Bioethics

The founders of the field of bioethics and its first leaders were largely theologians or philosophers. Reflecting the scholarly conventions of their home disciplines, the first works in bioethics centered on a normative analysis of bioethical issues, arguing for or against the moral permissibility of a particular technology, practice, or policy. Starting in the 1970s, these philosophers and theologians were joined by physicians and lawyers, who too made normative claims about bioethical problems. But by the mid-1990s, bioethics was attracting populations of scholars who had not previously been well represented in the field, namely, social scientists and empirically trained clinicians, both physicians and nurses. With the entry of these new groups of scholars, the "methods" of bioethics began to shift, mirroring the methodologies of the new disciplines becoming central to the field. With this change, bioethics included not only normative analysis but also the empirical study of bioethical questions, what Arthur Caplan has called "empiricized bioethics."

Empiricized bioethics takes one of two forms: either it seeks to collect empirical data needed to shed light on a bioethical problem, or it attempts to stand outside the discipline in order to study the field itself. Projects taking the first form use either qualitative or quantitative social science methodology to collect data needed to make persuasive bioethical arguments. These empirical studies might explore, for example, patient comprehension of medical information, patient and family experience with medical care, the ability of children or incompetent adults to give consent for research participation, or the frequency with which practitioners face particular ethical dilemmas.

Projects taking the second form explore the way in which the field of bioethics is evolving, the influence it has had on policy formation, the methods and strategies it employs, the field's understanding of itself, and its place in public life and contemporary academia. One very prominent contemporary method employing this strategy is narrative bioethics, or what might be called "deconstructionist bioethics." Using the insights of literary criticism, these bioethicists examine the discourse of the field to reveal its biases, conventions, and assumptions, making the field more self-reflective about its motives and goals. Along the same line, the field has seen the development of feminist bioethics and disability bioethics, both of which focus on issues of inclusion and exclusion, voice, and their confluence on particular substantive issues. Altogether, the empirical methods of bioethics have been so well received in the field that by the early twenty-first century, all bioethics centers and departments had representation from the social sciences or clinical medicine, and in many cases the empiricists constituted the majority of center or department membership.

One final methodology that has had a significant presence in medical humanities departments is literary analysis, in which literary texts are used as a vehicle for the ethics education of clinicians in training. These medical humanists use first-person illness narratives or first-person testimonies from clinicians, as well as important works in fiction, to teach health care professionals about the ethical issues involved in being both patient and practitioner.