The ESRC-funded “Ethics and Expertise” project has been progressing over the last year and is currently in its data collection phase. In July 2024, researchers from participating institutions, including the Universities of Birmingham, Bielefeld, Sheffield, Melbourne, and Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB), had the second meeting with the project’s Advisory Board in Berlin. The meeting was facilitated by Digital Mobilities group at WZB. The role of the Board is to provide feedback on the overall progress, academic direction and policy relevance of the project. The meeting presented to the Board key updates, challenges, and upcoming decisions.
Project progress updates
The team has shared key progress updates, including reflections after the first witness seminar held online in the beginning of July. The witness seminar engaged policymakers and other stakeholders working in One Health policy area in the UK. The German team updated on ongoing interviews with key ethics advisors and stakeholders. The Australian data collection is to start imminently. The NCOB also shared insights from related ongoing project on embedding ethics in UK government foresight work.
Defining ethics
The Board provided a range of valuable suggestions on the focus of the project and a direction forward. They noted the need to clarify the role ethics play in evidence-based policymaking. Among other discussions, the Board addressed the need to define “ethics” and specify the types of values that are relevant for the project. Rather than committing to a specific definition, the team and the Board considered mapping out different usages of the term “ethics” among ethics advisors and policy makers. One of the key focuses of the research is setting out how stakeholders are involved in process of valuation, and what this says about how values are structured within policymaking process.
Further avenues of inquiry
While the project is currently collecting data on different ways ethics advice is institutionalised and organised within different policy cultures, the wider context of policy-making is particularly important to keep in mind. The Board noted that the processes of policy-making and agenda setting are in continuous shift, and currently being shaped by the increasing involvement of business consultants (and prior to this specialist political advisors) in framing policy problems, proposals and implementation. This raises questions about what is lost and gained by the involvement of private actors in national ethics advisory ecosystem. For instance, private actors my be able to provide rapid responses, but have weaker quality control or types of expertise available. There is also a need to explore gaps in knowledge of current models of ethics advisory systems, to include global south perspectives, and other ways of doing science, exploring different epistemic outlooks.
Next steps
The Board will next convent in June 2025. In the meantime, the team is continuing data collection, focusing on witness seminars in the near future on ethics advice in One Health and AI & Healthcare policy areas. If you would like to get involved with the research, please do not hesitate and get in touch:
Marija Antanavičiūtė for the UK case study m.antanaviciute@bham.ac.uk
Beatrice Dippel for the German case study beatrice.dippel@uni-bielefeld.de
Sarah Ball for the Australian case study sarah.ball@unimelb.edu.au