In What Pragmatism Means, William James proposed that “truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. Truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.” For pragmatic philosophy since Peirce, beliefs are construed as habits of thought that provide guides for conduct. Taken together, these theses imply that we properly describe as “true” those warranted propositions that guide us to conduct ourselves in ways that yield more satisfaction than not in our efforts to achieve our various ends.
But it is obvious that people take up any number of different—even what might appear to be irreconcilably different—ends. And this human heterogeneity is manifest not only in our social and cultural and political plurality, but even within our own hearts. And if our ends are not always reducible to the same essential form, then—from all the above—this implies that our good beliefs, proper truths, warranted assertions will likewise take a number of proper forms.
And so, people arrive at rational convictions in the diverse pursuit of instrumental, moral, ethical, esthetic, and political ends (among others). Each of these ends can be expected to be quite differently warranted and surely none of them is, a priori, reducible to or hierarchizable in respect to any of the others, except on a case to case basis.
Now, it seems to me that enormous amounts of confusion and mischief arise from the fact that philosophers, of both the professional and armchair varieties, too often seem mistakenly to want to characterize the protocols of warranted assertibility arising from just one of these modes of belief ascription—which they happen to privilege for whatever reason, only their therapists know for sure—as uniquely characteristic or definitive of rationality as such. From this, they go on then to misread the attributes, protocols, and ends defining other necessary normative modes in ways that distort or denigrate them.
I would say that this is what happens when people seek to understand the political from the perspective of scientific instrumentality (as reductionism does), or of aesthetics (as some fascists did), or morality (as many religious fundamentalists seem to do), or to understand ethics from the perspective of the political (as nihilists do) or of instrumentality (as determinists do), and so on.
For me, rationality, properly speaking, is nothing like a reductionist project at all, but consists of being able, first, to determine which mode of belief best comports with a particular desired end (prediction and control? membership in a particular moral community? narrative coherence in a project of self-creation? normative claims that solicit universal assent? reconciliation of ends among peers? or what have you) and then, second, to satisfy the criteria for warranted assertibility proper to that mode.
I happen to think these questions are especially crucial to what is described as “bioethical” discourse and technoethical discourses more generally at the moment.
To me, for example, what goes on under the heading of “bioethics” sometimes looks far more like a kind of biomoralism. By this I mean to say such “bioethical” discourse really amounts to a set prescriptions arising out of some particular community of moral identification and, crucially, disidentification. I would suggest that many “bioconservative” arguments take this form.
Some “bioethics” looks to me far more like a kind of bioestheticism: that is to say, they consist of testaments to a desired or ongoing pursuit of private perfection in the form of projects of prosthetic self-creation making only limited claims to general affirmation. Sometimes “bioethical” discourses take the form of what I would describe instead as bioscientisms, parochial prescriptions stealthed as neutral medical or engineering descriptions. And, of course, quite a lot of bioethical discourse is really simply a matter of skirmishes across a biopolitical policy terrain, consisting of efforts to arrive at contingent compromise formations in the context of diverse stakeholders in relatively, or at any rate notionally, democratic societies.
These differing ends (scientific, moral, ethical, esthetic, political, and so on) clearly generate importantly different “shoulds,” they are arrived at through importantly different protocols, they are sensitive to importantly different phenomena, and they are warranted as rational by importantly different criteria.
I worry that bioethical discourse sometimes tends to be insensitive to (and perhaps even a bit antagonistic to) the actual irreducible diversity of perfectly rational, intelligible normative practices. It seems especially susceptible to a reductionism that would denigrate democratic stakeholder plurality as “bias,” or consensual lifeway diversity as “suboptimality,” “illness” or “irrationality”—either out of a misplaced faith in a triumphalist scientism that looks for all the world like the evangelism it likes (properly enough) to decry in others, or as an uncritical expression of sociocultural privilege in an era of technodevelopmental social struggle defined essentially by conflicts between reductive corporate-military rationality on the one hand and pluralist democratic movements on the other.
A second worry I have is that I would assume key contemporary technoethical discourses to be defined in their historical specificity, and that these specificities would also yield a diversity of actual forms. It isn’t simply a matter of irrationality that some people who take a civil libertarian stance on questions of neuroceutical interventions into mood and memory nevertheless express hostility to what seem conceptually analogious civil libertarian positions on questions of access to reproductive technologies to end unwanted pregnancies or faciliate wanted ones, but the fact that these arguments are lodged for some people in the historically separable discourses and commitments of the concrete politics of the so-called “War on Drugs,” on the one hand, and the anti-abortion politics of “Life,” so-called, on the other.
What I mean to say is simply that, whatever interesting structural, conceptual, and historical relations obtain between them, the fact is that bioethics really isn’t exactly the same thing as neuroethics. Neither is it roboethics, or media criticism, or environmental criticism, or existential risk assessment, and so on. I would like to see more interesting work which surveys the field of these technoethical discourses with an eye to their topical and tropological connections but also in a way that does justice to the concrete historical and political specificities of each.
Both of these worries, that influential bioethical and technoethical discourses tend to be insufficently responsive to the actual modal diversity of rational human normativity as well as insuffiently attentive to the actual historical diversity of concrete normative practices, are nudging me into a contrary and compensatory perspective I might as well describe as technoethical pluralism. I would be interested to hear from scholars, activists, and other folks interested in critical perspectives on contemporary global technodevelopmental social struggles, any of whom might suggest works that assume a comparable pluralist methodological perspective or works in which insensitivity or even hostility to such pluralism yields especially egregious problems.
Dale Carrico Ph.D. was a fellow of the IEET from 2004 to 2008 and is a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley.
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