Why an Empirical Bioethical Approach?
Parenting and families are being shaped in increasingly diverse ways. This prompts us to scrutinize central concepts and principles around parenting, reproduction, and families. Questions arise, such as ‘should children always have one or two parents, or can we recognize three parents’? We observe that, thanks to medical techniques, women can have children at a later age, and men can do so without medical interventions. Should limits be set, and if so, on what grounds, and should these limits be the same for men and women? Some of the medically assisted reproductive techniques, for instance, involve the use of donor gametes. This means that there are individuals who donate genetic material from which children are born, without themselves becoming parents of those children. This also means that there are individuals who will be parents of children not born from their own genetic material. Recently, we see people seeking potential partners for a parenting project through (online) associations and speed dates. For example, a single woman may agree to have a child together with a homosexual couple that they will co-parent.
The increase in alternative family forms and the use of medical techniques raise multiple ethical questions. Typically, ‘ethics’ attempts to formulate answers to these questions by relying on moral rules and principles justified by normative theories. The main criticism of this method is that such normative reasoning is too abstract and theoretical. This may result in normative principles and guidelines that do not align well with the experiences and perspectives of people in their living environment.
Instead of solely devising theoretical models, we also employ an empirical bioethical approach in our research. The starting point of this approach is the belief that existing rules neglect certain elements deemed morally important by the people themselves. In our research, we give these individuals a voice and test the results against the theoretical-normative literature. Our vision is that normative guidelines can and should be based on a better understanding of the moral views of the involved individuals, and that our method is exceptionally suitable for this purpose.