Epistocracy for Online Deliberative Bioethics

The suggestion that deliberative democratic approaches would suit the management of bioethical policymaking in democratic pluralistic societies has triggered what has been called the “deliberative turn” in health policy and bioethics. Most of the empirical work in this area has focused on the alloca...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics 2015-07, Vol.24 (3), p.272-280
Main Authors: SCHIAVONE, GIUSEPPE, MAMELI, MATTEO, BONIOLO, GIOVANNI
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Advisory Committees - ethics
Bioethical Issues
Bioethics
Community Participation
Decision Making - ethics
Democracy
Health care policy
Health policy
Humans
Internet
Policy Making
Politics
Special Section: Bioethics and Information Technology
United Kingdom
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The suggestion that deliberative democratic approaches would suit the management of bioethical policymaking in democratic pluralistic societies has triggered what has been called the “deliberative turn” in health policy and bioethics. Most of the empirical work in this area has focused on the allocation of healthcare resources and priority setting at the local or national level. The variety of the more or less articulated theoretical efforts behind such initiatives is remarkable and has been accompanied, to date, by an overall lack of method specificity. We propose a set of methodological requirements for online deliberative procedures for bioethics. We provide a theoretical motivation for these requirements. In particular, we discuss and adapt an “epistocratic” proposal and argue that, regardless of its merits as a general political theory, a more refined version of its normative claims can generate a useful framework for the design of bioethical forums that combine maximal inclusiveness with informed and reasonable deliberation.
ISSN:0963-1801
1469-2147
DOI:10.1017/S0963180114000590