Ethics commissions, which are a type of government advisory commission, give expert advice to governments on what policies to implement on ethical issues, most often within the field of bioethics.
This requires explicit value judgments and it is presumably for this reason that professional ethicists (philosophers, bioethicists, and theologians) are chosen as members of these commissions. Ethics commissions are common worldwide and raises questions concerning their expertise and their proper role in democracies, especially because it is highly contentious whether moral expertise exist. The research question of the PhD “What is the proper role of ethics commissions in democracies?” is answered through four articles.
In the first article, four normative models are drawn out from scholarly discussions of ethics commissions based on two dimensions: the expert dimension and the public/political dimension. This is used to construct four models which are labelled: commission consensus, society-proxy, correctness and deep pluralism. This article is published in the journal Res Publica (link.springer.com).
Questions concerning moral expertise and composition of ethics commissions are discussed in the second article. The article explores whether it is fruitful to apply the philosopher John Rawls’ concept of comprehensive doctrines on the question of moral expertise to make us able to go some way towards identifying these. Viewing ethics commissions through this prism raises the question as to whether ethics commissions should be composed of moral experts within different comprehensive doctrines. This article is published in the journal Bioethics (onlinelibrary.wiley.com).
The third article is based on interviews conducted with members of the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board (NBAB) and shed light on the epistemic-democratic tension within democracies and government advisory commissions. We want political decisions to be informed by reliable expert knowledge, but this can come into conflict with important democratic concerns such as equality and inclusion. This tension is explored through the NBAB’s members opinions on expertise, consensus and the main audience of ethics commissions.
In the fourth article, the question about the most appropriate standard for evaluating ethics commissions is probed. Contrasting a political standard with an academic and pragmatic, the political is further developed. The political standard emphasized the contribution ethics commissions should make to public deliberation, more specifically, their epistemic, democratic, and ethical functions.
Supervisor: professor Anders Molander, OsloMet.
Co-supervisor: associate professor Silje Maria Tellmann, University of South-Eastern Norway (usn.no).
