But thinking and impassioned humans. Dreams of workable global ecological policy and of a really democratic Eastern Europe have not yet given any grounds for belief that they can be realized. So we as yet have nothing on which to base the belief that the methods of the social sciences will help make the world more bioethical. Finally, even if the methods of the social sciences really do turn out to be able to run global bioethical opinion like a machine, it is not clear how much his approach respects what is really behind the idea of moral autonomy. Opinions are of moral worth only when they arise from serious informed reflexion and spring from the active use of the mind.
Moral autonomy depends upon epistemic autonomy.
It is not clear how much we respect the capacity of humans for autonomy when we treat their opinions quantitatively. These remarks are not intended to belittle the hard work of those people, myself included, who participated in this international survey. But it seemed to me that a dissenting opinion might help encourage the kind of intellectual self-criticism which may lead us to try to look at things more deeply. As should be clear from these remarks I have methodological difficulties with generalizations from statistical samples, so I hesitate to draw conclusions from the Israeli sample. I do think, however, that much can be learned from the Jewish tradition on which much if not all Israeli thinking is based.