Moral Acquaintances

From decisions about the end of life to choices about the creation of life and, more recently, to questions concerning the cost and accessibility of health care, bioethics is a field of vigorous and sometimes rancorous public debate. Indeed the moral controversies and dilemmas of medicine and health care often propel bioethics into newspaper headlines and television talk shows.

Moral Acquaintances: Methodology in Bioethics is not part of the standard repertory of books that explore and offer guidance on a particular issue in bioethics. The question Kevin Wm. Wildes poses is not what we can do morally in a field of great moral controversy, but how we can conceive the controversy and seek a moral course of action.

Wildes argues that the methodological issues in bioethics mirror the experience of moral pluralism in a secular society. The different methods that have been used in the field reflect the different moral views found in a pluralistic society. Rather than assume that there is one method for all or that we are lost in deep moral pluralism, Wildes argues that we can imagine ourselves as moral acquaintances. Key to understanding our acquaintanceship are the procedures that bind us together and the moral justifications and assumptions for those procedures.