Bioethics, Experimental Approaches

This entry summarizes an emerging subdiscipline of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) which has variously been referred to as experimental philosophical bioethics, experimental bioethics, or simply “bioxphi” (Earp et al. 2020a, b; Lewis 2020; Mihailov et al. 2021a). Like empirical bioethics, bioxphi uses data-driven research methods to capture what various stakeholders think (feel, judge, etc.) about moral issues of relevance to bioethics. However, like its other parent discipline of x-phi, bioxphi tends to favor experiment-based designs drawn from the cognitive sciences (Knobe 2016) – including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics – to tease out why and how stakeholders think as they do.