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Developing World Bioethics ISSN 1471-8731 (print); 1471-8847 (online) Volume 15 Number 1 2015 p iii

doi:10.1111/dewb.12078

EDITORIAL

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH AND BIOETHICS What counts as empirical evidence in bioethics? Differently from epidemiology or social sciences, bioethics is more argumentative than demonstrative, more normative than explanatory. Saying that, I am suggesting some parameters for the field: we need strong concepts, yet pieces of data. My provocative argument is that we should not import the epistemic criteria of what counts as data from epidemiology or social sciences to evaluate a contribution as relevant to bioethics. An ethical argument is more important than a long deep description of data. Pieces of data can be a population survey on benefit sharing after an extensive clinical trial, open interviews with a group of physicians to gather information on conscientious objection or a novel on institutional racism in a public hospital. Each type of data would demand different approaches to concepts, arguments and writing – the strength of the paper is more on the ethical thesis behind the survey, interview or fiction than about the reliability of the data to describe reality. I am not saying that anything goes in regards to methodology in order bioethics to flourish. My point is a slightly different one: the rules of what counts as a good survey have to be respected in a paper, but the quality of the survey is not enough to have a good bioethical argument. A reliable survey and a beautiful fictional story should have the same epistemic status as evidence in bioethics. We should not uncritically import the epistemic disputes on empirical data from other fields to bioethics. My suggestion is to adopt a twofold welcome to methodology in bioethics communication: to respect the epistemic criteria of validation from different fields – from public health to critical theory; and not assume any technology for gathering evidence as the best method. Empirical data, or evidence, in a more ordinary language, is subsidiary to the ethical argument.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

There is a strong position in favour of empirical methods in developing world bioethics. I would risk two hypotheses to such identity: the first one is the genealogy of bioethics among us, and the second one relates to the politics of knowledge in international bioethics. Bioethics has been consolidated as a discipline of the health sciences more than of philosophy or humanities, and as a consequence working in bioethics in developing countries is also being a reliable methodologist. The majority of graduate courses on bioethics are based in health departments, which imprint a different approach to empirical data and its centrality to composing an argument. The second explanation, the international politics of knowledge in bioethics, is not as obvious to sustain – I wonder if the use of empirical data has been the venue utilized by developing country authors to be heard by the consolidated bioethics community. The epistemic North offers the theoretical frames; we put them in movement by testing different realities. I do not want to be cynical in my analysis of the international politics of knowledge in bioethics. Honestly, this is not particular to our field; this is the way that knowledge flows globally. My point is more related to the explosion of empirical data and the importation of the epistemic criteria from other fields to developing world bioethics than a criticism of how global inequalities are reflected in the way that we recognize each other as epistemic peers. Empirical data are highly welcomed in bioethics: as a reader, touches of reality give me emotion, connection, clarity and a different taste of how moral conflicts are embodied in different places and times. As an anthropologist by training, I praise ethnographies as a face to abstraction, but as a bioethics thinker, I recognize different ways of giving reality to concepts and arguments.

DEBORA DINIZ

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Empirical research and bioethics.

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