Crisis management and ethical expertise: The role of ethics advice during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Germany

Abstract

AbstractThe COVID‐19 crisis posed challenges for policy‐makers, experts, and citizens alike. Current research often focuses on the interlinkage between scientific expertise and political decision‐making, but ethical expertise remains largely overlooked. This paper argues that multiple logics of science‐policy interaction and ethics advice exist, especially in times of crisis. It contributes to the debate on crisis management by explaining why ethical expertise is sometimes described as a technocratic development and other times as a political instrumentalization of science. We argue that these seemingly diametrically opposed claims are not necessarily a contradiction but that they can be explained by understanding the underlying logics of how ethics advice is formulated and used to advise policy‐makers. The paper focuses on the role of ethics and expertise in pandemic governance in Germany, based on an analysis of policy documents and workshops with ethical experts and members of organizations relevant to the German COVID response. The aim is to understand how epistemic and ethical claims are linked, reconstruct the underlying political and temporal logics, and identify when ethical dilemmas and controversies arise and become (in)visible. A clearer understanding of these logics is needed to improve national crisis response and governance during future crises.