Ethics Updates: Abortion. Lawrence M. Hinman, Ph.D., Editor

Critical Reading

A Guide to Reading and Analyzing Articles in Philosophy

Lawrence M. Hinman, Ph.D.

Philosophy articles are often difficult to read, in part because it's like walking into a room in the middle of a long conversation. You don't know what was already said, why it was said, or even what the participants really beleive. Moreover, philosophers often state an opponent's position first, outling the opposing position, and then point our its flaws, and finally introduce their own position on the issue. This can be confusing, especially for the novice reader.

In the following sections, Professor Sandel's article will be presented in the left-hand column and my analysis and commentary on it in the right-hand colum.

Ethics5
CMI4

Lawrence M. Hinman
Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, 5th ed.
Cengage Learning, 2012
ISBN-10: 1133050018
ISBN-13: 978-1133050018

In addition to covering all the standard topics, this book was, I think, the first in which an ethical theory book to consider Islam, the Navajo religion, and Buddhism. It was one of the earliest with a sympathetic discussion of the ethics of diversity, a topic now spanning two chapters. The concluding chapter is devotedto applying ethical theories to abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty.

Detailed Table of Contents

Lawrence M. Hinman
Contemporary Moral Issues: Diversity and Consensus, 4th ed.
Routledge, 2012.
ISBN-10: 0205633609
ISBN-13: 978-0205633609

Contemporary Moral Issues is distinctive in several ways: narrative selections for all issues; a diverse range of moral voices; an emphasis on seeking common ground; selections from notable contemporary authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Atul Gawande, E. O., Wilson, Sr. Helen Prejean, and Stehen Carter; new sections on Black Lives Matter and police ethics, contraception, gene editing (CRISPR), and more.

Detailed Table of Contents

Michael Sandel

"What's Wrong with Enhancement?"

Original Text

Analysis & Commentary

We have considered a number of practices that aim at enhancement--athletes' use of performance-enhancing drugs and genetic interventions; parents' use of sperm-sorting or pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to choose the sex of their children; cosmetic psychopharmacology; the search for techniques to improve memory or extend the human lifespan. Each of these practices gives rise to a certain unease that we have struggled to articulate. As we grope to explain what makes at least some of these practices objectionable, we often find ourselves reaching for familiar terms of moral argument. The most familiar is the safety objection: Using steroids to gain an edge in sports, or Ritalin to do better on the SAT, or cloning techniques to produce a designer child, or Botox injections to cure a furrowed brow, are troubling because they seek improvements at the cost of incurring medical risk. The safety argument is the least controversial and least interesting objection. It leaves open the question whether these practices are troubling in themselves.

In the opening, Sandel is setting the stage and showing some of the specific issues that involve enhancement.

Calling attention to “a certain unease” which he will eventually make more precise.

Sandel will proceed first to consider some objections that he does not want to pursue. This may seem odd—first telling the reader all the things you are not going to discuss, and only then turning to what you actually want to talk about—but it is not unusual among philosophers.

Considers first objection: the safety argument.

This is a familiar objection, one we have seen in many other areas. This probably makes it the least controversial.
It is also the least interesting. Why? Presumably for at least two reasons:

We are familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of objection from other examples;
It has an easy answer: make the process safe, and then there’s no longer any objection.