Display options
Cite
Earp BD, Lewis J, Dranseika V, et al. Experimental philosophical bioethics and normative inference. Theor Med Bioeth. 2021;42(3):91-111doi: 10.1007/s11017-021-09546-z.
Earp, B. D., Lewis, J., Dranseika, V., & Hannikainen, I. R. (2021). Experimental philosophical bioethics and normative inference. Theoretical medicine and bioethics, 42(3), 91-111. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-021-09546-z
Earp, Brian D, et al. "Experimental philosophical bioethics and normative inference." Theoretical medicine and bioethics vol. 42,3 (2021): 91-111. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-021-09546-z
Earp BD, Lewis J, Dranseika V, Hannikainen IR. Experimental philosophical bioethics and normative inference. Theor Med Bioeth. 2021 Aug;42(3):91-111. doi: 10.1007/s11017-021-09546-z. Epub 2021 Nov 17. PMID: 34787789.
Copy Download .nbib Format: NLM
Share it on

Theor Med Bioeth. 2021 Aug;42(3):91-111. doi: 10.1007/s11017-021-09546-z. Epub 2021 Nov 17.

Experimental philosophical bioethics and normative inference.

Theoretical medicine and bioethics

Brian D Earp, Jonathan Lewis, Vilius Dranseika, Ivar R Hannikainen

Affiliations

  1. Departments of Philosophy and Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
  2. Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, Oxford, England, UK.
  3. Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. [email protected].
  4. Institute of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland.
  5. Department of Philosophy, University of Granada, Granada, Spain.

PMID: 34787789 DOI: 10.1007/s11017-021-09546-z

Abstract

This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called "experimental philosophical bioethics" (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people's moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situated within the broader field of bioethics, it also aims to contribute to substantive ethical questions about what should be done in a given context. What are some of the ways in which this aim has been pursued? In this paper, we employ a case study approach to examine and critically evaluate four strategies from the recent literature by which scholars in bioxphi have leveraged empirical data in the service of normative arguments.

© 2021. The Author(s).

Keywords: Empirical bioethics; Experimental philosophical bioethics; Experimental philosophy; Moral judgment; Normative inference

