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‘It’s not worse than eating them’: the limits of analogy in bioethics

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Abstract

Bioethicists often defend novel practices by drawing analogies with practices that we are already familiar with and currently tolerate. If some novel practice is less bad than some widely-accepted practice, then (it is argued) we cannot rightly reject it. Using the bioethics literature on xenotransplantation and interspecies blastocyst complementation as a case study, I show how this style of argument can go awry. The key problem is that our moral intuitions about familiar practices can be distorted by their seeming normality. When considering the ethics of emerging technologies and novel practices, we should remain open to the possibility that our moral views about familiar practices are mistaken.

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Notes

  1. For a breakdown of different forms of female genital cutting, see: (World Health Organization & UNICEF 1997).

  2. The purpose of listing these examples is to give a sense of how frequently analogical arguments feature in bioethics. Not all of these arguments are necessarily vulnerable to each of the concerns raised below.

  3. It should, however, be noted that the moral relevance of species membership is both controversial and widely rejected by philosophers working in animal ethics (Andrews et al. 2018, pp. 13–40).

  4. My own work on the topic is no different; I have offered a similar argument in an earlier paper (Koplin and Savulescu 2019).

  5. The following discussion focuses on industrial farming. Humane farming practices raise a different – and more complicated – set of ethical issues (McMahan 2008).

  6. For a related argument in a different context, see: (Rivera-Lopez 2006). For a response (which differs somewhat from my own), see: (J. S. Taylor 2015).

  7. Indeed, some critics of male circumcision argue that these practices are closely analogous, and so should be discussed within the same ethical discourse (see e.g. Earp 2014).

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Funding

JK, through his involvement with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, received funding through from the Victorian State Government through the Operational Infrastructure Support (OIS) Program.

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Correspondence to Julian J. Koplin.

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Koplin, J.J. ‘It’s not worse than eating them’: the limits of analogy in bioethics. Monash Bioeth. Rev. 38, 129–145 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-020-00115-z

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