How Politics Deals with Expert Dissent: The Case of Ethics Councils

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 1 Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria 2 Institut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung e.V., ISF München, Munich, Germany Corresponding Author: Wolfgang Menz, Institut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung e.V., ISF München, Jaklob-KlarStr. 9, 80796 Munich, Germany. Email: [email protected] Science, Technology, & Human Values 000(00) 1-27 a The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0162243909357913 http://sthv.sagepub.com