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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

> Neither party can offer a valid argument as to why their principle is true, because both of their principles are normative.

The majority of ethicists agree that normative statements can express true statements.

But the positive/normative distinction is also not important here: medical ethics is a prescriptive and lexical ethics, one that you must follow if you are to practice medicine. It's not interested in what any individual does thinks should or shouldn't be the case: you do no harm and you always render treatment in accordance with your means.

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> The majority of ethicists agree that normative statements can express true statements.

What do you think is a good candidate for such a statement? My impression is that arguments must proceed from axioms, positive axioms aren’t helpful because the statement is normative and normative axioms just reproduce the issue.

> medical ethics is a prescriptive and lexical ethics, one that you must follow if you are to practice medicine.

What is the meaning of “lexical ethics”? Google didn’t return anything helpful.

I believe the essence of the claim you are making is that, “There is a powerful enforcement body that will only permit doctors to practice medicine if they do no harm and render treatment in accordance with their means.” I think this a positive claim about human behavior, a proposition potentially belonging to the set of sociological or historical facts.

I suspect the family is talking about the way things ought to be, “Heart transplants should go to good people”. And you are pointing out that the doctors are responding with a positive claim, “That’s not what we do here.”?

> What do you think is a good candidate for such a statement?

Here's an intuitive one: "you shouldn't kick puppies." Most people think that expresses a true statement (not that "most people" is itself indicative of truth value).

In terms of my own ethics: "act only in a way that you can will be universal law." Of course, not everybody agrees with that one, but I think it's an awfully good candidate.

We can talk about if and how those proceed from axioms, but I suspect that'll be a long thread :-)

> What is the meaning of “lexical ethics”?

Sorry: lex is in lex, legis, "law." Medical ethics don't concern themselves with normal moral objects or even moral laws in the deontological sense; they are literally a book of rules that doctors (broadly) are not allowed to disagree with.

So yes, I think it's correct to read the doctors' responses as a positive claim: they're pointing out that it's a category error to appeal to their (potentially true!) moral beliefs.

>Most people think that expresses a true statement

Worth pointing out that truth is a pretty complicated word in this case. The statement is intuitively true in the sense that it is a command that ought to be followed, but it's not a factual truth statement in an empirical sense. Likewise often truth statements or commandments are reframed emotional stances, say "you should not look at porn!" expressing simply disapproval.

Lay ethics discussions conflate truth claims a lot so it's hard to draw any conclusions from it. Also there's a deep cultural aversion to argue that moral statements have no truth value, despite it being a common philosophical position.

> a book of rules that doctors (broadly) are not allowed to disagree with.

They’re allowed to disagree, as long as they still follow them.

You're right, sorry. "It doesn't matter whether they disagree" is a better way to put it.

Dura lex sed lex and all that.

> The majority of ethicists agree that normative statements can express true statements.

Well, yeah, it would kind of be silly to be an ethicist if you didn't believe that, and even if you were it would be contrary to self-interest to admit to it. It’s like polling astrologists on the reality of planetary influence on personality and personal fortunes.

Not particularly! There are ethicists who believe all sorts of silly things, if you think "self-defeating" or "undermining" qualifies as "silly." For example, there are plenty of ethicists who think that moral statements are really just preference statements, putting "killing is bad" on the same epistemic level as "I don't like peanuts on my sundaes."

This all works out because it isn't actually contrary to their self-interest: academic philosophy doesn't care whether your position undermines some grounding claim, because there's no universal consensus around that grounding claim to begin with. You'll find plenty of moral philosophers who think that morality is a purely preferential mental phenomenon; they don't mind admitting that because there's still plenty of interesting work to be done if that's the case.

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