What is bioxphi?

There is a rich tradition in bioethics of gathering empirical data to inform, supplement, or test the implications of normative ethical analysis. To this end, bioethicists have drawn on diverse methods, including qualitative interviews, focus groups, ethnographic studies, and opinion surveys to advance understanding of key issues in bioethics. Collectively, these lines of research have flourished in the broader field of “empirical bioethics” for more than 30 years.

More recently, philosophers from outside the field of bioethics have similarly employed empirical methods drawn—primarily from psychology, the cognitive sciences, economics, and related disciplines—to advance theoretical debates. This approach, which has come to be called experimental philosophy, relies primarily on controlled experiments to interrogate the concepts, intuitions, reasoning, implicit mental processes, and empirical assumptions about the mind that play a role in traditional philosophical arguments.

We believe that experimental philosophical bioethics—or “bioxphi”—can similarly contribute to bioethical scholarship and debate. In simplest terms, bioxphi is experimental moral philosophy as applied to topics in bioethics. It is thus a species of experimental philosophy. It is also a species of empirical bioethics: one which relies primarily on controlled experiments rather than descriptive studies to make sense of normatively charged phenomena of interest to bioethicists, with the aim of contributing to associated substantive debates.

In this way, bioxphi aims not only to establish what people believe about matters of bioethical concern (for example, how various opinions, attitudes, or preferences are distributed in the general population or among specific stakeholders), but to uncover and explain why or how people arrive at certain normative beliefs, judgments, or decisions, largely by probing the relevant situational factors and proximate psychological mechanisms.

By attempting to empirically address these and other similar questions, the long term goal of bioxphi is to build cumulative, explanatory models of moral attitudes and behavior as these relate to bioethical issues, ideally grounded in nuanced, real-life examples. Depending on what is discovered about the situational factors or psychological processes involved in producing such attitudes and behaviors, their role in a given normative argument might be affirmed or called into question.

The text on this page is adapted from: Earp, B. D., Demaree-Cotton, J., Dunn, M., Dranseika, V., Everett, J. A. C., Feltz, A., Geller, G., Hannikainen, I. R., Jansen, L., Knobe, J., Kolak, J., Latham, S., Lerner, A., May, J., Mercurio, M., Mihailov, E., Rodriguez-Arias, D., Rodriguez Lopez, B., Savulescu, J., Sheehan, M., Strohminger, N., Sugarman, J., Tabb, K., & Tobia, K. (in press). Experimental philosophical bioethics. AJOB Empirical Bioethics, in press.