ABSTRACT
Disciplines are informed by epistemic values—and bioethics might do well to see social scientific practices and their attendant normative understandings about what is humanly important as a significant part of ethics generally. Bioethics's job is to assess in what respects prevailing or proposed health care practices, policies, and institutions are morally defensible. The common picture of the relationship between bioethics and the social sciences assigns responsibility for accurately gathering the pertinent facts to epidemiologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and their kin, and for assessing those facts to bioethicists wielding explicitly normative techniques. The sciences, then, both natural and social, provide bioethics with the empirical information relevant to its concerns. Social scientists may well be skeptical about the linear model, as indeed are many students of ethical theory. Extracting the ethical lessons from social sciences epistemic values and putting bioethics itself under a social scientific gaze might exert fruitful pressure on some of bioethics's own favorite values.
