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On the Nature and Sociology of Bioethics

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Abstract

Much has been written in the last decade about how we should understand the value of the sociology of bioethics. Increasingly the value of the sociology of bioethics is interpreted by its advocates directly in terms of its relationship to bioethics. It is claimed that the sociology of bioethics (and related disciplinary approaches) should be seen as an important component of work in bioethics. In this paper we wish to examine whether, and how, the sociology of bioethics can be defended as a valid and justified research activity, in the context of debates about the nature of bioethics. We begin by presenting and arguing for an account of bioethics that does justice to the content of the field, the range of questions that belong within this field, and the justificatory standards (and methodological orientations) that can provide convincing answers to these questions. We then consider the role of sociology in bioethics and show how and under what conditions it can contribute to answering questions within bioethics. In the final section, we return to the sociology of bioethics to show that it can make only a limited contribution to the field.

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Notes

  1. Nothing hangs on this definition of a discipline. It seems plausibly to us as a way of picking out a set of activities that are connected by methodologies, traditions of thought and institutions, perhaps in the service of answering a set of questions. We are interested in separating this set of activities (a discipline, here) from a set of activities that are connected by the consideration of a set of questions only (a field, here).

  2. The ‘social constructionist’ turn within the social sciences over the last half a century would question the validity and viability of all ‘bottom-up’ approaches. The argument here is that empirical data can only offer a construction (rather than reflection) of social reality because these data always reflect the historically, socially and culturally embedded values of the researcher, and the contingencies and complexities of the interactions between the researcher and his/her participants (see, for example, [8]. For the purposes of our argument here, accepting this constructionist claim means that the problems we have identified with connecting ‘bottom-up’ empirical explanation with practical ‘ought’ questions should be reclassified as equivalent to those problems we identify with the ‘top-down’ empirical approach in the following paragraph.

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Acknowledgments

Dr Mark Sheehan is supported by the Oxford NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.

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Sheehan, M., Dunn, M. On the Nature and Sociology of Bioethics. Health Care Anal 21, 54–69 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-012-0234-z

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