Emerging biotechnologies: full report - Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Emerging biotechnologies: full report - Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Emerging biotechnologies: full report - Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
E m e r g i n g b i o t e c h n o l o g i e s<br />
5.53 The dilemma of technical competence is entwined with the issue of representativeness, insofar<br />
as some members of the public will find the technical aspects of science easier to grasp than<br />
others. It is possible for the procedures of public engagement to address absences of technical<br />
competence, for example, by involving expert informants, although such approaches have builtin<br />
limitati<strong>on</strong>s. There is, for example, <strong>on</strong>ly so much that can be achieved within time and resource<br />
c<strong>on</strong>straints, and the reliance <strong>on</strong> technical expertise raises further questi<strong>on</strong>s about how it is<br />
selected. On the other hand, the inevitably differing competencies that participants bring to<br />
engagement activities makes it possible that the influence of existing socio-ec<strong>on</strong>omic<br />
inequalities may be exacerbated rather than ameliorated.<br />
C H A P T E R 5<br />
5.54 The noti<strong>on</strong> that public engagement should be used as a way of securing public c<strong>on</strong>sent for<br />
decisi<strong>on</strong>s made by experts is regarded with disdain by most advocates of public engagement,<br />
even though it still exists in scientific and policy discourse. 356 Nevertheless, the ideal separati<strong>on</strong><br />
between the processes of eliciting public perspectives and of c<strong>on</strong>diti<strong>on</strong>ing them is not always<br />
possible to sustain in practice. Scientists who have sincerely and str<strong>on</strong>gly held views about the<br />
desirability of a particular course of acti<strong>on</strong>, which they will seek to reinforce with scientific<br />
arguments, will often, in good faith, seek to persuade others to accept their points of view. 357<br />
That is not to say that we would never support the right – and indeed the desirability – of<br />
scientists taking overtly political positi<strong>on</strong>s, so l<strong>on</strong>g as they are represented and understood as<br />
such. The problem is not with the scientists and, for the same reas<strong>on</strong>, not with the lack of<br />
specialist technical competence am<strong>on</strong>g the lay majority, but with framing the debate in a way<br />
that privileges scientific argument where the decisi<strong>on</strong> is more than a technical <strong>on</strong>e, and where<br />
the technical judgment and moral judgment of scientists become c<strong>on</strong>fused.<br />
‘Top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ engagement<br />
5.55 We can distinguish between public engagement that is instigated through formal instituti<strong>on</strong>al<br />
channels where members of the public are invited (or recruited) to participate, and engagement<br />
that occurs in sp<strong>on</strong>taneous, uninvited ways, instigated through interest groups, voluntary<br />
organisati<strong>on</strong>s or members of the public. 358 Whatever directi<strong>on</strong> from which the initiative comes,<br />
what categorises these initiatives as engagement is the attempt, as we have noted at paragraph<br />
5.30, to c<strong>on</strong>struct a public space within which to represent the issues. Nevertheless, depending<br />
<strong>on</strong> the issue and c<strong>on</strong>text, the origin of the initiative may have a bearing <strong>on</strong> how effectively this<br />
proceeds and the commitment that different parties have to it.<br />
5.56 Top-down approaches are potentially problematic in that those initiating the engagement often<br />
have vested interests and instrumental reas<strong>on</strong>s for doing so. On the other hand, bottom-up<br />
engagement is by nature sp<strong>on</strong>taneous and resp<strong>on</strong>sive rather than anticipatory.<br />
5.57 The difficulty is that, by the time a technology becomes an appropriate subject for a possible<br />
policy decisi<strong>on</strong> – the point at which broader engagement usually takes place – it has already<br />
emerged to a significant degree and the issues are already invested with values and<br />
expectati<strong>on</strong>s. An important resp<strong>on</strong>se to this, as we have suggested in Chapter 4, is to do with<br />
cultivating an envir<strong>on</strong>ment in which engagement is not excepti<strong>on</strong>al but enabled, in which there<br />
are healthily diverse ecosystems of engagement.<br />
356 See, for example, Leask J, Braunack-Mayer A and Kerridge I (2011) C<strong>on</strong>sent and public engagement in an era of expanded<br />
childhood immunisati<strong>on</strong> Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health 47: 603-7.<br />
357 For a discussi<strong>on</strong> of scientists engaging in ‘issues advocacy’, whereby eliding scientific arguments and political positi<strong>on</strong>s<br />
‘stealth issues advocates’ attempt to attach the authority of the former to the latter, see: Pielke RA (2007) The h<strong>on</strong>est broker:<br />
making sense of science in policy and politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).<br />
358 Wynne B (2007) Public participati<strong>on</strong> in science and technology: performing and obscuring a political–c<strong>on</strong>ceptual category<br />
mistake East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an Internati<strong>on</strong>al Journal 1: 99-110.<br />
89