Oral Presentations Abstracts: A SMART ETHICS IS AN ETHICS COMMITTED TO CLOSE-LISTENING

Abstract

View of Volume 66, Special Issue, September 2021

A ‘smart’ bioethics is an ethics that is able to recognize and address the real-life and context-embedded moral concerns of the people it intends to serve, whether those people are patients, relatives, healthcare professionals, researchers or policy-makers. Therefore, close-listening to what those people have to say, should be at the start of each bioethics-undertaking.

In this presentation, I will explore how narrative approaches taken from the humanities and social sciences could help bioethicists in the 21st century to attune to and examine both the stories of others and the stories we create ourselves in medicine and bioethics. I will discuss why this is an essential first step before we embark on the normative task of bioethics, and how it entails a scrutinization of epistemological and meta-ethical positions.

Following, I will use my own research project –an empirical-ethical exploration of physician-assisted dying in Dutch general practice– as an example of how narrative approaches used in empirical research, training of researchers and normative evaluation may change one’s perspective on a highly contested bioethical issue.

Last, I will discuss the question whether concepts such as narrative humility and epistemic (in)justice could and should receive more attention in bioethics-training and-research.