ABSTRACT
One way of thinking of bioethics is as a dialogic discipline. For one thing, it is primarily involved in regulating the interactions of distinct agents, including doctors and patients, in medicine and the life sciences, and these interactions often involve the exchange of information. For another, bioethics itself has been described as having originated in a dialogue between practitioners of many disciplines (Borry et al. 2005). With such a history, we might expect bioethicists to take a healthy interest in the practices of information exchange in different contexts: not just between physician and patient, but between other agents in health care settings, and between the various types of expert who call themselves bioethicists.
