The Role of Moral Experts in Secret Policy

Abstract

Is it morally permissible to spy on allied countries? What type of otherwise criminal acts may covert intelligence agents commit in order to keep their cover? Is it permissible to subject children of high-value targets to covert surveillance? In this article, I ask whether democratically elected politicians ought to rely on advice from ethics committees in answering moral choices in secret policy. I argue that ethics committees should not advise politicians on how they ought to conclude secret moral choices. Instead, we can mandate ethics committees to provide advice aimed at improving the moral reasoning behind moral decisions in secret policy. Such advice, I argue, may add value to the decision process independently of whether it increases the chances of reaching morally correct conclusions.

Secret Moral Choices

Secret state operations involve a host of moral choices. Consider the following list of examples: Which countries should we engage in espionage against? Should we allow our undercover agents to use fake identities such as diplomats, doctors, journalists, clergy, or academics? Should we provide secret weapon technology to a friendly country at war? Should the government pay ransom money to kidnappers? By what means may undercover police and intelligence agents recruit and retain informants? Should we infiltrate societies in hostile countries by the use of so-called illegals (agents who are given fake identities and deployed abroad for long periods of time in order to procure sensitive information)? May the police take over and run an encrypted messaging platform as a means of gathering information about criminals?

The reasons for keeping the answers to such questions secret are not necessarily uniform. Some policies require secrecy to merit their label (e.g. espionage, surveillance), while others are such that they would benefit from secrecy (e.g. paying ransom money to kidnappers). All the same, the list indicates that there is a class of policy issues that are kept secret, and which involve difficult moral choices (hereafter referred to as Secret Moral Choices).

While no doubt many democratic governments engage in too much secrecy, I will assume that some decisions to Secret Moral Choices are legitimately kept secret.¹ As such, the paper will not discuss whether it is permissible for governments to engage in secrecy and how to justify it, but rather on questions further downstream about the moral choices involved in these policies. This allows us to focus on the question: how do we want Secret Moral Choices to be settled? I will propose two alternative answers. The first is that we should leave it to our elected representatives and their bureaucracy to make such decisions. The second is that the government ought to call on moral expertise to help them make the right decision. I will not consider a third alternative, although it may be closer to actual practice, of letting bureaucrats make these decisions largely without substantial interference from politicians. This decision-making procedure may be considered convenient for both politicians, because they retain plausible deniability, and bureaucrats, because it gives them greater room for manoeuvre.² Yet it is clearly a suboptimal way of making such decisions. Bureaucrats are not democratically elected and are not hired for their capabilities in normative reasoning and therefore lack both democratic legitimacy and expertise in solving Secret Moral Choices.³

Leaving it to the Politicians

Letting politicians decide Secret Moral Choices may seem to ensure that such decisions are both representative and accountable, ingredients typically needed for decisions to count as democratically legitimate. Yet a moment’s reflection should make us doubt this. Elected politicians have not been given any mandate when it comes to such issues, precisely because such issues have not (for reasons discussed above) been subject to political debate. Consequently, if these issues were left to politicians to decide, voters cannot know the positions their political representatives would take.

One may object that this is not so different from political decisions in other areas. After all, politicians often make decisions in matters where they lack an explicit mandate from voters when they address an unforseen event or an issue that has not been subject to previous political debate. This need not undermine the democratic legitimacy of such decisions, as long as voters can publicly criticize their elected representatives if they disapprove of how the issue was solved and adjust their vote accordingly during the next election. Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson (1996) suggest that politicians who engage secret deliberation can be held accountable in much the same manner and refer to this mechanism as retrospective accountability.⁴ The cases discussed by Gutman and Thompson are the US Constitutional Convention in 1787, which deliberated in secret, and the US Federal Reserve Board’s closed meetings, the summaries of which are not released until six weeks after each meeting. In both cases the public can exercise retrospective accountability—and take political action if they disagree with the outcome of the secret deliberation. Gutman and Thompson consider other practices which depend on secrecy for their efficacy, such as the use of unmarked police cars as part of law enforcement operations. It would obviously defeat its purpose if the police engaged in a public debate about when and where the cars will patrol. This does not undermine accountability, they point out, because ‘[c]itizens have a chance both to decide in advance whether the policy is justified and to review the details of the policy after it is implemented' (p. 103).

