‘Empirical bioethics’ aims to combine philosophical analysis with empirical data to produce ethical analyses that are sensitive to and informed by practice, practitioners and patients. There is, however, disagreement about how this can be achieved. Empirical Ethics explores this tension in psychiatry. Section one describes a range of practical and theoretical approaches (what empirical ethics is, the problem of the is/ought dichotomy and the naturalistic fallacy) and offers some reflections on possible methodologies, explanations and justifications for the emergence of empirical (bio)ethics as a discernable subfield of medical ethics. The second, longer section is devoted to specific examples of empirical ethics in practice that focus on ethical problems in psychiatry and mental health.

This book is both a comprehensive introduction to empirical bioethics and an exploration of familiar problems in psychiatric ethics. However, despite the common goal shared by all contributors, there is a wide variety of views on how the ethical and the empirical should be combined. Widdershoven and van der Scheer, for example, describe a pragmatic hermeneutic approach in which the practitioner, by virtue of his or her experience, is considered to have special moral knowledge that the empirical ethics researcher can access. In contrast, Verkerk, Polstra and de Jonge use case studies and Gidden's sociological theory of structuration to shed light on how healthcare structures influence our normative understandings of pressure and coercion. The editors have not shied away from including examples from both ends of the empirical ethics spectrum and many shades of grey in between. The excellent introduction and brilliantly clear first chapter by Hope and Macmillan gives even the novice reader the conceptual tools to begin to critically examine the chapters that follow.

This thoughtful and varied collection should appeal to practitioners primarily interested in psychiatric ethics, as well as those who are interested in the theory and practice of empirical ethics. Having just been tasked with developing a course on empirical bioethics, it comes as a great relief to find a book to which I can refer students; one that captures so well the possibilities, and problems, of the empirical ethics endeavour.