Abstract
The notion of common morality plays a prominent role in some of the most influential theories of biomedical ethics. Here, I focus on Beauchamp and Childress’s models in the fourth and fifth edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics as well as on a revision that Beauchamp proposed in a recent article. Although there are significant differences in these works that require separate analysis, all include a role for common morality as starting point and normative framework for theory construction in combination with a coherence theory of moral justification. I defend to some extent the existence and empirical significance of common morality, as delineated by Beauchamp and Childress in different versions, but criticize its normative role. It is neither convincing as a moral foundation nor well compatible with a standard coherentist justification. I suggest that the authors should give up the foundational account for a more modest account of common morality as resource of well-established moral insights and experiences, which have proved generally valid but neither sufficient nor infallible. Beauchamp’s latest proposal appears as a step in this direction; indeed, it may be the beginning of the end of his common-morality theory.
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Notes
Since this article is systematically rather than historically orientated, I will neither spend much space investigating the origin(s) of the concept and notion of “common morality” in general nor the sources that may have influenced Beauchamp and Childress’s account in particular. Gert and collaborators assume that Beauchamp and Childress adopted the concept of common morality from them [11, p. 126f, fn. 1]. Beauchamp, however, believes that he and Childress were the first writers in bioethics to develop a common-morality account, stimulated at the time by the work of Alan Donagan [16, p. 28].
People’s behavior may, of course, be of indirect significance for theory construction in so far as it often (although not always) corresponds to their beliefs. A behavior shared by most people is most likely not commonly believed to be immoral. This correlation, however, may not hold without exemptions.
I am indebted to one reviewer, who pointed out this problem to me.
Beauchamp and Childress make this point clear in the fifth edition of their book; it is less clear whether they hold such a thin account of common morality in the fourth edition.
To claim that societal cooperation is built on common moral views may seem—as one reviewer objected—to beg the question. Are not people often forced to act against their moral beliefs? This is no doubt true, especially in restrictive societies, but of course there are also constraints and coercions in democratic societies. For this reason, I have claimed a correlation between the willingness to cooperate and shared moral beliefs. In addition, I believe that the outcome of a more or less forced collaboration tends to be poorer than the outcome of a free and willing cooperation. As a consequence, one should expect a general correlation between the extent and quality of a society’s collaboration and the amount of moral beliefs shared in common in that society.
Evans, for example, argues that “[…] while it could be empirically true that there is a common morality (although I am sceptical), if it exists it is at such a level of generality as to be worthless. The real moral action occurs at specification from that common morality, and the process of specification is not even claimed by proponents to be based on anything to do with how the public thinks” [19, p. 227].
More examples are delivered by Carson Strong in [20, p. 42].
I address here the issue of substantive (or argumentative) rather than mere logical consistency. Logical consistency can be assessed fairly clearly (assuming standard logic); the lack of substantive or argumentative consistency is often much harder to prove, and many such objections really beg the question, being grounded on nothing but the cognitive dissonance (i.e., the intuitive feeling of implausibility) of the critics. However, I do not doubt that one can assess the substantive consistency of different moral convictions in the common morality with reasonable discursive means.
In order to stress that common morality is conceived as a singular entity, Beauchamp and Childress refer to it in a linguistically unusual way as “the” common morality.
Turner complains that Beauchamp and Childress use an a priori concept of common morality “in which empirical counterexamples are irrelevant” [18, p. 204]. Beauchamp rejects this claim [15, p. 403]. I suggest that both are half-right: those beliefs that are considered as constituting morality are taken to be valid a priori; the additional beliefs that may be shared by morally serious persons are to be discovered empirically.
Some candidates for future moral progress are given by DeGrazia [23].
Perhaps a useful analogy to this idea can be made with regard to biological taxonomy. Even if there are no two individual birds that have exactly identical wings, beaks, or other bird features, it would make sense to say that all birds have these general features in common. That is to say that the terms “wings,” “beaks,” etc., denote—on a conspicuously abstract and content-thin level—universal features of birds. Similarly, it can make sense to say that morality has—on a conspicuously abstract and content-thin level—some universal features even if there would be no two particular moralities in which these features are exactly identical.
Interestingly, and in line with this interpretation, there are two small notes in other publications where the authors embrace moral historicism. In the third edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics, in a footnote, they reject the idea that “moral theories are rooted in some ahistorical domain rather that in history and tradition” and support, without developing the notion, “a robust historicism” [3, p. 24, fn. 20]. To the best of my knowledge, there is no similar statement in any other edition of the book. Beauchamp, however, stated in his 2003 article that he is a “historicist and conventionalist in regard to the common morality,” again without explaining this notion [15, p. 262].
In a footnote, Beauchamp acknowledges Warnock, Mackie, Hobbes, and Hume as the primary sources for his theory of the objectives of morality [15, p. 272, fn. 2].
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Acknowledgements
This article was written during a visit at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA. I am grateful to the members of the Kennedy Institute for their hospitality and especially to Tom Beauchamp for extensive, fruitful discussions. I thank John Gordon and two reviewers for helpful comments. The work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, RA 1372/1).
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Rauprich, O. Common morality: comment on Beauchamp and Childress. Theor Med Bioeth 29, 43–71 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-008-9061-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-008-9061-5