To see why we cannot hold politicians retrospectively accountable for Secret Moral Choices, consider how they differ from the examples invoked by Gutman and Thompson. The main difference between Gutman and Thompson’s examples and Secret Moral Choices is that the latter require that both the deliberation and the conclusion to the choice be kept secret. Since there is no ‘output’ the public can assess and discuss, the public cannot hold politicians retroactively accountable for such choices. Recall the examples of Secret Moral Choices mentioned in the introduction (training so-called illegals in hostile countries, using a medical professional title as a cover identity, etc.). These methods and practices are secret at a deeper level than the use of unmarked police cars. Not only is the public kept in the dark as to when they are employed, it is also kept in the dark about whether they are employed.⁵

In general, secret state operations abroad involve more Secret Moral Choices than domestic secret state operation, because governments are subject to greater legal constraints within its territory than outside it. With respect to covert state operations abroad, secrecy must extend beyond the methods employed. In addition to covert methods, the government cannot describe in any precise manner who the targets of their secret operations abroad are, since this could immediately trigger international conflict and enable the target to take counter-measures. Governments will therefore typically describe such operations as missions aimed at thwarting threats to national security and political independence or some other generic values along these lines which leave wide discretion for interpretation. In domestic covert law enforcement operations by contrast, government can communicate that only those who are suspected of breaking the specific (and the most serious) chapters of the penal code  are potential targets of such methods. If the public wants to restrict or expand the group of individuals that may legitimately be targeted by covert law enforcement methods, they can regulate this through normal democratic procedures.

A final feature of Secret Moral Choices which prevents retrospective accountability is that they often do not have a clear expiration date after which they can be declassified. As long as declassifying the decisions can severely strain our international alliances or reveal ongoing practices and methods, they must remain secret. If on occasion there are conditions that make it possible to declassify a particular Secret Moral Choice, the politicians who made such decisions are likely to be out of politics by the time the relevant information is made public.⁶

This does not mean that it is impossible to hold politicians legally accountable for how they solve Secret Moral Choices. One may, for instance, establish a judicial review mechanism constituted by judges with the requisite security to oversee that secret operations do not break domestic law. However, the same reasons that make it legitimate to hold decisions about Secret Moral Choices secret, make it legitimate to refrain from making laws, which must be public, that are sufficiently detailed to settle these choices.⁷ Of course, governments may adopt secret internal directives that settle Secret Moral Choices.⁸ This practice, however, does little to assuage democratic worries as long as the public cannot know the content of such directives, how they were arrived at, or whether they are being adhered to.⁹

A second argument that counts against leaving it to politicians to settle such Secret Moral Choices, apart from the problem of accountability just discussed, is that politicians may lack the relevant skills and experience. Given the secrecy and absence of public debate on these matters, politicians will have had limited occasion to engage with these questions prior to being elected into government. One may object, perhaps, that this is nothing different from the general worry that individual politicians may lack the requisite competence to execute their responsibilities. However, when it comes to Secret Moral Choices, the worry is more acute in three respects. First, the worry regarding lack of competence of a specific politician in other policy areas will rarely apply to the entire class of politicians (at least not to the same degree). Other party members may try to support and advise incompetent politicians and the opposition members may point out their shortcomings. Second, in other policy areas a politician's lack of competence will be on public display for the media to criticise and for voters to penalise. Third, to the extent insufficient competence is due to lack of factual knowledge, bureaucracies will usually be able to assist politicians remedy this shortcoming to some extent. Bureaucracies, however, are not equipped to provide moral advice and thus cannot in the same manner mitigate politicians’ lack of competence when it comes to Secret Moral Choices.

