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. 2023 Jul;37(6):564-574.
doi: 10.1111/bioe.13034. Epub 2022 Apr 11.

Moral expertise without moral elitism

William R Smith  1
Affiliations

Moral expertise without moral elitism

William R Smith. Bioethics. 2023 Jul.

Abstract

Skepticism about ethical expertise has grown common, raising concerns that bioethicists' roles are inappropriate or depend on something other than expertise in ethics. While these roles may depend on skills other than those of expertise, overlooking the role of expertise in ethics distorts our conception of moral advising. This paper argues that motivations to reject ethical expertise often stem from concerns about elitism: either an intellectualist elitism, where some privileged elite have supposedly special access in virtue of expertise in moral theory; or an authoritarian elitism, where our reliance on experts in ethics risks violation of autonomy and democracy. The paper sketches an anti-elitist conception of ethics expertise in bioethics as continuous with an anti-elitist conception of ethics expertise in common moral practice, undercutting the intellectualism, and then uses this anti-elitist conception to reject arguments that ethical expertise violates autonomy or democracy. An anti-elitist picture of ethical expertise both renders it consistent with our general moral practice and allows us to resist skeptical concerns.

Keywords: bioethics; ethics consultation; expertise; healthcare policy-making; moral epistemology; role morality.

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References

    1. See Shalit R. (1997). When we were Philosopher Kings. New Republic, 216(17), 24–28, - PubMed
    2. and Satel S. (2010). The limits of bioethics. Policy Review, 159. https://www.hoover.org/research/limits-bioethics.
    1. Or at least many of them. Obviously, most fields may have some bombastic people.
    1. See, e.g., Dolgin E. (2014). The Ethics Squad: Bioethicists are Setting Up Consultancies for Research--But Some Scientists Question Whether they are Needed. Nature, 514, 418–420. - PubMed
    1. I will use ‘moral expertise’ and ‘ethical expertise’ interchangeably. (Contra see Rasmussen LM (2011). An Ethics Expertise for Clinical Ethics Consultation. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 39(4), 649–661, - PubMed
    2. and Iltis AS and Sheehan M. (2016). Expertise, Ethics Expertise, and Clinical Ethics Consultation: Achieving Terminological Clarity. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 41(4), 416–433). - PMC - PubMed
    3. Likewise, I will not use terms of art like “limited expertise,” “semi-expertise,” or “full-blooded expertise.” See Archard D. (2011). Why Moral Philosophers are not and Should not be Moral Experts. Bioethics, 25(3), 119–127, - PubMed
    4. and Gesang B. (2010). Are Moral Philosophers Moral Experts? Bioethics 24(4), 153–159, - PubMed
    5. and McGrath S. (2019). Moral Knowledge. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, p. 74– 75,
    6. respectively. I take my use to be consistent with standard English, and I fear that introducing such terms of art risks confusion by inviting intuitions that paradigmatic cases of expertise are somehow weaker, non-standard forms of expertise. In particular, among other problems, I suspect that these terms of art muddy intuitions about the relevant cases, frequently inviting elision between claims about whether there is expertise at play in some case and further claims about what that expertise may entail in some case—such as facts about the appropriate actions that someone receiving testimony from some expert should take. In contrast, I think the intuitions about cases involving concepts understood in standard English terms support my argument that the standard concept of ethical expertise is anti-elitist.
    1. Satel. op. cit., note 1.

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