Moral Judgement and Embodied Ethics

Abstract

A recent contribution of social science research to the study of ethics entails investigating the extent to which formal definitions of ethics and morality, and public discourses about specific ethical issues, affect lay understandings and perceptions of moral life. One way of gaining insight into this subject is to present people with hypothetical scenarios, asking them to think through an ethical issue (for example, see Edwards 1999), or retrospectively discuss their actions in a real-life situation, through narrative or interview accounts. The literature that comes closest to addressing this topic deals with how people deliberate ethical issues in their everyday lives, and is located primarily in sociology and anthropology. For example, the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre (PEALS) Ordinary Ethics Project (see http://www.ncl.ac.uk/peals/research/currentprojects/ordinaryethics.htm) follows this line of inquiry by using the hypothetical case of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and social sex selection, in a similar way to the Heinz dilemma in Kohlberg’s study of moral development, to get focus group discussants to ethically evaluate a moral dilemma (Banks et al. 2006). Similar work can be found at the interface of research on genetics and reproduction, and includes studies on decision-making about assisted reproduction and prenatal screening (Rapp 2000; Williams et al. 2005), embryo donation to stem cell research (Scully et al. 2012), genetic databases (Haimes and Whong-Barr 2004), parents’ decision-making about PGD (Franklin and Roberts 2006; Roberts and Franklin 2004), issues around consent in clinical drug trials (Corrigan 2003), and the exchange of body fluids (Busby 2004).