RESEARCH

A Reasoned Approach
A Moral Framework for Making Public Policy Decisions

EVERY PROBLEM has a right answer according to Frances Kamm. That’s as true in philosophy as it is in mathematics, says Kamm, who has set out to prove it by examining some of the thorniest social issues of our time and offering prescriptions based on a reasoned moral framework. Now she is guiding Kennedy School students to approach public policy issues in the same fashion.

“It’s very important that the students learn how to argue for their positions,” says Kamm. “Most of the students have never thought about ethical issues in that way. They think of values very often as not things that are subject to rational analysis, or there isn’t any ultimate truth. The approach here is that we reason our way towards truths in ethics.”

Kamm began teaching last year at the Kennedy School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences after serving as a professor at New York University. Her research focuses on normative ethical theory and applied ethics — what people ought to do and how that’s applied to particular problems — and spans topics such as bioethics, war and morality, and distribution of scarce resources. While on leave this year, she is working on several books, adding to a body of writing that demonstrates her methodology in a search for truth.

On bioethics issues, for example, she argues for the permissibility of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia (when death is a lesser evil, she writes, it is sometimes permissible to intend death in order to stop pain), as well as embryonic stem cell research (analyzing the moral importance of embryos, she concludes that the human embryo wouldn’t be harmed by losing out on more life). “I take the facts that are given to me by experts in the area, and then I think about the moral issues that are raised,” Kamm says. She builds each argument based on responses to hypothetical and sometimes fanciful cases: in her discussion of stem cell research, she evokes a table that can magically change into a person and considers whether it is harmed if it is destroyed before transformation. Philosophers use this method “to unearth the reasons for particular responses to a case and to construct more general principles from these data,” as she writes in the introduction of her two-volume book, Morality, Mortality.

“It seems like it’s complicating matters beyond belief, but it actually helps you to get to a bottom line,” says Kamm. “You get so used to doing this, that you do it rapidly. You go through various possibilities, and you see what you think is the right answer.”

Perhaps on the surface such philosophical analysis wouldn’t seem compatible with the rough-and-tumble world of politics. Most Ken-nedy School students whotake the required ethics and responsibility course don’t have a philosophy background, Kamm says. Yet she contends that “rational reflection” would serve aspiring politicians and others in the public sphere, allowing them to construct arguments that are accessible and respectful to people with different viewpoints. Amid the focus on moral values following the U.S.presidential election, Kamm cites philosophers since Socrates who have believed that morality must be a function of reasoning and giving arguments for one’s views.

In her brief time at the Kennedy School, Kamm says she has already seen her students evaluate contentious issues in a different way. The algorithms of public policy may not be as simple as 1+1=2, but for the students, she says, the solutions are beginning to add up: “One might actually get an answer to these questions rather than an emotional response to them. It’s a revelation for them that this is possible. They say, ‘We’re spending more time on this ethics and responsibility course than any other course because we’re constantly arguing with each other. We can see that there is a way to approach these issues that we never thought of before. And we feel like we’re getting closer to the truth.’” — LR