Public Bioethics and Deliberative Democracy

Abstract

This article aims to specify the dynamics of the democratisation of expertise by analysing public bioethics as a form of deliberative democracy. Public bioethics refers to the whole range of bodies and procedures, such as national ethics councils, parliamentary ethics commissions or public consultations on ‘ethical issues’, which are meant to inform and guide political decision making with respect to ethical considerations. The article draws from empirical research on three UK public bioethics bodies (the Human Genetics Commission, Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority). The article will show how public bioethics addresses some established problems of expert domination and rejects the aim of revealing substantial ethical unity in favour of facilitating and preparing public debate by representing the range of ethical positions on a particular issue, and as such seems to resemble more closely the ‘mixed’ discursive spheres advocated by Hendriks. However, the article argues that problems of expertise are transformed but not removed. By assuming the authority to categorise different publics and arrange them in a hierarchy, and framing ethical questions such that some kinds of concerns appear legitimately ethical while others are merely political or transient matters of public concern, public bioethics may be reproducing problems of expert domination at the more rarefied level of the construction of ethical positions.