ReviewBioethics2009
'Nobody tosses a dwarf!' The relation between the empirical and the normative reexamined.
Review in Bioethics, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review of empirical bioethics methodologies.BMC medical ethics · 2015Pooled it
- Digital bioethics: exploring an emerging field.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2026Article
- Balancing perspectives: a critical reflection on autonomy, respect and communication in end-of-life choice-making processes.BMC medical ethics · 2026Article
- Assisted Suicide for Irreversible Patients on Life Support? The Intricate Italian Journey Towards Conforming with the Legislation of Spain, Austria, and Portugal.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- What Is Wrong with Eating Pets? Wittgensteinian Animal Ethics and Its Need for Empirical Data.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Empirical studies on how ethical recommendations are translated into practice: a cross-section study on scope and study objectives.BMC medical ethics · 2023Article
- "The health equity curse": ethical tensions in promoting health equity.BMC public health · 2021Article
- Impact of legislation and public funding on oncofertility: a survey of Canadian, French and Moroccan pediatric hematologists/oncologists.BMC medical ethics · 2020Article
- Mapping, framing, shaping: a framework for empirical bioethics research projects.BMC medical ethics · 2019Article
- When are infection risks of blood transfusion tolerable? Towards understanding the ethical views of stakeholders in the blood supply.Vox sanguinis · 2019Article
- Instrumentalist analyses of the functions of ethics concept-principles: a proposal for synergetic empirical and conceptual enrichment.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2019Article
- The value of metaphorical reasoning in bioethics: An empirical-ethical study.Nursing ethics · 2019Article
- Standards of practice in empirical bioethics research: towards a consensus.BMC medical ethics · 2018Article
- Beyond integrating social sciences: Reflecting on the place of life sciences in empirical bioethics methodologies.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2018Review
- The PiGeOn project: protocol of a longitudinal study examining psychosocial and ethical issues and outcomes in germline genomic sequencing for cancer.BMC cancer · 2018Article
- An update on the "empirical turn" in bioethics: analysis of empirical research in nine bioethics journals.BMC medical ethics · 2018Review
- The use of empirical research in bioethics: a survey of researchers in twelve European countries.BMC medical ethics · 2017Article
- Critical Realism and Empirical Bioethics: A Methodological Exposition.Health care analysis : HCA : journal of health philosophy and policy · 2017Article
- An "Ethical Moment" in Data Sharing.Science, technology & human values · 2017Article
- "What the patient wants…": Lay attitudes towards end-of-life decisions in Germany and Israel.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This article discusses the relation between empirical and normative approaches in bioethics. The issue of dwarf tossing, while admittedly unusual, is chosen as a point of departure because it challenges the reader to look with fresh eyes upon several central bioethical themes, including human dignity, autonomy, and the protection of vulnerable people. After an overview of current approaches to the integration of empirical and normative ethics, we consider five ways that the empirical and normative can be brought together to speak to the problem of dwarf tossing: prescriptive applied ethics, theoretical ethics, critical applied ethics, particularist ethics and integrated empirical ethics. We defend a position of critical applied ethics that allows for a two-way relation between empirical and normative theories. Against efforts fully to integrate the normative and the empirical into one synthesis, we propose that the two should stand in tension and relation to one another. The approach we endorse acknowledges that a social practice can and should be judged both by the gathering of empirical data and by normative ethics. Critical applied ethics uses a five stage process that includes: (a) determination of the problem, (b) description of the problem, (c) empirical study of effects and alternatives, (d) normative weighing and (e) evaluation of the effects of a decision. In each stage, we explore the perspective from both the empirical (sociological) and the normative ethical point of view. We conclude by applying our five-stage critical applied ethics to the example of dwarf tossing.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.