The resurgence of nature-speak

In contemporary bioethics, two vocabularies can be distinguished: person-speak and nature-speak. The first is built around the claim that a person's moral decisions are to be respected, while the other stands on the claim that moral decisions should comply with standards for human behaviour conveyed by nature. While most bioethicists have obtained a thorough mastery of person-speak, they are considerably less well-versed in nature-speak. Apparently, the latter has lost much of its former ability to capture important aspects of moral existence. In this paper I attempt to rehabilitate nature-speak from a hermeneutical perspective. I believe that the task of ethics is to enlarge our range of moral description and to rediscover neglected ways of speaking about human experience. The ethicist should enable individuals in health care settings to become more articulate about their moral experience. He should not content himself with applying those moral vocabularies which happen to be readily available, but should rather proceed by recovering forgotten vocabularies from within the philosophical tradition. Finally, one particular effort at restoring nature-speak is critically reviewed.