neither conclusion is justified. As MacIntyre demonstrates, the failure of the Enlightenment project resulted from more than the internal limits of reason. Enlightenment thinkers of all kinds shared a variety of assumptions, even thought they pursued their own distinct versions of the project. MacIntyre argues that some of these common convictions ultimately undermined their own efforts. For example, as MacIntyre observes, “All reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end.” MacIntyre, 54. But without that notion of a final end and of human nature as on the move towards its transformation in that end, the other elements of a moral view—moral requirements and the recalcitrant human nature with which the movement begins—must seem unrelated fragments. MacIntyre, 55. MacIntyre, then, sees the loss of teleology as a reason for the collapse of the Enlightenment project. But Engelhardt and McCullough both try to barrel ahead toward some account of morality that can be cobbled together out of the fragments, with no attempt to recover the missing piece. Plausibly, then, both Engelhardt and McCullough offer faulty narratives that hobble their philosophical claims. But McCullough’s argument also suffers from a failure to justify his interpretation of Engelhardt and so to defend his own view against obvious Engelhardt-style criticisms. McCullough insists that the Enlightenment project Engelhardt both criticizes and represents has a quest for certainty at its center. But he does not provide evidence for that from Engelhardt’s own text, apart from Engelhardt’s use of the term “canonical.” McCullough frequently takes this term as equivalent to “[epistemically] certain,” McCullough, 5 and 12. though he also notes that it is “a phrase . . . elusive of meaning in both editions of Foundations.” McCullough, 6. I think McCullough is right to find the term vague; but he presents no compelling reason to resolve that vagueness in favor of certainty. A Scriptural text is canonical when it belongs to a list of texts, a canon, authorized for use in the relevant community. Given that etymological background, it is at least as plausible to associate “canonical” with “authoritative” as with “certain.” There seems no further reason why the ethics Engelhardt either criticizes or advances should be committed to a notion of epistemic certainty. Engelhardt does not seem to be interested nearly as much in certainty as in authorization. Having misidentified the real core of Engelhardt’s concern, McCullough leaves himself vulnerable to Engelhardt-style criticisms. For example, McCullough thinks that Engelhardt should be satisfied with an ethics that provides reliable guidance for choosing actions that ameliorate the human condition. Such an ethics, says McCullough, is “morally serious,” in the sense of evidencing a commitment to “the improvement of the human condition, which is the objective of morality.” McCullough, 7. But, of course, this begs just the sort of criticism that Engelhardt places at the center of Foundations, because it assumes someone’s definition of the “human condition”; what counts as an “improvement” of that condition; what counts as “misery”; and what counts as “human flourishing.” See McCullough, 7-8. Nothing in Hume’s account of the moral sentiments will provide a justification for the definitions McCullough favors when they come into conflict with the definitions of others. In fact, in this perspective, Hume’s sympathy begins to appear as just what MacIntyre diagnoses it to be: a “philosophical fiction” that endows one perspective’s assertions with a seemingly universal authority. MacIntyre, 49. Finding a way to articulate moral authority without philosophical fictions is Engelhardt’s project in Foundations of Bioethics; and even if he cannot in the end carry it off, since that project ultimately relies on the same assumptions as the Enlightenment thinkers it criticizes, the project cannot be dismissed so easily as McCullough seems to think. Thus, McCullough’s appeal against Engelhardt to a non-rationalist Enlightenment does illuminate an inadequacy in Engelhardt’s account, but it fails to provide an ultimately satisfying interpretation of Engelhardt’s claims or a compelling alternative to them. R. Colton 6

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