In light of the arguments from the lack of accountability mechanism and the lack of competence, we have reason to consider whether politicians should seek outside help when it comes to Secret Moral Choices.

Relying on Moral Experts

When confronted with thorny ethical issues, democratic governments occasionally appoint advisory ethics committees tasked with providing policy advice. This is true for many policy areas such as health care, animal welfare, and criminal legislation.

The practice of relying on expertise (be it ethical or otherwise) in policy formation is by no means uncontroversial. Insofar as governments justify their rule by appealing to democratic norms and procedures, reliance on experts seems inconsistent with the democratic idea of ‘rule by the people’. This criticism can be spelled out in various ways depending on how one thinks democracy is justified, but at the most basic level the worry is that reliance on expertise grants a non-elected group, the experts, more influence over policy formation than other citizens.

These arguments, however, do not seem to apply (at least not with the same force) in our context. As pointed out in the previous section, the high degree of secrecy that applies to Secret Moral Choices forces us to operate in a democratic vacuum. Although leaving Secret Moral Choices to be answered by politicians alone would nominally keep such decisions under democratic control, this control would lack democratic substance as long as voters must be kept in the dark about the content of the policy in advance and cannot exercise retroactive accountability afterwards. In one important sense, therefore, given that the decisions to Secret Moral Choices necessarily suffer from a democratic deficit, we may be less worried about relying on advisory committees in these matters than in normal (non-secret) public policy areas. There are, however, a range of objections to the reliance on advisory committees that do not concern the putative democratic problems that come with this practice.

Philosophical Concerns About Moral Expertise

In order to get a better picture of what it would mean to rely on ethics committees in secret policy, it is worth having a closer look at the conditions one would have to impose on such a committee. To start with, the committee would have to keep their conclusions secret because such conclusions would in themselves reveal secret information and would suggest to the public what the government is likely to decide. Plausibly, the arguments in support of their conclusions would have to be secret too insofar as one can derive the conclusions from them. Even the identity of the committee members must arguably be kept secret for two reasons. The first is out of self-interest of the members. Having access to high-stake state secrets of this sort is a liability for the committee members and can expose them to unwanted attention, possibly blackmail, from criminals or foreign powers. Second, revealing their identities will make it easier for others to guess their conclusion either from their fundamental moral commitments or from learning about their track record (be it practical or theoretical).

No doubt the proposal of appointing a secret ethics committee with a mandate to give government advice in Secret Moral Choices sounds ominous. However, once we look beyond the democratic concerns that governmental reliance on moral expertise otherwise gives rise to, we need to look elsewhere for what may be wrong with this procedure. What other objections might one raise against the idea of a secret ethics committee, and which of these objections are tied to the conditions of secrecy per se as opposed to the idea of ethics committees in public policy in general?

Moral Judgement Expertise

At a fundamental level, one may object to the idea that governments should rely on ethics committees in general on the ground that one denies that there is such a thing as moral expertise. If there is no moral expertise, there can be no moral experts, and without moral experts ethics committees will not be able to arrive at better solutions to moral choices than what the politicians (or indeed anyone) would be able to on their own.

The question of whether moral expertise exists and the proper role of those who possess it in politics is an age-old debate in philosophy. How we approach this question depends crucially on what we might mean by moral expertise. Following Peter Singer, one may describe a moral expert as someone who has a better chance than non-experts of reaching ‘soundly based’ moral conclusions (Singer 1972, p. 117). Similarly, [contributor to this issue] describes a moral expert as someone who has a higher chance of ‘getting it right in moral matters’ than non-experts (this issue, p. X). Cathrine Holst and Andres Molander describe an expert as someone who is better than non-experts at reaching ‘justified conclusions in moral affairs’ (2017, p. 236).¹⁰ In the following, I will refer to considerably-higher-than-average ability to arrive at conclusions that are morally correct, where correctness reflects moral truth in some sense, as moral judgement expertise.¹¹

Based on this understanding of moral expertise, imagine how a government minister might answer a citizen who asks how a given Secret Moral Choice is resolved.

