Jonathan D. Moreno
Center for Biomedical Ethics
University of Virginia
15 March 2001

"Deciding Together: The Role of Ethics Committees in Moral Decision-Making"

Abstract: Moral consensus is to bioethics (and, arguably, ethics and social philosophy generally), what health is to the body: We don't notice it until its missing. (Of course it does not follow from this analogy that all moral consensus is "healthy"!) Despite the ubiquity of moral consensus and its oft-stated role as a "goal" of ethical thinking, there is remarkably little careful study of the concept of moral consensus. Six years after the publication of my book, Deciding Together: Bioethics and Moral Consensus, this remains the case. In this presentation I will reflect on some aspects of moral consensus developed in the book, especially with regard to the field of bioethics.
 

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