Not Just for Experts: The Public Debate About Reprogenetics in Germany‪.‬

Over the past thirty years, national ethics committees, ethical advisory boards, and similar bodies have proliferated throughout the Western world. While these bodies may be quite different from each other, they are all expected to bring ethics to the arena of politics. "Ethics" here is not about the virtues of the statesperson or distributive justice and the welfare state, as has been the case when ethics and politics have intersected in the past. It is about how a nation-state should handle developments in science and technology, specifically in biology and medicine. As ethics has come to politics in this new way, we have seen a new type of expert providing political counselling: experts for questions of ethics. There is no unanimous agreement on how to assess this linkage between public policy and ethics, however. Some hope it will lead to more responsible and more rational decisions. Others have strong reservations about what they see as a "politicization of expertise," even the emergence of a new, undemocratic "Expertokratie"--rule by experts.