The argumentation in the ethical/biomedicine interface. A rhetoric of collaboration

Abstract

Bioethics offers a transdisciplinary domain for framing ethical questions of how to move forward with cutting-edge medical technologies. The practice of Bioethics is structured in terms of a complex interrelationship between institutional facts (Searle, 1997) – Law, Science, Ethics and Religion – which arise out of a specific social ontology that involves the ascription of hierarchies, status functions, rules, regulations, conventions, standards and principles. Even though within this transdisciplinary domain alternative enunciation scenes can be setted, each deriving its existence from social institutions, a form of collective intentionality is deployed through which “argumentative activity types” may take place (van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2005). The focus of this article is on the peculiarities of arguments leading to conclusions in the contexts of decision-making on ethical questions of problematic clinical situations, as evidence that picking up on theoretical frameworks which provide a focus, a rationale, and a tool for the interpretation of the essential characteristics of theoretical reasoning in science and scholarship and expecting it to perform as well in practical and everyday argumentation is problematic (Hegelund & Kock, 1999; Kock, 2009). Considering the fact that rhetorical possibilities within the conflicts that fuel the growth of ethics expertise in health care arise out not from an ideal of reciprocal persuasion but from irresolvable misunderstanding, it is our aim to identify the key elements of those rhetorical issues as they are developed in the field of Bioethics apart from the prime target of classical rhetoric: persuasion. The study will examine the possibilities and limits of consensus in this argumentative space where rhetorical paradigm leads to cognitive breakdowns and persuasive strategies failure rather than to intercomprehension and mutual intelligibility (Angenot, 2008).