ABSTRACT
The national ethics councils are interdisciplinarily or transdisciplinarily composed commissions for political counselling on the exposure to risks in biomedical fields. They make concrete several issues discussed by philosophy. Ethics councils try to use ethical analysis for solving political and social problems. Therefore, when studying the functioning of national ethics councils, the philosophical problem of the possibility of ethical expertise must be considered. One further problem, that will not be considered here, is to subsume the councils under the popular but still poorly defined terms of inter-, trans- and multidisciplinarity. This chapter concentrates on the analysis of the outcome of the work of ethics councils. By considering typical forms of their statements I want to investigate the problem of the possibility of ethical expertise. Is there such a thing as ethical expertise, can the work of the council be described by the term ‘ethical expertise’, is this kind of expertise desirable for the estimation of risks? First I want to give a short overview of the origins, typical tasks and composition of national ethics councils. This descriptive part of the chapter also presents an analysis of typical forms of the design of their outcomes of deliberations. The main focus in the normative part of the chapter is on the philosophical question whether there actually is such a thing as ethical expertise, and whether ethics as an academic discipline can be translated into documents of political counselling. In this context the question arises whether the recommendations of committees like the national ethics councils can be regarded as ethical expertise, and whether they are adequate instruments to evaluate the risks of technologies. Special emphasis is placed on the fact that ethics councils provide a specific kind of ethical knowledge by incorporating knowledge from different spheres, that is, from different scientific disciplines as well as practical experience. It will be analysed whether this can also be applied to other modern technological developments that raise ethical questions, in particular concerning the new information and communication technologies.
