Dental ethics and the role of experts.

Moral problems in dentistry have both a technical and an evaluative component, but expertise in clinical dentistry does not confer expertise in clarifying evaluative issues. Ethical expertise consists of the capacity either to provide strong justifications for a range of ethical propositions or to perform a skill well according to the moral rules and virtues of a practice. I consider four areas of ethical expertise, the contributions that ethics experts might make to the practice of dentistry, and who the likely candidates to be ethics experts are.