Abstract

This paper explores the interconnections between philosophical wisdom and bioethical expertise, arguing that the latter can be enlightened by the former. First, it analyses the arguments of those who think that philosophy has nothing to say to bioethics, and afterwards, it shows that philosophical wisdom has an irreducible ethical component, which in turn helps bioethics to reach its aims. Thus, this paper shows that some Wittgensteinian commentators (e.g., Paul Johnston) did not grasp the contributions the author of the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus and even his later work made to ethics (and potentially to bioethics as a subfield) as an autonomous domain of investigation independent of logic, the empirical sciences, and metaphysics.