A response to Levitt and Molewijk

Abstract

Levitt and Molewijk raise some fundamental concernsabout our view on integrated empirical ethics. Levitttakes social science as her point of departure.Molewijk discusses our conception of integrated empi-rical ethics from the point of view of ethics. First wewill respond to Levitt’s remarks. Next we will turn toMolewijk’s commentary.Levitt comments on our paper as a social scientist.On the one hand, she fears that the integration of ethicsand social science may lead to a loss of the criticalfunction of ethics; on the other hand she argues thatintegrated empirical ethics in the way we present itdoes not add much to social science. Consequently,she proposes to stick to the more traditional view thatethics and social science complement one another. Wewill address these arguments one by one.Levitt’s first argument concerns the loss of thenormative function of ethics. She suggests that inte-grated empirical ethics as presented in our paper maytake the validity of existing practices too much forgranted. Levitt rightly argues that one should take intoaccount the fact that practitioners may very well failto see the problematic character of their own prac-tices. But we certainly do not deny the need for sucha critical attitude; indeed we start from the assump-tion that critical elements are often inherent in socialpractices because various stakeholders have differentviews of what is morally right. We explicitly aimat developing such different views and stimulatingcritical discourse. Moreover,weencourageresearchersto doubt the validity of commonly accepted ways ofbehavior. These doubts, however, are only relevant ifthey truly voice the experiences of (some of) the parti-cipants. If nobody is interested in critical issues raisedby the research team, they should better be dismissed(at least for the time being). The above remarks alsohelp to answer Levitt’s claim that everyday ethics,accepted though it may be in practice, might still beat odds with ethical theory, and indeed be wrong. Andagain, we concede that ethical theory may very well beat odds with everyday ethical reasoning and everydaymoral practice. But our point is that such criticism isonly relevantif practitionerscan learn from it. Far fromdoing away with ethical theory, in our hermeneuticpragmatic approach we suggest that ethical theory bedeveloped in interaction with moral practice.Secondly, Levitt asks in what sense our concep-tion of integrated empirical ethics differs from socialscience. Is the project on quality of coercion and com-pulsion in psychiatry not merely an example of socialscience? We admit that the methodology of the projectis actuallyderivedfrom thesocial sciences(interviews,focus groups). Yet the results are clearly normative.The conclusion that coercion is bound up with tragedyis not just a factual conclusion; it involves moralconsequences for the participants, for instance thatthey should assume their responsibilities towards eachother. The conclusion that coercion and compulsionare partof a processof(caring)interaction with its ownhistory is also more than a factual statement; it entailsthe normative obligation for participants to be aware ofthe process character of their interaction and to remainfaithful to the moral orientation which is inherent tocare as a social process. Thus, the project focuses onthe structure of social life as a moral practice.The project makes explicit not only what parti-cipants are doing, but also the moral attitudes and obli-gations which they have towards one another. Maybesocial science does not exclude such explicit refer-ence to moral attitudes, but neither is the inclusionof such reference typical of social science. There-fore, if social science should display features that aresimilar to our endeavor, it would need to also includetheoretical considerations regarding ethical notions(such as responsibility), as well as a discussion ofelements that belong to the tradition of the humani-ties (the