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2. See, for example, the specific section for empirical ethics articles in the journal Clinical Ethics.

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6. “The course in 2011, open for PhD students and research master students, aims to give an overview of current debates in practical philosophy, with a special emphasis on the role of different normative theories in applied contexts.” Available at www.osze.nl (last accessed 2 Feb 2011).

7. For that reason we do not refer here to papers, however interesting, that give sociological descriptions of how the field of ethics, and later bioethics, has turned into a more empirically focused discipline.

8. Molewijk, B, Stiggelbout, AM, Otten, W, Dupuis, HM, Kievit, J.Empirical data and moral theory: A plea for integrated empirical ethics. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. A European Journal 2004;7(1):55–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

9. See note 1, Musschenga 2005.

10. This criticism applies, of course, only to those moral theories that state that they have a normative and prescriptive aim for social practices.

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23. See note 1, Weaver, Trevino 1994.

24. See note 1, Weaver, Trevino 1994.

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29. For example, see note 8, Molewijk et al. 2004; Molewijk and colleagues have distinguished and described the following goals: description, interpretation, explanation, evaluation, reform, development of moral theory, and development of methodology.

30. Van der Scheer, Thiel, Delden, and Widdershoven (2004) studied 33 completed empirical ethics research projects and found that fewer than half of the original empirical ethics project descriptions explicitly contained information on the relationship between the empirical and the normative. Furthermore, even the projects that explicitly mentioned the problematic relationship between the empirical and the normative often remained unclear about the specific features of that relationship. During the interviews with empirical ethics researchers, the researchers often could not state whether something was a purely empirical or normative distinction. See van der Scheer L, van Thiel G, van Delden J, Widdershoven G. Ethiek en empirie: Theorie en methodologie van empirisch ethisch onderzoek [Ethics and empiricism: Theory and methodology of empirical ethics research]. Report of the Caphri Research School funded by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), Maastricht University; 2004.

31. “Ideally, empirical research in bioethics should meet standards for empirical and normative validity similar to those used in the source disciplines for these methods, and articulate these aspects clearly and appropriately. More modestly, criteria to ensure that none of these standards are completely left aside would improve the quality of empirical bioethics research and partly clear the air of critiques addressing its theoretical justification, when its rigour in the particularly difficult context of interdisciplinarity is what should be at stake.” See note 28, Hurst 2010:444.

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