Bioethical Controversies and Policy Advice: The Production of Ethical Expertise and its Role in the Substantiation of Political Decision-Making

Abstract

In: Maasen, Sabine; Weingart, Peter (Hrsg.), Democratization of Expertise? Exploring Novel Forms of Scientific Advice in Political Decision-Making; Dordrecht: Springer, S. 21-40 At the beginning of 2002 the German parliament took a decision on the permissibility of embryonic research. The compromise reached had neither the compelling logic of the liberal position nor the moral consistency of the opponents of research involving the destruction of human embryos: it allows research on imported embryonic stem cells which originated before January 2002. The decision was preceded by a public discussion in talk shows and newspapers where, for a long period before the funda- mental political decision, the most important arguments and positions on the question of the ethical legitimacy of stem cell research were debated. At the end of November 2001 the recommendations of the ethics councils were made available. The Natio- naler Ethikrat (National Ethics Council) and the Enquete-Kommission ‘Recht und Ethik in der modernen Medizin’ (Study Commission on Law and Ethics in Modern Medicine) expressed the anticipated dissent in the commissions by formulating diver- gent positions and documenting them in separate votes. A similar situation occurred a little later in Austria. At about the same time as the German National Ethics Council was being established, the Austrian chancellor convened a bioethics commission which drew up a statement on stem cell research. As in the German case, competing positions were expressed and documented. On the basis of this example of ‘ethical assistance’ to political decision-makers, we discuss in this chapter the following questions: Can one identify a social meaning of the advice provided by expert commissions under conditions of the absence of clarity? Or, more generally: What does the “new institutionalisation of morality” (Kuhlmann 2002) mean for the relationship between expertise and politics? And what follows from the disagreement of the commissions’ experts for the legitimation of political decision-making? Our chapter, dealing with this „new complexity in the relationship between sci- ence and politics“ (Weingart 2001a: 80), is structured in two sections. In the first section, against the background of the sociological tradition, we critically address the basic assumptions of the theory of reflexive modernisation concerning the role of expert knowledge in the face of new risks. In the second section we outline, in the form of a series of theses, some findings of our qualitative interviews with members of the Austrian Bioethics Commission.