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12 - Epilogue: Naturalized Bioethics in Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Marian Verkerk
Affiliation:
University Medical Center, Groningen
Hilde Lindemann
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Hilde Lindemann
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Marian Verkerk
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
Margaret Urban Walker
Affiliation:
Marquette University, Wisconsin
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Summary

As the chapters in this collection show, naturalizing bioethics is a dynamic business: it requires us to move continually from theory to practice and back again. Theory is overhauled, adjusted, and fine-tuned in the light of practice and practice in the light of theory, and justification rests on the norms that have been tested and found good in critical and self-reflexive deployments of this process. The essays gathered here offer many examples of how bioethicists might build better theory by understanding individuals in context, attending to the web of relationships in which we all live, appreciating the reality of power, and — a not unimportant point to which we will return — situating themselves within their own work. But what does all this mean for bioethicists in clinical settings? In this epilogue, written specifically for bioethicists working in health care institutions, we set out an agenda for a naturalized bioethics in practice.

The agenda can be thought of as a call for three closely interconnected kinds of change. First, bioethicists will have to alter how they engage in — and teach clinicians to engage in — moral deliberation. Second, because working conditions greatly affect how well health care professionals can exercise their moral agency, bioethicists may need to initiate changes in those conditions. Third, bioethicists will have to change how they understand their own role in the clinical setting. We take up each of these in turn.

Type
Chapter
Information
Naturalized Bioethics
Toward Responsible Knowing and Practice
, pp. 238 - 248
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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