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Speaking Across Time and Cultures in Bioethics and Environmental Ethics

‘What counts as knowledge in the fields of applied ethics?’ is a question that unites the two books in question. When an ethicist enters a hospital or laboratory or is invited to participate in an international commission on sustainable development, what source of knowledge can she or he claim as uniquely philosophical? What is the basis of the philosopher’s claim to expertise in an applied setting? What distinguishes the ethicist’s voice from that of others whose credentials are bolstered by the authority of science? On what grounds can the ethicist offer criticisms of these other voices’ claims to knowledge? The volumes treated in this essay look to the ancient past and to various cultures in the Southern Hemisphere for answers to these questions regarding the epistemic status of enterprises in applied ethics. The pool into which the authors included in the Bioethics volume dip for answers to these questions is classical philosophy, particularly the concept of phronesis and the writings of Aristotle. The first three essays are critical examinations of the sources of the physician’s claim to knowledge. Robert Bartz offers a careful reconstruction of the historical emergence of medical knowledge—a corpus distinguished from the knowledge of magicians, seers, and other healers—from the prognostics of the Hippocratics. ‘While some seers looked toward the flights of birds and other diviners examined entrails’, writes Bartz, ‘the Hippocratic iatros examined signs on the surfaces of the human body, scrutinized material coming from inside the body, and studied the environment surrounding the body in order to make their prognosis’ (pp. 5–6). Bartz then cautions the reader not to shoehorn this ancient practice into contemporary philosophical categories. ‘What differentiated the Hippocratic iatros from earlier healers was not principally a shift from