References

  1. Earp, Brian D. 2019. Introducing bioXphi. The New Experimental Philosophy Blog, February 8, 2019. https://xphiblog.com/introducing-bioxphi . - PubMed
  2. Earp, Brian D., Joanna Demaree-Cotton, Michael Dunn, Vilius Dranseika, Jim A.C. Everett, Adam Feltz, Gail Geller, et al. 2020. Experimental philosophical bioethics. AJOB Empirical Bioethics 11: 30–33. - PubMed
  3. Davies, Rachel, Jonathan Ives, and Michael Dunn. 2015. A systematic review of empirical bioethics methodologies. BMC Medical Ethics 16(15): 1–13. - PubMed
  4. Pettit, Philip. 1992. Instituting a research ethic: Chilling and cautionary tales. Bioethics 6: 89–112. - PubMed
  5. Graber, Abraham. 2016. Lessons from Tuskegee: What law enforcement can learn from the history of bioethics. Criminal Justice Ethics 35: 123–141. - PubMed
  6. Callahan, Daniel. 2012. The roots of bioethics: Health, progress, technology, death. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - PubMed
  7. Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 2013. Principles of biomedical ethics, 7th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - PubMed
  8. McMillan, John. 2018. The methods of bioethics: An essay in meta-bioethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - PubMed
  9. Lewis, Jonathan, and Udo Schuklenk. 2021. Bioethics met its COVID-19 Waterloo: The doctor knows best again. Bioethics 35: 3–5. - PubMed
  10. Arras, John. 2016. Theory and bioethics. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Fall 2020 ed, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/theory-bioethics . - PubMed
  11. Livengood, Jonathan, and Edouard Machery. 2007. The folk probably don’t think what you think they think: Experiments on causation by absence. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31: 107–127. - PubMed
  12. Sytsma, Justin, and Edouard Machery. 2010. Two conceptions of subjective experience. Philosophical Studies 151: 299–327. - PubMed
  13. Lewis, Jonathan. 2020. From x-phi to bioxphi: Lessons in conceptual analysis 2.0. AJOB Empirical Bioethics 11: 34–36. - PubMed
  14. Rachels, James. 1975. Active and passive euthanasia. New England Journal of Medicine 292: 78–80. - PubMed
  15. Harris, John. 2005. Sex selection and regulated hatred. Journal of Medical Ethics 31: 291–294. - PubMed
  16. Leather, Suzi. 2005. The HFEA then and now. Human Fertility 8: 63–64. - PubMed
  17. DeCesare, Michael A. 2000. Public attitudes toward euthanasia and suicide for terminally ill persons: 1977 and 1996. Social Biology 47: 264–276. - PubMed
  18. Donnison, David, and Caroline Bryson. 1996. Matters of life and death: Attitudes to euthanasia. In British social attitudes: The 13th report, ed. Roger Jowell, Roger, John Curtice, Alison Park, Lindsay Brook, and Katarina Thomson, 161–183. Aldershot: Dartmouth. - PubMed
  19. Sikora, Joanna, and Frank Lewins. 2007. Attitudes concerning euthanasia: Australia at the turn of the 21st Century. Health Sociology Review 16: 68–78. - PubMed
  20. Alexander, Joshua, Ronald Mallon, and Jonathan M. Weinberg. 2010. Accentuate the negative. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1: 297–314. - PubMed
  21. Fisher, Justin C. 2015. Pragmatic experimental philosophy. Philosophical Psychology 28: 412–433. - PubMed
  22. Knobe, Joshua. 2016. Experimental philosophy is cognitive science. In A companion to experimental philosophy, ed. Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter, 37–52. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. - PubMed
  23. Machery, Edouard. 2017. Philosophy within its proper bounds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - PubMed
  24. Mukerji, Nikil. 2019. Experimental philosophy: A critical study. London: Rowman and Littlefield. - PubMed
  25. Sosa, Ernest. 2007. Experimental philosophy and philosophical intuition. Philosophical Studies 132: 99–107. - PubMed
  26. O’Neill, Elizabeth, and Edouard Machery. 2014. Experimental philosophy: What is it good for? In Current controversies in experimental philosophy, ed. Edouard Machery and Elizabeth O’Neill, vii–xxix. London: Routledge. - PubMed
  27. Reiner, Peter B. 2019. Experimental neuroethics. In Shaping children: Ethical and social questions that arise when enhancing the young, ed. Saskia K. Nagel, 75–83. Cham: Springer. - PubMed
  28. Knobe, Joshua. 2003. Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis 63: 190–194. - PubMed
  29. Earp, Brian D., Stephen R. Latham, and Kevin P. Tobia. 2020. Personal transformation and advance directives: An experimental bioethics approach. American Journal of Bioethics 20(8): 72–75. - PubMed
  30. Alfano, Mark, Don Loeb, and Alexandra Plakias. 2018. Experimental moral philosophy. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2018 ed, ed. E. N. Zalta. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/experimental-moral . - PubMed
  31. Earp, Brian D., and David Trafimow. 2015. Replication, falsification, and the crisis of confidence in social psychology. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 1–11. - PubMed
  32. Open Science Collaboration. 2015. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science 349(6251). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716 . - PubMed
  33. Earp, Brian D. 2016. What did the OSC replication initiative reveal about the crisis in psychology. BMC Psychology 4: 1–19. - PubMed
  34. Cova, Florian, Brent Strickland, Angela Abatista, Aurélien Allard, James Andow, Mario Attie, James Beebe, et al. 2021. Estimating the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12: 9–44. - PubMed
  35. Kuehne, Maria, Kai Heimrath, Hans-Jochen Heinze, and Tino Zaehle. 2015. Transcranial direct current stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex shifts preference of moral judgments. PLOS ONE 10(5): e0127061. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127061 . - PubMed
