What characterizes the role of moral and political philosophers in contemporary governance? And what ought their role to be? Should we see philosophers in these areas as some kind of moral experts? If so, what kind of expertise are we talking about, and does the possession of such expertise imply that moral and political philosophers, as well as moral experts more generally, can legitimately be granted a special authority in the formulation of public policy?

These questions touch upon core philosophical issues concerning what constitutes political authority, political competence, quality of government, and democratic legitimacy, and are topical in a time when public criticism of expert power and ‘elites’ has intensified in some corners, and some scholars call for the ‘democratization of expertise’ (Weingart 1999; see also Fischer 2009; Krick 2021), while others call for a greater scope for expert judgment in policy-making processes and even in decision-making (e.g. Sunstein 2016; Caplan 2007; Brennan 2016). From history, we know that several philosophers have been consulted by rulers and governments for advice, from Aristotle to Machiavelli and Locke (Glendon 2011). Historically, the philosophers themselves have also been preoccupied with how to conceive of the place of philosophers in political life, starting with Plato’s famous argument for a government by philosopher kings in The Republic.

Still, even if the political role of moral and political philosophy is often touched upon and sometimes studied and explicitly addressed also in recent philosophical and political science scholarship (for references, see Hegstad, Hedlund and Holst in this issue), contributions are scattered, and a number of questions merit further inquiry. Importantly, it is notable that philosophical discussions of experts’ moral authority and philosophers’ role in policy-making often take place in one of two contexts: first, in the context of a general discussion of the role of experts in policy development, and second, in the context of a discussion about the nature of moral expertise and the appropriateness of moral deference. Unfortunately, these two contexts are largely isolated from each other, and contributions seldom speak across the divide. By bringing these discussions and fields of scholarship together, this special issue seeks to make new contributions to the understanding of the role of philosophers and other (putative) moral experts in policy development, and to do so in a way which is alert to both the democratic and epistemic challenges raised by our reliance on and use of experts in general, and to the specific challenges involved in identifying and using moral expertise.

Experts in Policy and Democracy

The first context we start out from is recent normative political theory and political philosophy about the proper role of experts and expert knowledge in public policy-making and democratic decision-making. Contemporary governments are commonly justified as democracies, but the politicians and policy-makers of the present-day ‘rule of the people’ often ask experts and professionals for advice to enlighten policy debates and improve on decisions, or even delegate decision-making power to them (Moore 2017; Holst and Molander 2017; Pamuk 2021; Heath 2020). This has led commentators to talk about an ‘expertization’ of policy-making (Turner 2003) and ‘the rise of the unelected’ (Vibert 2007), and has triggered a vivid discussion about the proper role of expert bodies and expert knowledge in policy formulation, and about the relationship between democracy and expert rule or ‘epistocracy’ (Estlund 2008; recently Brennan and Landemore 2021).

Generally, worries over expertization have been twofold. First, granting extra political power to experts raises some obvious democratic concerns. How can it be ‘a rule of the people’ if public policies are left in the hands of experts? Critics see deficits in participation and representation, leading to an increasingly ‘disfigured’ democracy (Urbinati 2014). In addition, there are epistemic worries, that is, concerns about whether experts actually contribute to ensuring more rational and informed policy-making. Just like non-experts, experts can make cognitive mistakes (Kahneman 2012; Tetlock 2005), and be biased by ideology or by their disciplinary culture and socialization. Expert involvement in policy-making is thus no guarantee against—and may even increase the likelihood of—skewed and poor decisions (e.g. Karpowitz and Raphael 2014, pp. 34–88; Moore 2017, pp. 34–58; Koppl 2018). The fact that epistemic asymmetries between experts and non-experts may be considerable does not make it easier. Arguably, taking advice from the most knowledgeable in relevant areas is likely to improve on decision and policy quality (Holst and Christensen 2023), but it can be hard to distinguish first-rate from second-rate or quasi experts on, say, nanotechnology, public health, or macro-economics, if you are not an expert within these domains yourself (Goldman 2011).

The experts that inhabit contemporary expert arrangements are often, for instance, economists, lawyers or medical or climate scientists who typically offer factual, technical, or regulatory expertise regarding some issue, for example when epidemiologists and virologists give advice on proper Covid-19 measures; economists propose a new tax, say on capital or property; or legal experts propose amendments to environmental or education policy regulations.