Relying on Secret Moral Experts 1

I cannot comment on the moral choice you refer to, due to the sensitive nature of the matter. I can reassure you, however, that in addressing this issue I will rely on a secret advisory committee consisting of persons much better trained than me in arriving at morally correct conclusions.

How should we assess this statement? As already alluded to, a fundamental worry may be that we reject the idea of moral expertise, at least if understood in this manner. We may reject that the variation of moral competence among adults is sufficient to justify a distinction between experts and non-experts, or more radically that there are any moral facts to have knowledge about. In the proceeding discussion I will, however, assume that these objections can be met.¹² If for no other reason, it will serve to direct the attention to other possible worries that a citizen may have upon hearing the above statement by a member of government.

A serious worry we may have if we grant that there are moral experts, concerns our ability to identify them. It is not obvious which characteristics qualify a person to be an expert of this sort. Building on Peter Singer (1972), Holst and Molander suggest that those who through training and education have acquired competence in analysing moral concepts and arguments, and who have had ample time to reflect on moral issues, may qualify as moral experts (2019, pp. 550–551). Yet it would be unreasonably restrictive to claim that having such competence is a necessary requirement for moral judgement expertise. As Sarah McGrath notes, it is equally plausible to think that the training necessary to become a moral expert consists in ‘being raised by virtuous people who devote relatively little time to scrutinizing arguments for and against their views’ as in ‘taking a series of ethics courses devoted to the critical examination of arguments on both sides of divisive issues’ (2008, p. 98).¹³ In an ecumenical spirit, Jakob Elster (2023) suggests that training in moral argumentation, having time to spend on discussing moral questions, long practical experience in dealing with moral choices in a given domain, empathy, and imagination are all sources of moral expertise and may serve as criteria for identifying moral experts.

The problem with this solution is that there is widespread, systematic, and enduring disagreement among people who meet these criteria. Of course, there is disagreement between experts in other fields as well. If disagreement in social and natural sciences does not pose an unsurmountable problem for the notion of expertise in these disciplines, why should it be a problem for the notion of moral expertise? To begin with, it is worth noting that similar worries concerning our ability to identify experts is not entirely absent in other fields characterised by enduring disagreement.¹⁴ In addition, disagreement in moral matters cannot be restricted to disagreement between people with formal training in moral philosophy (since we rejected such training as a necessary requirement for moral expertise) in the same way that disagreement about legal or economic matters can arguably be restricted to people with formal training in law and economics. Finally, even if one only considers the disagreement within academic moral philosophy and compares it with that of other academic disciplines, the disagreements in moral philosophy are of such a nature as to give rise to distinct worries. First, there is no majority view in moral philosophy (Bourget and Chalmers 2014). As such, we cannot solve the issue of disagreement by siding with the majority, which some have suggested may make the problem of identifying experts more tractable (Goldman 2001). Second, this disagreement does not seem to be a passing phenomenon and there are no signs of a large and stable collective convergence on a single moral perspective such as deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics. This may in part be explained by the distinctive nature of disagreements in moral philosophy. Disagreements in moral philosophy frequently arise over the status of principles that are non-derivative in the sense that they may not be justified or refuted by appeal to any more fundamental principle. This type of disagreement is especially intractable, providing limited hope for the prospect of a stable and widespread convergence any time soon.¹⁵

As a partial reply to the problem of disagreement among putative moral judgement experts, Elster (2023) suggests that we may at least listen to their advice in cases where they do not disagree. David Enoch (2014) has suggested another approach. Enoch suggests that we can identify persons who have a track record of reaching conclusions on certain matters that we, after careful consideration, have come to endorse. We are entitled to view such people as moral judgement experts according to Enoch, and to defer to the advice they give in such matters. ¹⁶

In view of the responses offered to the problem of expert disagreement, we may consider the slightly different response a government minister may give to a citizen who asks how Secret Moral Choices are settled:

Relying on Secret Moral Experts 2

I cannot comment on the moral choice you refer to due to the sensitive nature of the matter. I can reassure you, however, that in addressing this issue I will rely on a secret advisory committee consisting of persons much better trained than me in arriving at morally correct conclusions. When they agree, I take their advice. When they disagree, I pick the expert that I have previously agreed with in similar cases where I’ve had time to consider their reply carefully.

