Abstract
Complex policy issues pose a conundrum for liberal democratic governments. Disagreement about complex policy issues can often be traced back to fundamental value differences and governments aim to avoid heavy political conflicts based on these, while at the same time they face the need for expedient decision making. One solution is to seek advice of or even defer decisions to expert committees, in particular ethics committees. In this paper, we focus on the role of ethics committees by putting the role of ethicists as experts up for discussion. We argue that governments and the public foster wrong expectations regarding the role and mandate of ethics committees. Normative expertise is essentially different from scientific expertise. Lumping them together has resulted in false expectations and an overvaluation of the role of various types of experts. It is therefore necessary to explicate the roles the various players have and to define what is to be expected from them.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, the creation of in vitro meat could drastically change the way we produce our protein. http://nos.nl/artikel/536816-veestapel-weg-door-kweekvlees.html, last accessed 5 August 2013. See also Van der Weele (2014).
- 2.
M.R. Capecchi, M.J. Evans, and Oliver Smitties, nobel prize for medicine 2007, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2007/index.html, last accessed July 2013.
- 3.
For example the Dutch Committee on Animal Biotechnology, see Bovenkerk and Poort (2008).
- 4.
Another example can be found in the analysis of the development of standards in the areas of global food safety. Alessandra Arcuri (2014) describes that decision making in this field is mainly left up to technocratic regime by relying too much on scientific experts only.
- 5.
Scientific reasoning can often not even do without it, because there is always a risk of error in different stages of research and what error one is willing to accept in the end depends on a non-epistemic value choice. Douglas (2000) argues that there are many stages in scientific endeavour where there is ‘inductive risk’, in other words the possibility of false positive or false negative outcomes, or the possibility that the outcomes lead the researcher to accept his/her hypothesis while the hypothesis is in reality false, or the other way around, that he/she rejects a hypothesis that is in reality right. The consequences of false positives are often overregulation (for example when the toxic properties of a chemical are measured) and the consequence of false negatives underregulation (and a possible health risk to the population) and thus they have a consequence in the real world. This means that the scientist in question will have to make a value judgment about what is an acceptable outcome in the case of inductive risk. In other words, non-epistemic values do and should enter the internal scientific domain.
- 6.
While Sarewitz’ writing could be subsumed under the critical stream of the modern model, as he attacks the fact/value distinction, the implications of his work in our view do not fit within the modern model, but belong instead in the model that we want to propose.
- 7.
See M Slob and J Staman (2012) Policy and the evidence beast. The Hague: Rathenau Institute.
- 8.
Another problem, as Verweij et al. (2000, p. 347) suggest is that ‘the possibility of a negative judgment about a research project often pits scientists and committees toward a struggle for power – which is the death sentence for any moral deliberation’.
- 9.
Now subsumed under the Ministry for Economic Affairs.
- 10.
It should be noted, however, that Baggini appears to be thinking about ethics committees completely composed of ethical experts, which is generally not the case in practice.
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Poort, L., Bovenkerk, B. (2016). Changing Expectations of Experts: The Symbolic Role of Ethics Committees. In: van Klink, B., van Beers, B., Poort, L. (eds) Symbolic Legislation Theory and Developments in Biolaw. Legisprudence Library, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33365-6_16
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