Public defence: Eilev Hegstad

Experts play an important role in modern governing, including participating on government advisory commissions which give policymakers advice on what policies they should implement. Ethics commissions, which are a type of government advisory commission, are asked to advise on ethical issues, most often in the area of bioethics.

Professional ethicists, such as bioethicists, philosophers and theologians are prominent members of these commissions. Ethics commissions raise questions about the nature of their expertise, and what authority, if any, the advice from these commissions should be given.

The aim of this thesis has therefore been to investigate the research question: What is the proper role of ethics commissions in democracies?

Methods

The research question has been explored by combining both empirical and normative work. To answer the question of what the proper role of ethics commissions is it was necessary to gain understanding of how ethics commissions work and the salient normative issues concerning them.

For this purpose, two main sources were used. Firstly, the thesis engaged the relevant scholarly literature on ethics commissions and the status of moral expertise. Secondly, members of the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board (NBAB) were interviewed. The research question was investigated through four articles.

Articles

Article 1 locates the main disagreement in the literature along two dimensions: the expertise and public/political dimensions. The expertise dimension concerns whether there is moral expertise or not, while the public/political dimension is about whether the public or policymakers should be the main audience of ethics commissions. These two dimensions are used to construct four normative models.

Article 2 analyses the interviews with members of NBAB seen through the lens of the epistemic-democratic tension, focusing on members’ views on expertise, consensus and the main audience of the board. The article contributes to our understanding of the epistemic-democratic tension, and how this can be handled in the case of ethics commissions.In addition, the question of whether NBAB is a best case of handling this tension is considered.

One of the key normative questions related to ethics commissions are their composition. Article 3 focuses on the issue of moral expertise, particularly the difficulty of identifying these experts. In the article, I propose that viewing moral experts through the prism of what John Rawls calls ‘comprehensive doctrines’ makes it manageable to appoint moral experts, along with other experts that are necessary for ethics commissions to perform well.

In article 4, a political standard for evaluating ethics commissions is developed. I argue that in order to make an overall judgment of how they perform we need to understand what the political context means for the work of ethics commissions. More concretely, this involves contributing to the epistemic, democratic and ethical functions of public deliberation. The implications for the work of ethics commissions are discussed, and it is argued that ethics commissions should focus on seriously considering a range of views including those based on comprehensive doctrines, but that commissions should be mindful that the recommendations they make are justifiable to a public characterized by pluralism.

Findings

Overall, most importantly, the thesis contributes to the literature by setting out a way to think about the proper role of an expert institution: namely ethics commissions. Furthermore, the analysis of the main points of disagreement about ethics commissions can be a fruitful starting point for future discussions, as well as a tool for analyzing real-world ethics commissions. 

The interview study with NBAB members is also an important addition to the literature as there are relatively few case studies of ethics commissions.