It seems clear that Elster and Enoch’s suggestions are of little help in our case.

Suppose we adopt the criteria suggested by Elster for identifying moral experts (moral training, time to consider moral questions, long experience, etc.); what non-arbitrary reason do we then have for excluding putative experts who espouse dramatically opposing moral views such as Jainism, hedonism, asceticism, and pacifism? Once representatives of such views are part of the committee, most moral issues (at least the issues involved in Secret Moral Choices) will be subject to controversy.One could hope to narrow the range of disagreement among committee members by explicitly instructing them to only provide advice consistent with international law and fundamental human rights. While this would block some outright extreme views (say an argument defending torture of captive spies) it will not settle any of the Secret Moral Choices listed in this article. Fundamental human rights, and international law more generally, does not prohibit espionage, blackmail, manipulation, deceit, surveillance, and infiltration of networks on foreign soil.¹⁷ In short, legal restrictions of this sort would not significantly narrow the scope of disagreements between moral experts.¹⁸

Moreover, it is not entirely clear why we should listen to putative moral judgement experts simply because they agree. If we could be confident that there is at least one infallible expert, we would know that when everyone agrees the conclusion is in line with the view of the genuine moral expert in the group. But the idea that we can be sure to have an infallible moral expert in the group is an unrealistic assumption. Once we relax this assumption, we cannot know whether a given consensus arises when the true moral expert has failed to identify the correct answer and therefore incorrectly agrees with the rest of the merely apparent expert. In the case of Enoch’s proposed response, it seems clear that it does not provide a good method to solve a moral problem for a society. Although Enoch’s method can identify a person whom it would be reasonable for the politician to consider as a moral expert, this does not mean that it is reasonable for voters with different moral perspectives to consider the same person a moral expert. One could potentially amend Enoch’s proposal such that in order to identify a moral expert we pick an expert the group has largely agreed with on similar matters that they have thoroughly discussed before. In groups characterised by reasonable pluralism, however, such experts will be hard to come by.¹⁹

In sum, the prospects that a diverse group will agree on a method for identifying moral judgement experts seems dim. Consequently, citizens may legitimately feel uneasy about the government minister’s statement above. How, then, should we want the government to proceed with Secret Moral Choices?

Moral Deliberation Expertise

If the preceding discussion is right, there are serious objections to both alternatives discussed so far. Leaving Secret Moral Choices in the hands of elected government officials does not ensure substantive democratic control of such decisions. Instructing politicians to instead appoint moral judgement experts to provide recommendations does not make the case significantly better if politicians are unable to identify such experts.

One way out of this impasse is to distinguish between different types of moral expertise.

Rather than describing the competence to identify correct moral answers and competence in reasoning about moral matters by the same term, I suggest we use the term ‘moral deliberation expertise’ to cover the latter, where this is taken to mean ability to avoid fallacious reasoning and resolve merely apparent disagreements, ability to identify moral concerns, as well as familiarity with moral concepts. The motivation for this is twofold. First, in agreement with Elster and McGrath, insofar as anyone possesses moral judgement expertise it seems equally reasonable that one can possess expertise in arriving at correct moral conclusions by virtue of one’s well-developed moral sensibilities and extensive experience rather than through moral reasoning and theoretical analysis. One may thus have moral judgement expertise without having moral deliberation expertise. Second, we should grant that competence in moral reasoning and ability to clarify moral questions may not entail competence in reaching morally correct conclusions. Consequently, those who have moral deliberation expertise do not necessarily also have moral judgement expertise.

