Moral or Ethical Experts? The Role of Bioethicists in a Democratic Society

"It is often believed that if bioethicists are to play the role of experts, the nature of their expertise must be explained and the authority of their advice justified. This presentation will be a moderate challenge to this view. It will be contended that the nature of bioethical expertise and the source of bioethicists’ authority depends on the kind of advice that is expected from them. If one expects a moral advice, i.e. a self-standing instruction about what to do in a given situation, it is indeed hardly possible to identify a moral expert in a rational way, and so to take their advice as authoritative. If, however, the counsel sought is to be an ethical advice, that is, a recommendation guided by a particular normative context, bioethicists can be sufficiently good experts and their instructions can enjoy a significant authority. Since bioethics is a field of research and social practice which developed in a democratic society, the bioethicist’s advice presupposes the normative framework of the values and ideals of democracy such as mutual recognition and respect, liberty and equality. Accordingly, although a bioethicist is not to be expected to be a moral expert (this role belongs, for example, to spiritual or religious leaders), she can be an ethical expert, who – on the ground of her knowledge of the values and ideals of a democratic society, ethical theory and, among other things, social theory and law – can offer a reliable advice which addresses a particular problem. The expert status of a bioethicist and the authority of her advice derives crucially from the values and ideals of a democratic society and her ethical knowledge, rather than from a moral insight into a realm of context-independent values. "

Moral Knowledge

This book is an exploration of moral knowledge: its possibility, its sources, and its characteristic vulnerabilities. It addresses such questions as: what are the strengths and weaknesses of the method of reflective equilibrium as an account of how we should make up our minds about moral questions? What would count as evidence for or against a fundamental moral conviction? Are observation and testimony potential sources of moral knowledge? What, if anything, would be wrong with simply outsourcing your views about moral questions to a moral expert? How fragile is our knowledge of morality, compared to other kinds of knowledge? Does knowledge of the difference between right and wrong fundamentally differ from knowledge of other kinds in that it cannot be forgotten? To what extent are our moral views vulnerable to being “debunked” by empirical discoveries about why we hold them? What is the relationship between being able to justify a moral judgment and knowing that it is true? Should we invest more confidence in relatively abstract, general moral principles that strike us as true, or more confidence in our judgments about the rightness and wrongness of particular actions?

MORAL EXPERTISE: JUDGMENT, PRACTICE, AND ANALYSIS

This essay defends moral expertise against the skeptical considerations raised by Gilbert Ryle and others. The core of the essay articulates an account of moral expertise that draws on work on expertise in empirical moral psychology, and develops an analogy between moral expertise and linguistic expertise. The account holds that expertise is contrastive, so that a person is an expert relative to a particular contrast. Further, expertise is domain specific and characterized by “automatic” behavior and judgment. Some disagreements in the literature regarding moral expertise are diagnosed as being due to failures to adequately distinguish different ways in which someone can be a moral expert. For example, expertise in action does not imply expertise in judgment or analysis.

Moral Expertise and Democratic Legitimacy

In modern democracies, moral experts play an increasingly important role in law-making. Apart from the question of which competences characterize moral experts, their influence on the legitimacy of democratic procedures must be discussed. On the one hand, the contribution of moral experts promises to improve the quality of decision making. On the other hand, however, moral experts cannot claim to represent the will of the people. In this essay, at first a concept of the moral expert will be sketched which does without the assumption of a privileged access to 'moral truths'. Then a procedural understanding of democratic legitimacy without epistemic components will be defended. Finally there will be a distinction between the purely consultative and the quasi-legislative tasks of ethics committees. Whereas councelling by moral experts does not influence the legitimacy of democratic procedures, giving them quasilegislative functions is connected to risks in this respect.

Crito and the Socratic Controversy

Crito was written in response to popular slanders concerning Socrates’ failure to escape from prison, and accompanying misgivings within the Socratic circle. Plato responds by asking his audience to disregard the slander of the mob and obey the moral expert instead. But he also responds by creating an image of Socrates and his friends widely at odds with the popular slander; by implying that Socrates’ critics were themselves guilty of some of the behaviour they charged against Socrates; by pointing out that Socrates had no viable alternative to death; and, in partial contradiction to all this, by rejecting the popular morality which saw Socrates’ abandonment and death as signs of failure. In the rhetorical climax of the composition, Plato shows that Socrates chose to die rather than victimize or offend the laws of the city, which he represents as sentient beings. The weaknesses that have been perceived in the arguments of the Athenian Laws are not fatal to the composition, because it aims not at a convincing demonstration, but at providing a portrait of Socrates’ own overwhelming conviction of the rightness of his decision.