Are Hospital Ethicists Experts? Taking Ethical Expertise Seriously

Abstract

I argue that an increasingly well-received conception of clinical ethics consultation incorporates an understanding of ethics expertise that is untenable in light of what that conceptions says is the aim of the practice. Arguments supporting this theory betray a deep ambivalence over the idea of ethics expertise, seeming both to affirm and deny that clinical ethicists can possess it. This ambivalence is traceable to a central assumption about how ethicists should operate: By supplying answers to moral problems reflecting conventionally-accepted views of what may and may not be done in clinical medicine. I argue that this assumption is incompatible with the attribution to ethicists of expertise in fulfilling their purported goal—resolving moral puzzlement and conflict. I suggest that being expert at addressing moral problems does not consist in furnishing answers, but rather in the deployment of skill in moral reasoning.