Distinguishing between types of moral expertise this way allows us to agree with Holst and Molander’s observation that ‘[o]ne can recognise someone as a moral expert and learn from the expert’s reasoning without agreeing with his or her judgements’ (2019, p. 551). It also makes it easier to understand their claim that ‘the reasoned disagreement between moral experts is therefore a resource for a democratic society and not something problematic’ (p. 551). It would be odd to regard it as a resource that experts disagree on what the correct conclusions are, insofar as we think that there cannot be more than one correct conclusion to a moral choice. If, however, we think that some people are experts at moral deliberation, then the fact that such experts disagree on what the correct conclusion is, may indeed be a resource. Reasoned disagreements of this sort may elucidate different moral perspectives, identify faulty reasoning, and help non-experts clarify their own thinking on the matter. By understanding moral deliberation expertise in this manner, we can imagine the following alternative response by a government minister.

Relying on Secret Moral Experts 3

I cannot comment on the moral choice you refer to due to the sensitive nature of the matter. I can reassure you, however, that in addressing this issue I rely on a secret expert committee, consisting of people who are experts at identifying moral problems and who are highly trained in moral reasoning. They do not provide recommendations about how the question should be solved, but they help clarify the government’s deliberation on the matter.

I suggest that citizens have less reason to be worried about this response by the minster than the previous two responses. One reason for this may be that the problem of disagreement seems less acute when it comes to moral deliberation experts compared to moral judgement experts. Although there is room for disagreement as to what constitutes moral deliberation expertise, it is fair to consider this disagreement less systematic and widespread than disagreement on what constitutes correct judgements on controversial moral matters. Moral deliberation expertise is typically among the central criteria by which journals in moral philosophy measure the quality of submitted articles. The fact that there is relative agreement on how to rank academic journals in moral philosophy may be taken as an indication that there is a corresponding degree of agreement on what constitutes moral deliberation expertise. Insofar as it is less problematic to identify moral deliberation experts, we may be less worried that government ministers (and their bureaucracy) will be unable to distinguish apparent from genuine moral deliberation experts.²⁰

Although citizens may have less reason to worry about the government’s reliance on moral deliberation expertise, one may ask what reason they have to find it an improvement over letting politicians solve Secret Moral Choices by themselves (or in consultation with non-experts in their bureaucracy). To put the question in sharper focus, consider the following case:

Weapons Support

Country A is unjustly invaded by country B. Our government has three choices:

• 1. Supply country A with a highly effective but also hugely destructive secret weapon. It is estimated that the destruction of country B’s military capacity achieved by this weapon will end the siege of a city which would otherwise have killed about 1500 civilians. However, due to the limited discrimination, the weapon is likely to foreseeably kill 1000 other civilians.

• 2. Supply country A with a highly discriminate, but not very powerful secret weapon. It is estimated that the weapon will succeed in thwarting an attack from country B on three hospitals, thereby saving 100 civilians who would otherwise have been killed. Due to the precision of the weapon, 110 combatants from country B’s army, but no civilians, will be targeted and be killed if the weapon is employed.

• 3. Do nothing.

Due to the secret nature of the weapons technology, and the danger of becoming a military target, we may assume that the government has good reason to hold the decision secret in this case. Which alternative should the government choose? We can expect a moral disagreement on this case roughly along the lines of utilitarianism, deontology, and pacifism.²¹ Imagine that the government is trying to decide on which alternative to pursue and that moral deliberation experts are assisting them in the decision process. The experts help the government ministers and their aides to think through the issues, understand different moral views, clarify assumptions, avoid fallacious reasoning, resolve merely apparent disagreements, and identify potential moral concerns. But will they help the government representatives convergene on the morally correct conclusion? To answer that question, we seem to be in need of a genuine moral judgement expert, which takes us back to the problems already adressed. What good, then, is moral deliberation expertise?

In the following, I suggest that moral deliberation experts may be valuable in different ways, independent of whether they increase the chance of reaching the morally correct conclusion. To argue for this, I will point out that a decision process can be morally defective in ways that are independent of the correctness of its conclusion.

