A modest proposal
methodological pragmatism for bioethics
pp. 79-97
in: Jozef Keulartz, Michiel Korthals, Maartje Schermer, Tsjalling Swierstra (eds), Pragmatist ethics for a technological culture, Berlin, Springer, 2002Abstract
The last ten years has witnessed a growth in work at the intersection of pragmatism and applied ethics. In environmental ethics, the field in which I carry out most of my own research, pragmatism has grown from a sometimes explicit but largely unstated background in the work of a few figures such as Anthony Weston (1992) and Bryan Norton (1987, but especially 1991), to a critical mass large enough to sustain an edited collection (Light and Katz, 1996), to the recent publication of an issue of the leading journal in the field dominated by contributions focusing on pragmatism (Environmental Ethics, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring 2001 - three of the four features and discussion papers in the issue are on pragmatism). While the last bit of evidence could have been a self-conscious attempt by the editor of the journal to group related papers in the same issue (which would have been a departure from his common editorial policy), I think it fair to say that ten years ago there wouldn't have been three papers published in the same year in this journal on pragmatism, let alone in one issue. In bioethics too there has been a similar growth in work in this area. While this volume is proof in and of itself, Glenn McGee's book on pragmatism and genetics (1997) and his edited collection, Pragmatic Bioethics (1999a), also count as strong evidence of a surge in interest.
