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22 Med., Health Care & Phil. 1 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/medhcph22 and id is 1 raw text is: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy (2019) 22:1-3 https://doi.org/1 0.1007/s 11019-019-09885-8 EDITORIAL CrossMark Giving up on abstract ethical theory Bert Gordijn' Henk ten Have2 Published online: 16 January 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Disunitarianism Johan Brannmark argues that in medical ethics it is better not to employ general ethical propositions that transcend the domain that medical ethics intends to cover (Brannmark 2019). He thus favours a 'disunitarian' approach, not only in medical ethics but in all kinds of domain-specific ethi- cal theorizing. When unitarians advance domain-specific norms for certain fields of applied ethics, they try to legiti- mize these by demonstrating that they are in line with the most general principles in ethics. In contrast, disunitarians focus exclusively on whether the domain-specific norms are appropriate for the domain at hand without engaging any domain-transcending principles. Indeed, ...the disunitar- ian approach involves giving up on the level of completely general principles or norms as a meaningful subject-matter for ethical inquiries... (Brannmark 2019). For disunitar- ians the highest-level principles for any domain would still be domain-specific. Domain-transcending theorizing is regarded as superfluous, indeed even detrimental. In order to substantiate the appropriateness of disunitari- anism as a 'working assumption' Brannmark advances the following three arguments. He first points out that there is hardly any agreement on the most abstract principles in eth- ics. Subsequently, he maintains that disunitarianism allows a better testing of principles against intuitions. Finally, he argues that it facilitates more workable principles for the non-philosophical practitioners who have to use them in their professional practice (Brannmark 2019). Each of these arguments triggers interesting questions for further debate, some of which we wish to highlight. First though, it is worthwhile having a closer look at the idea of disuni- tarianism itself. E Bert Gordijn bert.gordijn@dcu.ie Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland 2 Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA Far from claiming he has unearthed the final truths about disunitarianism Brannmark aims to generate more discus- sion about the fundamental methodological choices in medi- cal and indeed, more generally, in applied ethics (Brann- mark 2019). He presents disunitarianism as a claim about the highest level of abstraction of ethical principles eligible to be employed within a specific domain. According to disu- nitarianism all eligible principles, even the most abstract ones, must still be domain specific. Unitarians on the other hand assume that specification starts with abstract top-level ethical principles down to domain-specific principles and then further down to specific ethical judgments. Accord- ingly, they conceptualize all fields of domain-specific ethics as instantiating the same abstract ethical theory as their com- mon ethical core. Disunitarians, in contrast, do away with this shared abstract core and start specification at the level of domain-specific principles, whereby-at least theoreti- cally-they can organize each domain-specific ethics sub- discipline completely different, as long as its principles are appropriate to the domain at hand (Brannmark 2019). Obviously, the disunitarian claim leans heavily on the concept of domain, which Brannmark defines as a set of interconnected practices (Brannmark 2019). In order to further delineate the concept of practices Brannmark refer- ences Rawls' notion of any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penal- ties, defenses, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure (Rawls cited in Brannmark 2019). Brannmark admits that the demarcation of domains as sets of intercon- nected practices is likely to be less than razor-sharp. For practical purposes, however, he maintains that the domains covered by currently existing fields of applied ethics, such as business ethics, environmental ethics, and medical eth- ics, give reasonably clear examples of what is meant by the notion of domain. Moreover, the main point is that disuni- tarians do not resort to domain-transcending ethical theory (Brannmark 2019). 9 Springer Introduction

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