University of Liverpool – Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, The Waterhouse Buildings, Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L69 3GL, United Kingdom.
Bioethics. 2012 May;26(4):198-206. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2010.01843.x. Epub 2010 Oct 6.
Like any discipline, bioethics is a developing field of academic inquiry; and recent trends in scholarship have been towards more engagement with empirical research. This 'empirical turn' has provoked extensive debate over how such 'descriptive' research carried out in the social sciences contributes to the distinctively normative aspect of bioethics. This paper will address this issue by developing a practical research methodology for the inclusion of data from social science studies into ethical deliberation. This methodology will be based on a naturalistic conception of ethical theory that sees practice as informing theory just as theory informs practice - the two are symbiotically related. From this engagement with practice, the ways that such theories need to be extended and developed can be determined. This is a practical methodology for integrating theory and practice that can be used in empirical studies, one that uses ethical theory both to explore the data and to draw normative conclusions.
与任何学科一样，生物伦理学是一个不断发展的学术探究领域；最近的学术趋势是更多地参与实证研究。这种“经验转向”引发了广泛的争论，即社会科学中进行的这种“描述性”研究如何有助于生物伦理学的独特规范性方面。本文将通过开发一种实用的研究方法来解决这个问题，即将社会科学研究的数据纳入伦理审议。这种方法将基于一种自然主义的伦理理论概念，即实践为理论提供信息，正如理论为实践提供信息一样——两者是共生关系。通过这种与实践的接触，可以确定需要扩展和发展这些理论的方式。这是一种将理论和实践结合起来的实用方法，可以用于实证研究，即在使用伦理理论探索数据和得出规范结论时都可以使用。
