CfA: International Congress of Empirical Biomedical Ethics "EXPLAIN, JUSTIFY, DEFEND"

Empirical biomedical ethics is a research field that is both old and new. It builds on a long tradition of field exploration to ensure research questions remain relevant to concerned stakeholders, while also representing an emerging scholarly community working to structure its approaches and methodologies. Biomedical ethics is inherently plural, shaped by interdisciplinarity, diverse cultural backgrounds, national and local contexts, as well as various moral frameworks. Where philosophers and theologians first laid down conceptual and theoretical groundwork to address ethical concerns in medicine, the empirical turn in biomedical ethics saw the social and health sciences bring in their own perspectives and methods to ground ethical judgments in the realities of clinical experience, patient and family perspectives, and complex social contexts. Medical professionals themselves have started to train in and engage with the field. While it is sometimes thought to occupy too much space and resources within the medical humanities more generally, biomedical ethics is still seeking to find its unique place among the philosophy, history, geography or sociology of medicine or science. Its defining trait – its normativity – is both the source of its internal disarray and what unifies it, what sets it apart and what intertwines it deeply into other fields. Continue reading