Yet, philosophers too, and more generally experts on normative or moral questions, can be brought in as policy advisors (Lever and Poama 2019; Wolff 2019), typically to give recommendations on ethical issues. Within the community of philosophers some argue that philosophers ought to take on a more public role and engage with existing political institutions (see for instance Sen 2009; Dowding 2020; Heath 2020; Waldron 2016; Kitcher), and even take part in processes of policy formulation (e.g. Wolff 2019), while others oppose or question the idea that philosophy should take on a role on par with other contemporary policy sciences (see Holst this issue for an overview of the debate).

However, the role of philosopher experts in policy advice—contested among philosophers themselves—has so far received limited attention in recent discussions of expert knowledge and experts’ political role. Still, it raises several important conceptual and normative questions, and the contributions to this special issue address them in different ways.

For one thing, if moral and political philosophers are brought in as experts in policy-making, what kind of expertise can we expect them to offer? Philosopher experts may no doubt possess some or even considerable factual, technical, and regulatory expertise within the issue or policy area they engage with, be it biotechnology (Hegstad 2023, special issue), international affairs (Christie 2023, special issue), or artificial intelligence (Hedlund 2023, special issue). However, it is not obvious why one would want to draw on philosophers for this kind of expertise, as their primary competences, given the focus of academic philosophy and the training it provides, lie elsewhere (Holst 2023, special issue).

One way of describing what the primary competence of moral and political philosophers is, is in terms of moral expertise. But can there at all be expertise on morals and morality? And if so, how should such expertise be understood and defined? There is little disagreement—generally, and in this special issue—that philosophers typically have special competences in conceptual and logical discussion and analysis, in argumentation and ‘deliberation’ (i.e. Christie’s distinction between ‘moral deliberation’ and ‘moral judgment’). Moral and political philosophers have tailored these competences towards moral and political issues specifically, and also possess knowledge of ethical and (political–philosophical) theories—what is often referred to as ‘ethical expertise’ (e.g. Hedlund 2023, special issue, Hegstad 2023, special issue). While many contributors in this issue see a significant role for such expertise in policy-making, what is much more contested, is whether philosophers’ conceptual, argumentative, and ethical skills make them more likely to be ‘correct’ on moral issues, in other words, whether they are, in this respect, ‘moral experts’. While some contributors dismiss this outright (e.g. Lever 2023, special issue; Dowding 2023, special issue; Christie 2023, special issue) or take an agnostic position (e.g. Hedlund 2023, special issue), others either assume this as not unlikely (Elster 2023, special issue), grant that philosophers’ expertise can contribute to make their moral and political judgement ‘better’ in the sense of more reason-based (Holst 2023, special issue), or recognize the ‘correctness approach’ as one of the more reasonable normative models for philosophers’ work in ethics commissions (Hegstad 2023, special issue).

However, the latter contributors also recognize that there may be different potential sources of moral expertise—philosophers are not the only likely candidates, as moral expertise may also result from both academic competence in other disciplines engaged in ethical reasoning, such as theology or bioethics, and from sources other than academic competence, such as practical experience within a given field. Moral expertise might also be a quality possessed not by a given individual, but by a group, such as ethics commissions, in virtue of the varied perspectives of the members of the group, in addition to their individual expertise (Hegstad 2023, special issue). Lever makes a similar point about how the different experiences of members of randomly selected assemblies makes such assemblies useful tools for eliciting knowledge, though she would presumably reject the characterization of such assemblies as collective moral experts.

Finally, given philosophers’ role and competences—which there is no full agreement on—would we like them to be more—or less—involved in policy-making? Is it likely that philosophers and other putative moral experts will contribute to enlightenment and better political decisions, or are their skills and competences dubious, over-rated, or simply not so policy relevant? What are philosophers’ biases and shortcomings? Are there asymmetries between experts and non-experts in philosophy which make it difficult for non-experts to assess philosophers’ explanations and judgments and to distinguish qualified from less qualified philosophers, paralleling asymmetries in other domains of expertise? And what are the implications for democracy of including philosophers and moral experts among policy experts and in expert bodies? Should the rise of philosophers as ethics advisors and would-be moral experts worry democrats, or can philosopher experts play a valuable role in democratic governance?

