Table 1 Quality criteria for normative bioethics proposed in the literature

Argumentative concerns

Dialectic concerns

Pragmatic concerns

• being accurate, consistent, and coherent [2], ensuring integrity, trustworthiness, transparency, and accountability [1], including “rigour and transparency in all literature review processes undertaken in bioethics” [33]

• being based on solid philosophy [12]

• being principle based [34, 35], being “practical in approach, philosophically well grounded, cross disciplinary”; and being performed by good people [36]

• responding to disagreement by improving understanding [37],

• “contributing to the debate on problems people experience in real life and to changing practices” [38],

• engaging the public [39], fostering a morally good public deliberation [40], or drawing “attention to the normative underpinnings of global health justice and distribution” [41]

• identifying and avoiding “moral fictions” [42],

• fostering “sensitivity to the problem of the multiplicity of moral traditions” [43]

• resulting in better health and wellbeing [40], or making the world a better place [44], resulting in changes in practice or policy [1, 45]

• empowering action [46], being functional or instrumental [40], facilitating legislation [35], legitimizing governance practices [47],

• making clinical medicine better [48], providing “sound action-guiding prescriptions” [49],

• advancing “awareness of the sorts of institutional considerations that might lead to a divergence between bioethical analysis and legal [and policy] analysis” [43]; opposing and correcting law [50]; addressing non-ideal circumstances with non-ideal theories in order to contribute to effective policy design [51].

• attending to both the biomedical and existential aspects of illness [52], countering a “a progress and technology-driven model of medicine” [53], appreciating the intrinsic value of human life [54,55,56].