The Role of Moral Theory in Health Care Ethics

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New technologies and practices in areas like health care, engineering, and the media pose serious ethical challenges to the whole of society. In the academic world, these ethical challenges are generally tackled in a discipline known as applied ethics. But doing applied ethics is not always confined to universities and in some countries has become professionalised: Being an ethicist has become an expert role, especially in the health care context, for instance in clinical ethics committees. However, these roles require a kind of expertise the nature of which is still debated and whose existence is rejected by many. Although researchers have always explored how the discipline of philosophical (purely theoretical) ethics is translated to a more applied context, they never have done so in a systematic and concerted fashion. The proposed interdisciplinary research network will fill this gap.The widespread lack of certainty about the proper role of moral theory in health care ethics is evidenced in the lack of a core curriculum in the training of committee or panel members in most contexts where ethical expertise is called for. A member of a clinical ethics committee, for instance, does not necessarily have knowledge about different ethical theories like utilitarianism or virtue ethics. It is not clear if members would need this knowledge, either, because there is a related uncertainty regarding the methods of doing health care ethics and the status of moral theory in general. There are also other widely accepted theories that allow for ethical deliberation without recourse to fundamental theories of ethics. But if applied ethics is not done by simply applying a moral theory to a problem, then what exactly is the latter's proper role? This lack of methodological confidence has recently led to a joint call for papers about 'The Methods of Bioethics' of leading academic journals.To be manageable, the network will concentrate on one particularly exemplary and wide-ranging area of applied ethics, namely health care ethics. It is in this area that the professionalisation of ethical expertise is most widespread and in which different roles of professional and semi-professional ethicists are being found, e.g. in national and professional task forces on policy issues, clinical ethics committees, and general practice.The central focus of the network is to critically evaluate the role and significance of moral theory in health care ethics from different, interdisciplinary angles, including theoretical and practical viewpoints. It will develop a well-rounded picture of the status of moral theory in health care ethics, and it will point out shortcomings of the current practice of utilizing moral expertise, thereby enabling policy makers to think afresh about ways to put ethics into practice.The proposal emanates from the 'Wales and Southwest Applied Ethics Network'. We will invite ethicists from a variety of academic and non-academic backgrounds, who do health care ethics in different contexts, like clinical ethics committees, research or politics. We shall jointly explore how each conceives of their expertise, the kinds of theoretical questions they encounter and the possibility that different contexts may call for different levels and styles of moral theory. The events and its outcomes will be attractive to a wide audience in diverse spheres, to people who are interested or involved in providing moral expertise, e.g. ethics committee members, politicians, doctors, social workers, lawyers, nurses, physiotherapists, paramedics, medical technologists, and medical engineers.