Empirical Methods in Bioethics: A Cautionary Tale

Bioethicists and others have argued about the properrole for empirical research in addressing ethical con-cerns because of the increased use of social science, health services, and outcomes research methods in the medical ethics domain. In fact, a long tradition in normative ethics, the branch of ethics that seeks to make definitive argu-ments about what we ought to do, scoffs at attempting to derive conclusions about what one ought to do from em-pirical observations about what people actually do (1, 2). In this issue, Halpern and colleagues (3) confront this dilemma in their innovative and rigorous empirical study of attitudes about the use of payments as an inducement to living kidney donation. Although the practice of using pay-ments in this way was originally scorned, the growing problem of organ scarcity has led many to suggest that we reexamine the ethical objections to its adoption. The au