Eilev Hegstad

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. Besides recommending policies, they are also often mandated to inform and stimulate public debate. Discussions about the role of these commissions have not paid sufficient attention to the political context that ethics commissions operate within. Instead, they have too often been evaluated based on academic or pragmatic standards. In this article, I argue for and develop a political standard for evaluating ethics commissions. This standard emphasizes the contribution these commissions should make to public deliberation, and more specifically, their epistemic, democratic, and ethical functions. Following this, the implications of the two-part mandate of ethics commissions – informing and stimulating public debate and recommending policies – will be drawn out. These include the most important role of moral cartography, which involves seriously considering a range of views including those based on comprehensive doctrines, and the expectation that recommendations should be public justifications.

Ethics commissions are government advisory commissions mandated to give expert advice on contentious moral issues. As this requires making explicit value judgments, members with expert knowledge of ethics have a natural place as members of such commissions. Apart from these commissions being widespread, their recommendations assume a special normative authority within the legislative process. This raises many fundamental questions concerning the nature of moral expertise and how such commissions should deal with the political contexts in which they operate. Through a reading of the relevant discussions in the literature in which the underlying normative ideals are located, this article reconstructs four normative models of the proper role of ethics commissions. This reconstruction seeks to contribute to analytical clarity and to elucidate the underlying disagreements concerning our expectations of ethics commissions. The four models, labeled ‘commission consensus model’, ‘society-proxy model’, ‘correctness model’, and ‘deep pluralism model’, differ from one another in terms of two main dimensions: the expertise and the public/political dimensions. After describing the models, giving examples from the literature on how they can be explicated, and describing an empirical example of a commission that has approximated the ideals, the strengths and weaknesses of the four models are discussed before the article concludes by asking whether there is one correct model of ethics commissions.

Ethics commissions provide expert advice to governments on what policies to implement regarding pressing ethical issues, most often in bioethics. These commissions distinguish themselves by having members from the professions we are most likely to think of as moral experts, if we believe that these exist. The relationship between moral experts and the composition of ethics commissions is worthy of further exploration, especially because of the highly controversial nature of whether moral expertise exists and, if so, how, and whether, we can identify moral experts. Moreover, it has been argued that the emergence of ethics commissions and how they have been composed have led to a “thinner” debate. In the first part of the article, the problem regarding checks for identifying moral experts is discussed. I argue that one way to handle this difficulty is through the application of Rawls’ concept of comprehensive doctrines. These doctrines have inherent standards that function similarly to independent checks, making it possible to identify moral experts from within such different doctrines. Using this approach makes it manageable to appoint moral experts to ethics commissions. In the second part, I consider the implications of seeing moral expertise through the prism of comprehensive doctrines for the composition of ethics commissions. One natural conclusion is that we should select moral experts representing different reasonable comprehensive doctrines to serve as members of ethics commissions. I consider six challenges to my proposal and demonstrate why these lack merit, and I point out some practical concerns that need further inquiry.