The starting point of ethics and its role in moral disagreement: from pluralistic disagreement to ethical progress

As biomedical science progresses and novel ethical values and questions emerge, there is a practical need for professional ethicists to identify and address them. Responding to emerging ethical values and questions can require engaging with other people’s values and the ethical theories they hold. Parker discusses both the challenge and potential value of ethical disagreement for grappling with emerging ethical questions. He proposes adversarial cooperation as a novel strategy for dealing with these disagreements and helping achieve (among other things) ethical progress. Therefore, his proposal raises the following question: can one engage with such moral disagreements and make progress in ethics?[i]1 In Parker’s view, moral disagreement can be valuable for ethics research because engaging ‘‘productively and respectfully with seemingly intractable differences of values, commitments and interests’’ could bring ‘‘mutual understanding and more ethically robust positions.’’1 To enable such engagement, Parker proposes to reform bioethics and the expertise of bioethicists. Instead of bioethics training being focused primarily on argumentation and ethical theory, he holds that bioethicists should principally be trained to become mediators whose authority is ‘‘grounded in the ability to facilitate inclusive and trustworthy processes of moral deliberation.’’1 Why should bioethicists become mediators? By drawing on the concept of antagonistic cooperation, Parker seems to endorse an ‘‘irreducible cultural pluralism’’ where people’s values and their productive interaction arise from ‘‘lived experience and practical activity, not abstract theories.’’[ii]1 As a result, for Parker’s worldview, there seems to be no truth in ethics that bioethicists could discover through research.[iii] So what type of work is left for the bioethicist, if not investigating the ethically right course of action? In Parker’s framework, bioethicists can try to make the most of such irreducible value conflicts. How? Through mediating between people who ethically …