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Toward a normative practice approach for mental healthcare
Published in Gerrit Glas, Person-Centered Care in Psychiatry, 2019
In this chapter, I make a distinction between ethical and normative aspects of a practice. I prefer to speak of the normative aspects of psychiatric practice. Ethics is a science and a branch of both philosophy and theology. Ethicists refer to moral theories, but not all ethics is normative. There are also descriptive ethics and meta-ethics. However, the main reason for my preference of the term normative is that it spans a broader domain than the domain of (normative) ethics per se. Like medicine, psychiatry needs a broader than strictly moral analysis of its “normative structure.” This is because there are other kinds of normativity than ethical normativity alone, such as socially, economically, legally, and politically qualified normativity. The kind of normative analysis I am aiming at is an attempt to intuitively probe the inherent normative principles (rules, maxims, and values) of a certain practice. This attempt begins from within, i.e., in the form of a phenomenological and/or ethnographic descriptive analysis of mental healthcare as a practice. This kind of analysis ideally provides a substantive account of the practices under study, with glimpses of an implicit normativity, which is subsequently unearthed by conceptual analysis as thoroughly as possible. My contribution mainly consists of the second part: the conceptual analysis. With respect to the first part, the descriptive analysis, I mainly refer to the work of others.
Spirituality and ethics
Published in Barbara Hemphill, Occupational Therapy and Spirituality, 2019
Morality according to the Occupational Therapy Code of Ethics (Slater, 2015, p. 292) consists of “the normative structure of human practice, including specific rights and duties, rules and laws, ideals, virtues and vices. Morality may be culture-based or culture-driven.” Ethics is a philosophical discipline and can be defined as the philosophical study of morality. Morality is often called “descriptive ethics” which describes existing moral views. Ethics can be subdivided into normative ethics, which attempts to determine what is right and what is wrong (usually expressed in “dos and don’ts”). The occupational therapy code of ethics is normative ethics. Meta-ethics is concerned with tasks such as analyzing moral judgments (e.g., genetics, human and animal experiments). Normative ethics tries to establish which moral views are justifiable and thus ought to be accepted. The difference between ethics and morality is that ethics is the study of behavioral values, deals with principles, and asks what is morally right or wrong. Morality has higher standard. The two can overlap. Being moral can be a synonym for being ethical but not the other way around. To further define normative ethics Mappes and DeGrazia (1996, p. 2) stated, In general normative ethics task is to advance and provide a reasoned justification of an overall theory of moral obligation, thereby establishing an ethical theory that provides a general answer to the question: What is morally right and what is morally wrong?
What is ethics?
Published in David B Cooper, Ethics in Mental Health–Substance Use, 2017
Michael Robertson, Edwina Light
Athenian philosopher Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle 1998) was the first attempt at empirical ethics. Aristotle’s project sought to identify the habits and dispositions of great men in Athenian society. Contemporary descriptive ethics rely on more evolved empirical methods of enquiry from a range of disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, medicine, public health, epidemiology, and economics (Borry et al. 2004). In a typical approach to empirical ethics, a selection of members of a particular group participates in interviews, focus groups or other techniques of data acquisition. This data is then analysed using methods that attempt to systematically refine the observations into a more structured account of the values evident in their speech or written acts. Through a process of further analysis, the data is used to construct an idiographic account of the value system of the group. Empirical ethics seeks to focus on ‘ethics in action’ (Borry et al. 2004), bringing us closer to the ‘detail of everyday life’ (Carter 2009).
The Place of Bioethics in Philosophy: Toward a Mutually Constructive Integration
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Wayne Shelton, Daniel T. Kim, Pierce Randall
However, it is striking that much of the target article’s response to the skeptics appears to be framed in a manner consistent with the assumption that philosophy is an AHIA. The many examples the authors use to argue for the role of philosophy in bioethics focus on philosophy’s one-way contributions to bioethics. But this tendency persists also in their discussions about integrating and connecting the two fields. Their suggestions focus on the application and translation of “general principles, concepts, and theories” and “technical concepts from metaphysics and epistemology” (1). Although the authors note that a philosopher’s work in bioethics can enrich their philosophical work (13), little is made of this point. Though we agree with the authors that descriptive ethics should not be conflated with normative ethics (1), it does not follow that sources of ethical judgment reside entirely in the domain of philosophical ethics as they risk implying.
The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, Sean Aas, Dan Brudney, Jessica Flanigan, S. Matthew Liao, Alex London, Wayne Sumner, Julian Savulescu
Philosophers continue to play a fundamental role in bioethical analysis. Resolving normative questions requires principles, concepts, and theories. It requires weighing considered judgments about particular cases against general principles, applying technical concepts from metaphysics and epistemology, and engaging in debates in moral theory and philosophy of science, among other things. These are all domains of expertise of the philosopher. As Sulmasy and Sugarman argue in their book, The Methods of Medical Ethics, normative ethics is at the core of ethical inquiry, since it seeks to answer what ought to be done and not be done in a systematic and critical fashion. Descriptive ethics (e.g., of majority views or practices) cannot do this, nor can law. The mere fact that something is illegal or legal does not make it immoral or moral. In the past, professionals widely perceived policies like non-voluntary treatment or eugenic sterilization to be ethical. Just because they were perceived to be ethical at the time does not mean that they were ethical (Sugarman and Sulmasy 2010).
How Philosophy of Science Can Unlock New Methods in Bioethics
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Blumenthal-Barby et al. also describe “normative ethical principles” as another “output” of analytic normative ethics that is frequently taken as “input” by bioethics. Their examples include the doctrine of double effect, decisional capacity, equipoise, and the “4 principles” of Beachamp and Childress. The intended use of these principles is that they provide sound justification for reasoning about what should be done. Since it is a very important point, let me repeat—and express my wholehearted agreement—with Blumenthal-Barby et al.’s argument that no form of “descriptive ethics” can provide a valid basis for such reasoning.