One way in which a decision process can be morally defective is if politicians fail to consider potential moral problems or fail to gather relevant information about consequences of a proposed course of action. Not taking into account the foreseeable but unintended consequences of a decision shows a disrespect to those affected by such consequences, regardless of whether they are of sufficient gravity to render the policy decision as a whole morally objectionable (awareness of adverse consequences may for instance alert government to the need for compensation). The same is arguably true of failing to consider normative questions. For instance, to simply assume without argument that the difference between harming someone as a side-effect and harming them as a mere means is of no moral relevance, or that the target’s normative status is unaffected by whether she is morally responsible or not, shows a certain morally inappropriate nonchalance, regardless of whether in fact it is correct to ultimately reject these features as morally relevant. In order to ensure that morally relevant features of a given decision has been taken into account, a committee of moral deliberation experts can (and must) point out that there are more than one moral approach (say, a particular form of utilitarianism) to a given problem, which differ not only in the conclusions they lead to, but also in the facts that they consider morally relevant.

Failure to consider moral problems and gather morally relevant information occurs in politics for several reasons. One is that there will often be institutional pressure among those working under the minister not to complicate matters or slow down decisions by pointing to potential moral problems with a proposed course of action. Providing a government minister with documentation that there is insufficient support for a factual premise for a proposed course of action, or that it entails a controversial moral compromise, may be considered a liability for the government minister if the policy is leaked and criticised. Consequently, bureaucrats and advisors to the minister may have an incentive not to provide complicating information of this type. A separate advisory board with the expertise and a mandate to clarify the stakes and possible concerns regarding a moral choice will be less vulnerable to such institutional pressure and will increase the chances that the Secret Moral Choice is settled in a factually and morally informed manner.

Another way a political decision process can be morally defective, regardless of whether it leads to the morally correct conclusion, is if politicians put private interests before public interest. To cover up corruption of this sort, a politician may resort to vicarious moral argumentation to make the decision to a Secret Moral Choice appear morally motivated. She may manipulate a factual premise in a moral argument, downplaying or ignoring likely negative side-effects of an action. Alternatively, she may invoke a moral principle that she in other contexts rejects, in order to reach a conclusion favoured for private reasons. The room for this type of corruption can be made narrower by moral deliberation experts. If a specific factual premise is necessary for a conclusion to a Secret Moral Choice, moral deliberations experts can alert members of the decision-making body (the government or a parliamentary subcommittee) to the importance of checking whether a factual premise is sound. In the case where a minister cherry picks a moral premise designed to support a favoured conclusion, moral deliberation experts may alert the members of the decision-making body that this principle has been rejected in a relevantly similar context. In both of these ways, moral deliberation experts make covering up corruption by engaging in vicarious moral argumentation more difficult.

A third way a political decision process can be morally defective, independently of whether it leads to the morally correct conclusion, is by failing to state and document the reasoning that leads to a decision. This is problematic because it makes it more difficult to expose defects in the argumentation of the sort mentioned above. Moreover, it makes understanding the conclusion by those who are given the task of implementing it more difficult. Promoting moral understanding among those who execute the policy is valuable in itself and makes it more likely that they can resolve variations of a given Secret Moral Choice that may not have been foreseen when the government decided on how it should be settled. If, for instance, an intelligence agent does not understand why she cannot use doctor or a priest as cover identities, she may be unable to infer how the guidelines should be applied in societies that divide up professions in ways not foreseen in the existing government regulations. By helping the goverment members document the reasoning behind a decision to a given Secret Moral Choice in a clear and cogent manner, moral deliberation experts may help mitigate these problems. 

The Problem of Secrecy

An upshot of my argument so far is that secrecy makes no difference to the question of moral judgement expertise. If we do not have sufficiently precise criteria to identify moral judgement experts in controversial moral matters, we should not instruct ethics committees, whether public or secret, to provide government with substantive recommendations about what the correct moral conclusion is. What difference does secrecy make when it comes to moral deliberation experts?