  36. Earp, Brian D. 2018. Psychedelic moral enhancement. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 83: 415–439. - PubMed
  37. Nado, Jennifer. 2021. Conceptual engineering via experimental philosophy. Inquiry 64: 76–96. - PubMed
  38. Savulescu, Julian, Guy Kahane, and Christopher Gyngell. 2019. From public preferences to ethical policy. Nature Human Behaviour 3: 1241–1243. - PubMed
  39. Rueda, Jon, Ivar R. Hannikainen, Joaquín Hortal-Carmona, and David Rodriguez-Arias. 2020. Examining public trust in categorical versus comprehensive triage criteria. American Journal of Bioethics 20(7): 106–109. - PubMed
  40. Beverley, John, and James Beebe. 2018. Judgments of moral responsibility in tissue donation cases. Bioethics 32: 83–93. - PubMed
  41. McMahan, Jeff. 2003. The ethics of killing: Problems at the margins of life. New York: Oxford University Press. - PubMed
  42. Beverley, John. 2016. The ties that undermine. Bioethics 30: 304–311. - PubMed
  43. Wedgwood, Ralph. 2007. The nature of normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - PubMed
  44. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter. 2008. Framing moral intuitions. In Moral psychology, vol. 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 47–76. Cambridge: MIT Press. - PubMed
  45. Andow, James. 2016. Reliable but not home free? What framing effects mean for moral intuitions. Philosophical Psychology 29: 904–911. - PubMed
  46. Awad, Edmond, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Jonathan Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon, and Iyad Rahwan. 2018. The moral machine experiment. Nature 563: 59–64. - PubMed
  47. Earp, Brian D. 2021. Falsification: How does it relate to reproducibility? In Research methods in the social sciences: An A-Z of key concepts, ed. Jean-Frédéric Morin, Christian Olsson, and Ece Özlem Atikcan, 119–112. London: Routledge. - PubMed
  48. Lakatos, Imre. 1970. Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes. In Criticism and the growth of knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 91–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - PubMed
  49. Rodríguez-Arias, David, Blanca Rodríguez López, Anibal Monasterio-Astobiza, and Ivar R. Hannikainen. 2020. How do people use ‘killing’, ‘letting die’ and related bioethical concepts? Contrasting descriptive and normative hypotheses. Bioethics 34: 509–518. - PubMed
  50. Cushman, Fiery, Joshua Knobe, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. 2008. Moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgments. Cognition 108: 281–289. - PubMed
  51. Earp, Brian D., Joshua T. Monrad, Marianne LaFrance, John A. Bargh, Lindsey L. Cohen, and Jennifer A. Richeson. 2019. Gender bias in pediatric pain assessment. Journal of Pediatric Psychology 44: 403–414. - PubMed
  52. Cohen, Lindsey L., Jean Cobb, and Sarah R. Martin. 2014. Gender biases in adult ratings of pediatric pain. Children’s Health Care 43: 87–95. - PubMed
  53. Earp, Brian D., and Katelynn E. Boerner. 2019. Does gender bias influence how people assess children’s pain? OUPblog, April 4, 2019. https://blog.oup.com/2019/04/gender-bias-children-pain . - PubMed
  54. Kuorikoski, Jaakko, and Caterina Marchionni. 2016. Evidential diversity and the triangulation of phenomena. Philosophy of Science 83: 227–247. - PubMed
  55. Brandt, Richard B. 1979. A theory of the good and the right. Oxford: Clarendon Press. - PubMed
  56. BonJour, Laurence. 1985. The structure of empirical knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. - PubMed
  57. Cath, Yuri. 2016. Reflective equilibrium. In The Oxford handbook of philosophical methodology, ed. Herman Cappelen, Tamar Szabó Gendler, and John Hawthorne, 213–230. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - PubMed
  58. Scanlon, T.M. 2014. Being realistic about reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - PubMed
  59. Earp, Brian D. 2020. What is gender for? Philosopher 108: 94–99. - PubMed
  60. Haslanger, Sally. 2000. Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? Noûs 34: 31–55. - PubMed
  61. Lindauer, Matthew. 2020. Experimental philosophy and the fruitfulness of normative concepts. Philosophical Studies 177: 2129–2152. - PubMed
  62. Thomasson, Amie L. 2012. Experimental philosophy and the methods of ontology. The Monist 95: 175–199. - PubMed
  63. Sommers, Roseanna. 2020. Commonsense consent. Yale Law Review 129: 2232–2324. - PubMed
  64. Veit, Walter, Brian D. Earp, Heather Browning, and Julian Savulescu. 2021. Evaluating tradeoffs between autonomy and wellbeing in supported decision making. American Journal of Bioethics 21(11): 21–24. - PubMed
  65. Elwyn, Glyn, Jon Tilburt, and Victor Montori. 2013. The ethical imperative for shared decision-making. European Journal for Person Centered Healthcare 1: 129–131. - PubMed
  66. Lewis, Jonathan. 2020. Getting obligations right: Autonomy and shared decision making. Journal of Applied Philosophy 37: 118–140. - PubMed
  67. Notini, Lauren, Brian D. Earp, Lynn Gillam, Rosalind J. McDougall, Julian Savulescu, Michelle Telfer, and Ken C. Pang. 2020. Forever young? The ethics of ongoing puberty suppression for non-binary adults. Journal of Medical Ethics 46: 743–752. - PubMed
  68. Notini, Lauren, Brian D. Earp, Lynn Gillam, Julian Savulescu, Michelle Telfer, and Ken C. Pang. 2020. Identity, well-being and autonomy in ongoing puberty suppression for non-binary adults: A response to the commentaries. Journal of Medical Ethics 46: 761–762. - PubMed
  69. Neiders, Ivars, and Vilius Dranseika. 2020. Minds, brains, and hearts: An empirical study on pluralism concerning death determination. Monash Bioethics Review 38: 35–48. - PubMed
  70. Veatch, Robert M., and Lainie F. Ross. 2016. Defining death: The case for choice. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. - PubMed

Publication Types