Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultants: In Search of Professional Status in a Post-Modern World

  • Published:
HEC Forum Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities (ASBH) issued its Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation just as it is becoming ever clearer that secular ethics is intractably plural and without foundations in any reality that is not a social–historical construction (ASBH Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation, 2nd edn. American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, Glenview, IL, 2011). Core Competencies fails to recognize that the ethics of health care ethics consultants is not ethics in the usual sense of a morally canonical ethics. Its ethics is the ethics established at law and in enforceable health care public policy in a particular jurisdiction. Its normativity is a legal normativity, so that the wrongness of violating this ethics is simply the legal penalties involved and the likelihood of their being imposed. That the ethics of ethics consultation is that ethics legally established accounts for the circumstance that the major role of hospital ethics consultants is as quasi-lawyers giving legal advice, aiding in risk management, and engaging in mediation. It also indicates why this collage of roles has succeeded so well. This article shows how moral philosophy as it was reborn in the 13th century West led to the ethics of modernity and then finally to the ethics of hospital ethics consultation. It provides a brief history of the emergence of an ethics that is after morality. Against this background, the significance of Core Competencies must be critically reconsidered.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. For the development of my views in these matters, see Engelhardt (1999, 2003, 2009). For a brief overview of other reflections in this area, see Caws (1991), May (2001), Moreno (1991, 1988), Tong (1991), Wildes and Kevin (1993), Zaner (1993), Tong (1991), Zaner (1993).

  2. David Knowles in a popular volume concerning medieval thought opines, “the world of 1210 [i.e., the year of the publication of Aristotle and the condemnation of Aristotelianism at Paris] was a very different one from that of 1155 both in its institutional forms and in its interior spirit. The monastic centuries had ended and the age of the universities, the scholastic age, had taken their place” (Knowles 1962, pp. 223–24).

  3. Kant appreciated the necessity of engaging the idea of God, even though he was likely an atheist. As Manfred Kuehn puts it, “Kant did not really believe in God” (Kuehn 2001, pp. 391–392).

  4. The author sides with and is a member of the Church of the early first millennium that is alive and well in Orthodox Christianity. See Engelhardt (2000).

References

  • American Society for Bioethics & Humanities. (2011). Core competencies for healthcare ethics consultation (2nd ed.). Glenview, IL: American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beauchamp, T. (2004). Does ethical theory have a future in bioethics? Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 32, 209–217.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Caws, P. (1991). Committees and consensus: How many heads are better than one? Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 16.4, 375–391.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chrysostom, S. (1994). Nicene and post-Nicene fathers: Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew (Vol. 10). Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (1999). Healthcare ethics committees: Re-examining their social and moral functions. HEC Forum, 11.2, 87–100.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (2000). The foundations of Christian bioethics. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (2003). The bioethics consultant: Giving moral advice in the midst of moral controversy. HEC Forum, 15.4(December), 362–382.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (2006). Critical reflections on theology’s handmaid: Why the role of philosophy in Orthodox Christianity is so different. Philosophy & Theology, 18.1, 53–75.

    Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (2007). The Euthyphro’s dilemma reconsidered: A variation on a theme from Brody on halakhic method. In M. Cherry & A. Iltis (Eds.), Pluralistic casuistry (pp. 109–130). Dordrecht: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (2009). Credentialing strategically ambiguous and heterogeneous social skills: The emperor without clothes. HEC Forum, 21.3, 293–306.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (2010a). Moral obligation after the death of God: Critical reflections on concerns from Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Social Philosophy & Policy, 27.2, 317–340.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (2010b). Kant, Hegel, and Habermas: Reflections on ‘Glauben und Wissen’. The Review of Metaphysics, 63.4, 871–903.

    Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (2011a). Confronting moral pluralism in posttraditional Western societies: Bioethics critically reassessed. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 36.3, 243–260.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Engelhardt, H. T, Jr. (Ed.). (2011b). Bioethics critically reconsidered: Having second thoughts. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fox, E., Myers, S., & Pearlman, R. A. (2007). Ethics consultation in United States hospitals: A national survey. American Journal of Bioethics, 72, 13–25.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hegel, G. W. F. (1968). Jenaer kritische Schriften, in Gesammelte Werke (Vol. 4). Hamburg: Meiner.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Faith and knowledge. W. Cerf & H. S. Harris (Trans.). Albany: State University of New York Press.

  • Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right. A. W. Wood (Ed.), H. B. Nisbet (Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Knowles, D. (1962). The evolution of medieval thought. New York: Vintage Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuehn, M. (2001). Kant: A biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • May, T. (2001). The breadth of bioethics: Core areas of bioethics education for hospital ethics committees. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 26.1, 101–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moreno, J. (1988). Ethics by committee: The moral authority of consensus. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 13.4, 411–432.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moreno, J. (1991). Consensus, contracts, and committees. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 16.4, 393–408.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rawls, J. (1985). Justice as fairness: Political not metaphysical. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 14(Summer), 223–251.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tertullian. (1994). In A. Roberts & J. Donaldson (Eds.), Ante-Nicene fathers, Latin Christianity: Its founder, Tertullian. (Vol. 3). Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers.

  • Tong, R. (1991). The epistemology and ethics of consensus: Uses and misuses of ‘ethical’ expertise. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 16(4), 409–426.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vattimo, G. (1991). The end of modernity. J. R. Snyder (Trans.). Baltimore: Jon R. Snyder.

  • Wildes, S. J., & Kevin, W. M. (1993). The priesthood of bioethics and ethics and the return of casuistry. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 18.1, 33–49.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zaner, R. (1993). Voices and time: The venture of clinical ethics. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 18.1, 9–31.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Rice University, MS 14, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX, 77251-1892, USA

    H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.

  2. Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.

Authors
  1. H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr..

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Engelhardt, H.T. Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultants: In Search of Professional Status in a Post-Modern World. HEC Forum 23, 129–145 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-011-9167-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-011-9167-4

Keywords

Search

Navigation