Secrecy makes reliance on moral deliberation expertise in political decisions more problematic in at least two respects. The first concerns the selection of moral deliberation experts. Some moral deliberation experts may intentionally or unintentionally influence the government towards favouring their own particular substantive moral view—or worse—exploit their position to argue for a particular self-interested view.²² Secrecy also makes it easier for government ministers to pick moral deliberation experts who they know are particularly adept at developing moral justifications in line with their government's political preferences.

In the case of public ethics committees, this problem can be addressed by making the committee’s report available to academic peers and to the public, which in turn may object to potential shortcomings or biases of the committee’s report. To achieve peer review in settings of secrecy, albeit in a limited form, one could institute a rotating committee membership, giving those who are not currently part of the committee a mandate to review the current committee’s outputs. In addition, one may give a parliamentary subcommittee, together with members of the bureaucracy, responsibility for appointing members to the ethics committee to prevent individual ministers from cherry picking experts in line with their own political preferences.²³

A second problem with secret ethics committees is that citizens cannot know whether the committee succeeds in improving ministers’ moral deliberations. Citizens therefore cannot confirm whether the interests of parties affected by a Secret Moral Choice in fact have been given adequate weight in the deliberation.²⁴

While this is a genuine problem, it does not take away the value of moral deliberation expertise in Secret Moral Choices. To have an independently appointed ethics committee alert the government to possible moral concerns, to require the committee’s output and the government’s decisions to be documented for subsequent governments (and potentially other parliamentarians) to review and overturn, does add some improvement compared to the absence of these mechanisms. It is not unreasonable to hope that it will be harder for a government to ride roughshod over an individual or a group if it has to document its reasoning and if it has been provided with a report that highlights moral concerns associated with its decision to do so. ²⁵

My argument in support of the value of moral deliberation experts depends on the assumption that they do not provide substantive recommendations on what constitutes a correct conclusion to Secret Moral Choices. There are reasons why this constraint can be relaxed when it comes to moral choices in public policy, at least if such committees are complemented with additional types of expertise. Public ethics committees may, for instance, be tasked with formulating a compromise that strikes a balance between the main moral perspectives actually held by citizens. Doing so would require knowing the distribution of different moral views among citizens, a competence distinct from moral deliberation expertise as we have defined it here. This in turn may require taking into account questions of political, religious, and cultural representation when members of ethics committees are selected. An ethics committee of this sort could conceivably propose conclusions to public moral choices that presume to be in conformity with the main moral perspectives actually held by citizens. The point here is not to argue that tasking ethics committees with this responsibility would on balance be a good idea.²⁶ For our purposes, it is enough to note that this approach seems comparatively more problematic for secret ethics committees, since such proposals cannot be made public and therefore cannot be challenged by citizens. In contrast, citizens can challenge a public ethics committee that claims to have identified a compromise that conforms to the main moral perspectives held by citizens. If citizens do not recognise the proposal as an acceptable compromise, they have the option of mobilising against it (and against the committee) either through the media, by voting, or through other political channels. This accountability mechanism gives citizens a degree of control which reduces the potentially problematic sides of mandating an ethics committee with this task.

Concluding Remarks

How should politicians solve Secret Moral Choices? Given that these choices cannot be settled in substantially democratic ways, the need for moral expert advice may seem clear. Unfortunately, putative moral judgement experts are likely to fundamentally disagree on what the correct conclusions to many Secret Moral Choices are. In light of this, I have suggested it may be better to instruct governments to rely on moral deliberation experts. While moral deliberation experts cannot claim competence in delivering morally correct conclusions, their competence can help politicians consider moral choices from different perspectives and clarify politicians’ reasoning behind moral decisions. Establishing committees to provide advice of this sort may ensure better morally and factually informed decisions, reduce the room for vicarious moral reasoning, and increase both the contestability and the understanding of the government’s solutions to Secret Moral Choice among those who have access to them. These are virtues, I have argued, that are morally valuable irrespective of whether they help politicians identify the correct conclusions to Secret Moral Choices.