In his 1739 book, A Treatise of Human Nature, Scottish philosopher David Hume brought to the fore a problem central to empirical bioethics and scientific research more generally. Hume observed that many expressly ethical arguments or prescriptions were premised on factual claims. For example, one might observe that humans sit atop the animal hierarchy intellectually and technologically and infer from this fact that humans ought to reign over the world and the animal kingdom. Hume considered these kinds of inferences non-sequiturs and questioned the soundness of coming to an ethical, evaluative, or normative (concerning how people ought to act or standards for acting) conclusion based solely on empirical observations of fact.
This “is/ought” distinction bears heavy implications for empirical bioethics, which sometimes marries empirical observations to ethical conclusions. In 1994, the New England Journal of Medicine published an empirical study of the general public and physicians’ views on physician assisted suicide (physician aid in dying). They found that 60% of physicians and 70% of the general public held permissive attitudes towards at least some form of physician-assisted suicide. Is it possible to arrive at any moral and normative conclusions or insights based on this data?
This Empirical and Normative Bioethics Foundations section will provide a foundational understanding of (1) how to integrate empirical and normative bioethics research and (2) how to conceptualize normative (philosophical) bioethics methods. It will address questions like the following:
- What are the justified (and unjustified) moves between empirical and normative bioethics research?
- What are acceptable normative methodologies?
- What are acceptable empirical bioethics methodologies?
- How does one integrate normative methodology into a research project or study (how does one write a grant with normative aims)?
- What does a successful collaboration between empirical and normative ethics research look like?