Empirical Ethics

Empirical and Armchair Ethics∗

In a recent paper, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve present a novel argument against prioritarianism. The argument takes its starting point from empirical surveys on people’s preferences in health care resource allocation problems. In this paper, I Vrst question whether the empirical Vndings support their argument, and then I make some general points about the use of “empirical ethics” in ethi...

The limits to empirical ethics

Empirical ethics: who is the Don Quixote?

‘Empirical ethics’ is a broad term that is used in many different and, often, unclear ways. Such vagueness has disadvantages: it can make discussion difficult. However, ambiguity also offers opportunities to explore and negotiate the multiple meanings of the emerging practice of ‘empirical ethics’. An increasing number of authors refer to their work as ‘empirical ethics’, yet most of them are n...

Symbiotic empirical ethics: a practical methodology.

Like any discipline, bioethics is a developing field of academic inquiry; and recent trends in scholarship have been towards more engagement with empirical research. This 'empirical turn' has provoked extensive debate over how such 'descriptive' research carried out in the social sciences contributes to the distinctively normative aspect of bioethics. This paper will address this issue by devel...

Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics

There are an increasing number of medical research studies involving children, including many long-term birth cohort studies. Involving children raises many issues, and little is known about children’s own views. This study explored children’s views (N = 5,851) on participation in a long-term screening study for type 1 diabetes. The results show that children 10 to 13 years of age have in gener...