abstract:

With the Healthcare Ethics Consultant Certification (HEC-C) offered through the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), the practice of clinical ethics has taken a decisive step into professionalization. But without an unambiguous sense of what clinical ethicists can contribute to the clinical environment, it is unclear what the HEC-C ensures clinical ethicists can do. Though the ASBH enumerates a set of core competencies, many disagree over what role those competencies empower ethicists to serve. Two recent publications are notable for advocating conflicting positions on the question of ethicists’ competence: “Ethics Expertise: What It Is, How to Get It, and What to Do with It” by Christopher Meyers (2018) and Rethinking Health Care Ethics by Stephen Scher and Kasia Kozlowska (2018). In response to Scher and Kozlowska’s argument that the primary role of ethicists is to create space to engage clinician’s moral intuitions, this analysis follows Meyers in contending that ethicists can also contribute a kind of moral expertise. However, acquiring moral expertise is no easy task, and it is unlikely to be substantiated by a certification exam. This analysis draws on research from the psychology of expertise to outline the sort of training needed to cultivate and enhance moral expertise.

摘要：

通过美国生物伦理与人文学会（ASBH）提供的医疗伦理顾问证书（HEC-C），临床伦理实践已迈向了专业化的决定性一步。但是，在没有明确了解临床伦理学家可以为临床环境做出什么贡献的情况下，尚不清楚HEC-C确保临床伦理学家可以做什么。尽管ASBH列举了一组核心能力，但许多人对于这些能力赋予伦理学家服务的作用持不同意见。最近有两个著名的出版物在伦理学家的能力问题上主张立场冲突：克里斯托弗·迈耶斯（Christopher Meyers）的“伦理专业知识：什么是什么，如何获得它以及如何使用它”（2018）和对卫生保健伦理的重新思考Stephen Scher和Kasia Kozlowska（2018）。为了回应谢尔和科兹洛夫斯卡关于伦理学家的主要作用是创造空间来吸引临床医生的道德直觉的论点，该分析遵循了迈耶斯的观点，即伦理学家也可以贡献一种道德专长。但是，获得道德专长并非易事，并且不太可能通过认证考试来证明。该分析借鉴了专业心理学的研究成果，概述了培养和增强道德专业知识所需的培训类型。