How Politics Deals with Expert Dissent

The Case of Ethics Councils

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5337986
AutoresAlexander Bogner (0000-0002-4211-2858, Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria), Wolfgang Menz (0000-0002-5554-3534, Institut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung e.V., ISF München, Munich, Germany, autor de correspondencia)
Año2010
Volumen35
Número6
Páginas888-914
Fecha de publicación2010-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScience Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0162243909357913
OpenAlexW2060766216
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15
Referencias citadas26

Over recent years, science and technology have been reassessed increasingly in ethical terms. Particularly for life science governance, ethics has become the dominant discourse. In the course of this ''ethical turn'' national ethics councils were set up throughout Europe and in the United States to advice politics in ethically controversial issues such as stem cell research and genetic testing. Ethics experts have become subject to traditional warnings against expertocracy: they are suspected to unduly influence political decision-making. However, any reliable ethics expertise has to reflect societal disagreements in moral issues. Therefore, expert dissent is a normal feature of legitimate ethics expertise. Based on theoretical considerations we argue that in principle, expert dissent does not cause problems for political legitimacy; rather, it enhances the salience of politics: obviously decisions on ethical issues cannot be taken on the basis of expert knowledge alone. We therefore conclude that expert dissent, not consent, supports politics. Focussing on Germany and Austria, we show how politics deal with expert dissent in practice. While in Germany politics acknowledge dissent and use it to foster a fundamental political debate, Austrian politics attribute authoritative power to ethics expertise and try to construct an overall consensus. This illustrates how the drawing of boundaries between politic and expertise differs

Dissent · Engineering ethics · Environmental ethics · Legitimacy · Political dissent · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation · Ethics in Clinical Research · Ethics in medical practice · Law · Psychology