Ethical Reasoning Bridge

Course overview

The ethical reasoning bridge is a framework that supports ethical decision-making processes for healthcare professionals and their patients. This approach to ethical decision-making can foster mutual understanding and learning and is applicable across diverse cross-cultural settings. This framework helps connect two different perspectives - the healthcare professional's and the patient's. It has three characteristic features: a knowledge-theoretical approach which considers the relationship between different types of ethics and how these relationships are understood; a dialectical approach which shows how different forms of knowledge interconnect to facilitate learning and action; and finally a symbolic crossing and recrossing of the ethical bridge when reasoning making decisions taking action and reflecting. This course explores the characteristic features of the ethical reasoning bridge and introduces concepts such as wide reflective equilibrium and dialectical reasoning which together can lead to transformative learning for healthcare providers and patients. This course aims to describe different types of clinical reasoning strategies and the ethical reasoning bridge as a framework for clinical and ethical reasoning.