Abstract

Applied ethics as singular or plural? Disciplinary Pluralism and the Centrality of Science in the new Horizons of Bioethics The accelerated scientific and technological advancements of the 20th and 21st centuries have, on the one hand, created a gap between Sapiens’ technical abilities and its moral psychology. On the other, it has offered our species unprecedented possibilities for hybridisation with the world outside. The need for a well-structured reflection on the ethical-philosophical aspects of the new scenarios was the driving force behind the transformation of Ethics. Toulmin, in a 1982 paper How medicine saved the life of Ethics, emphasised the key role that medicine played in giving new life to ethics and stimulating the birth of Bioethics, a kind of Applied Ethics at the center of a vast debate. In fact, to take up Toulmin’s expression and, in some ways, revive it, not only medicine, but the sciences of the biosciences as a whole, engineering in its various forms, information technology right up to the leading sectors of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology have fostered the emergence of new areas of reflection and the multiplication of applied ethics. Each area of applied ethics somehow claims its own autonomy, in terms of the elaboration of specific analytical tools, distinctive problems and specific skills that a scholar within that area should exhibit. Nonetheless, it is also clear that the common denominator between the various fields and the connecting elements that emerge in the differences and beyond them should not be overlooked. Faced with these scenarios, there are two main themes that the present Issue intends to focus on.1) To try to answer the question of whether disciplinary autonomy and pluralism in relation to Applied Ethics are the regulatory ideal to which we should adhere or rather (at least in some cases) an obstacle that prevents us from finding a more general framework for sectors of ethical reflection that often present points of contact and interconnected problems that it would be more effective to address by overcoming the hyper-specialisation that today seems to be the ultimate destiny (even) of the philosophical disciplines; 2) starting from the observation that in applied ethics the object of enquiry cannot be a mere Gegenstand (something that is in front of) but an active part of the process of reflection, a further question to be examined will be: what space in an ethics of science must scientific knowledge of reference occupy, in order to avoid making it the mere object of an external reflection?