Taking the Political Context Seriously: How to Evaluate Ethics Commissions

Abstract

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.