Competency and Risk-relativity
In this paper I discuss the view that the appropriate concept of competence is a decision-relative one: that a person may be competent to make one decision but not another. The argument that I present is that neither of the two competing theories supporting the decision-relative approach, internalis...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Wiley-Blackwell
2001
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| In: |
Bioethics
Year: 2001, Volume: 15, Issue: 2, Pages: 93-109 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In this paper I discuss the view that the appropriate concept of competence is a decision-relative one: that a person may be competent to make one decision but not another. The argument that I present is that neither of the two competing theories supporting the decision-relative approach, internalism and externalism, can provide a coherent explanation of why a person’s competence should be thought to be relative to a particular decision. On the one hand, internalism, which regards competence as exhaustively a matter of the person’s understanding, fails to identify the specific skills or content that would warrant linking a specific decision with competence, and thus cannot provide an account of decision-relative that parallels task-relative. On the other hand, externalism, which regards competence as a matter of the person’s understanding in relation to external elements such as risk, cannot adequately defend why a person’s competence to make a decision should ‘track’ the level of probable harm that results from the decision. |
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| ISSN: | 1467-8519 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Bioethics
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1111/1467-8519.00218 |