ETHICS AS COLLECTIVE LEARNING. BIOETHICS, CLINICAL ETHICS AND INSTITUTIONAL ETHICS

The following paper provides a reflection that allows us to grasp both the emergence of the practice of clinical ethics and the need to go beyond it in order to move towards integrative institutional ethics. This reflection is based on the concept of ethics as a collective learning process [1] . Our starting point of reflection focuses on the practice of bioethics and advances made by theoretical research in bioethics since the 1980s, which attest to a growing need to bring bioethics into context. For us, these changes justify developing a contextual, pragmatist and reflexive ethical approach as a learning process. Viewing ethics in this manner allows us to account for a transition – one which has been recognised for over a decade – from relying on an “expert” clinical ethics approach to adopting a more gradual as well as pragmatic and integrative institutionalisation of the ethical approach. [1] This text is an abridged and slightly modified version of Boitte and Cobbaut, 2012.