How developing a more expansive, non-formal conception of reason
produces richer ethical understandings of human situations, explored and
illustrated with many real examples.
In Re-Reasoning Ethics, Barry Hoffmaster and Cliff Hooker enhance and
empower ethics by adopting a non-formal paradigm of rational
deliberation as intelligent problem-solving and a complementary
non-formal paradigm of ethical deliberation as problem-solving design to
promote human flourishing. The non-formal conception of reason produces
broader and richer ethical understandings of human situations, not the
simple, constrained depictions provided by moral theories and their
logical applications in medical ethics and bioethics. Instead, it
delivers and vindicates the moral judgment that complex, contextual, and
dynamic situations require.
Hoffmaster and Hooker demonstrate how this more expansive rationality
operates with examples, first in science and then in ethics. Non-formal
reason brings rationality not just to the empirical world of science but
also to the empirical realities of human lives. Among the many real
cases they present is that of how women at risk of having children with
genetic conditions decide whether to try to become pregnant. These women
do not apply the formal principle of maximizing expected utility (as
advised by genetic counselors) and instead imagine scenarios of what
their lives could be like with an affected child and assess whether they
could accept the worst of these scenarios.
Hoffmaster and Hooker explain how moral compromise and a liberated,
extended, and enriched reflective equilibrium expand and augment
rational ethical deliberation and how that deliberation can rationally
design ethical practices, institutions, and policies.