The contributions of this special issue shed light on, approach, and answer these questions differently, even if the underlying normative concerns may be overlapping. A first set of concerns concern the effect of the use of moral experts on the quality of democratic debate. In her article, Maria Hedlund highlights how ‘under-reliance’ on advice by ethicists may diminish the epistemic quality of deliberations and decisions, while ‘over-reliance’ may be a severe problem for democratic legitimacy. Cathrine Holst argues that philosophers are vulnerable to biases that may contribute to reducing the quality of their advice. At the same time, philosophers have competences and orientations that policy discussions are likely to profit from, and philosophers can in the best of cases play a profound democratic role. Eilev Hegstad outlines four models of how ethics commissions can play a role in policy development—‘common consensus’, ‘society proxy’, ‘correctness’, and ‘deep pluralism’—and provides a normative discussion of their strengths and weaknesses. Jakob Elster discusses the challenges which arise when the argumentation of moral experts is so complex that neither politicians nor the public can understand their arguments. By contrast, Keith Dowding stresses how ethical advice typically works by providing reasoned arguments, which the recipient of the advice will then use in their own deliberation. Lars Christie focuses on an outlier case, ‘secret moral choices’ in international politics and affairs, where democratic deliberation cannot take place, precisely because these choices are secret, and the question arises how politicians should then deliberate. Christie recognizes the vital role of philosophers in improving a politician’s moral deliberation on such choices, even if they cannot be relied upon to provide moral recommendations.

A second set of concerns are about whether the use of moral experts undermines ideals of democratic equality by giving greater influence to some citizens (the philosophers or the moral experts) than to others. Indeed, on what is a commonly accepted model, there is a division of labor within policy-development, wherein scientific experts may provide factual input to the policy-process, but where it is politicians who should provide the normative input to the process, and the use of moral experts challenge this model (Hegstad 2023, special issue, Elster 2023, special issue) in ways which may seem to be detrimental to the ideal of democratic equality (Hedlund 2023, special issue; Christie 2023, special issue; Elster 2023, special issue). Thus Holst contends that reliance on philosopher experts may intensify democratic worries not least due to the depoliticization pressures that the introduction of ethics expertise tends to give rise to. Hedlund has similar concerns, and points to how over-reliance on ethicists gives citizens less influence on the interpretation of political problems, while under-reliance may give disproportional scope for policy-makers and technocrats to use the symbolic authority of ‘ethics’ to make strategic moves and pursue their political interests. And Elster argues that it is a democratic problem if politicians need to defer to the advice of moral experts, because they do not understand their arguments. Christie points out that for decisions which have to be secret, it is less of a challenge that moral experts have more influence than other citizens, since citizens will not be able to influence such choices anyway, given their secret nature. This challenge also seems lesser if we focus not on the role of experts in giving advice, but rather on their role in stimulating public debate (Hegstad 2023, special issue) or on how recommendations by experts will be ‘accompanied by a set of justificatory reasons or arguments’ (Dowding 2023, special issue).

Torbjørn Gundersen and Annabelle Lever stand out from the other contributions in that their articles do not focus particularly on the role of philosophers or of moral experts, but rather on other actors who might play the role, often given to moral experts, of providing normative input to policy debates: scientists (Gundersen 2023, special issue) or randomly chosen citizen assemblies (Lever 2023, special issue). Gundersen discusses the role of science and expertise generally, focusing on the cases where scientific experts do not only provide factual input, but also provide recommendations. Gundersen argues that scientific experts must operate from within institutions that guarantee the scientific quality of their advice while at the same time connecting properly to the procedures and mandates of a democratic society. This includes adhering sufficiently to fundamental norms of moral responsibility—for instance as we know them from philosophers’ discussions—a precondition, Gundersen says, for ‘basic’ (and not only ‘enhanced’) trust. Annabelle Lever delivers a systematic critique of the idea of replacing democracy not with experts, but with ‘lottocracy’, even if she recognizes that bodies of randomly selected citizens can be a valuable addition to democratic elections, publics, and institutions as we know them. Moreover, with her assessments and recommendations, she is generally somewhat skeptical of the idea that epistemic credentials should have relevance for political authority. Scientists and philosophers may have various competences—even if Lever takes it that no one, neither philosophers nor others, possesses moral expertise in the sense of ‘better’ knowledge. However, the democratic norm of political equality should have primary force, irrespective of epistemic considerations.

