【Seminar】

Topic：Experts’ Epistemic Authority in Time of Crises. The need for New Virtues
Speaker：Andrea Lavazza
Date：2022.10.21

As the Covid-19 crisis has shown, subject matter experts have been important in addressing the basis and impact of biomedical, socio-economic, and political engagement. Biomedical experts involved in the formulation of public health policies seek to optimize effectiveness, yet such decisions may incur issues of ethical balance and transgression of certain shared values and principles. In this paper, I propose the importance of, and need for what I call ‘expertise in action’, which obligates: (1) explicit and specific epistemic and responsibilist expertise in informing public decisions, and (2) relative transparency about the extent, role, and contribution of any such expertise and guidance. Operating within a structural and functional model of ethics, I assert that particular virtues should be considered as valuable to the exercise of this new kind of expertise.