Moral Expertise

The second scholarly context of this special issue is moral philosophy. Interestingly, whereas the extensive recent debates in normative political theory on the role of experts in policy-making and democracy have largely sidestepped the philosopher experts and the idea that there can be expertise on moral questions, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of moral expertise in a branch of the moral–philosophical literature during the last 10–15 years. Significantly, the focus of these discussions has moved from the traditional, but still relevant, question whether there is such a thing as moral expertise at all (Singer 1972, 1988; Archard 2011; Jones and Schroeter 2012) to further questions which arise if we take the idea of moral expertise seriously. Two central issues have been: first, how we can identify moral experts, given that there is widespread disagreement among putative moral experts, such as the moral philosophers themselves, and given that unlike in a number of other domains, such as weather prediction, we do not have independent access to the right answer, and thus have no way of assessing the putative moral experts’ track record (McGrath 2009, 2011; Riaz 2020; see also Dowding, Elster, and Christie in this special issue). Second, even if we can in the end identify some moral experts after all, it might not be morally right to defer to a moral expert, rather than make up one’s own mind on moral matters. Deference to moral expertise has been said to be detrimental to an individual agent’s autonomy, moral virtue, and capacity for moral learning (Hills 2009; Driver 2006; Howell 2014; for a defense of moral deference, see Enoch 2014).

Yet, to a large degree, this recent philosophical literature on moral expertise and moral deference focuses on private morality and on the use of moral expertise by individual agents in their private and professional lives, and less on the role of moral expertise in political decisions and policy-making (although there are relevant discussions in e.g. Singer 1988; Archard 2011; Jones and Schroeter 2012). As a result, there is a peculiar lacuna in this literature regarding the role of moral and political philosophers in policy-making and democratic decision-making. For example, building on Alison Hills’s distinction between taking moral advice and deferring to moral testimony (2009), we may ask if there is a place at all for moral deference in the political sphere, or if the role of moral experts is limited, as Peter Singer argues (1988), to giving advice to elected politicians, who may reject this advice based on their own moral judgment. Are the worries concerning the conflict between deference to moral experts and the agent’s autonomy and virtue relevant when we assess the role of experts in the political sphere, or are these concerns limited to private moral decisions? And given the particular role moral experts have when giving advice to policy-makers, are other factors relevant for identifying moral experts than what might be relevant in the private sphere?

Several of the articles in the special issue take up such questions. Jakob Elster argues that because of the complexity of moral arguments, as developed in contemporary moral and political philosophy, policy-makers might need to defer to moral experts, if they are to use their advice at all, and he discusses how the main objections to moral deference may be met. However, Keith Dowding argues that there is neither any need nor reason for moral deference, and he argues, based on a consideration of real-world examples, that the moral authority that we actually grant to ethics commissions and other ‘morally authorative agencies’ have other sources than any supposed ‘content authority’. Lars Christie discusses how moral deference presupposes that one has managed to identify which moral experts one should listen to, something which is difficult given the widespread disagreements among even very qualified moral philosophers. He therefore argues that instead of looking for experts who are likely to be right, we should rather look for people with ‘moral deliberation expertise’, who will contribute to the quality of politicians’ moral deliberation. Hegstad too discusses how the role of moral expertise in the context of public policy and collective problem-solving is not necessarily just to give a concrete recommendation, but to enhance the public debate by providing an overview of different policy options and arguments for them or by identifying what follows from the values held in society. Gundersen makes a similar point when it comes to the role of scientists’ recommendations and Lever also stresses the ‘variety of different purposes’ to which citizen assemblies are put. These arguments suggest that a too one-eyed focus on advice and moral deference might miss how moral expertise actually functions in policy debates (see also Dowding on this point.)

The Variety of Roles for Philosophers and Moral Expertise

As the previous discussion indicates, one lesson from the articles in this special issue is that there are a number of different roles that moral and political philosophers may play in the policy process, and more generally, that moral expertise is a complex and varied phenomenon. The legitimacy of drawing on moral expertise in the process of policy development will depend on how moral expertise is understood, what role it is supposed to play, and also on the broader ecology (by analogy with the ‘ecological view’ of legitimacy developed in Buchanan 2013) of the actors and societal institutions involved in the policy process. Attention to empirical studies of how philosophers (and other moral experts) actually operate as experts in contemporary governance, which is found in several of the articles in this issue, is valuable in illuminating this complexity. While we hope and believe that the articles in this special issue constitute an important step forward in understanding the role of philosophers in public policy, the variety of their roles and of the ways in which moral expertise is used indicates that there is still much more to be said on this topic.