Department of Philosophy, University College London, London, UK.
Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London, London, UK.
Bioethics. 2024 Mar;38(3):213-222. doi: 10.1111/bioe.13208. Epub 2023 Jul 28.
The pandemic significantly raised the stakes for the translation of bioethics insights into policy. The novelty, range and sheer quantity of the ethical problems that needed to be addressed urgently within public policy were unprecedented and required high-bandwidth two-way transfer of insights between academic bioethics and policy. Countries such as the United Kingdom, which do not have a National Ethics Committee, faced particular challenges in how to facilitate this. This paper takes as a case study the brief career of the Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) for the NHS Covid-19 App, which shows both the difficulty and the political complexity of policy-relevant bioethics in a pandemic and how this was exacerbated by the transience and informality of the structures through which ethics advice was delivered. It analyses how and why, after EAB's demise, the Westminster government increasingly sought to either take its ethics advice in private or to evade ethical scrutiny of its policies altogether. In reflecting on EAB, and these later ethics advice contexts, the article provides a novel framework for analysing ethics advice within democracies, defining four idealised stances: the pure ethicist, the advocate, the ethics arbiter and the critical friend.
这场大流行极大地提高了将生命伦理学见解转化为政策的重要性。需要在公共政策中紧急解决的伦理问题具有新颖性、广泛性和数量之多前所未有，这需要学术生命伦理学和政策之间进行高带宽的双向知识转移。像英国这样没有国家伦理委员会的国家，在如何促进这一点方面面临着特别的挑战。本文以 NHS Covid-19 应用程序伦理咨询委员会（EAB）的短暂职业生涯为例，该案例说明了大流行期间与政策相关的生命伦理学的困难和政治复杂性，以及伦理咨询的结构短暂性和非正式性如何加剧了这种情况。它分析了在 EAB 解散后，威斯敏斯特政府为何以及如何越来越倾向于私下接受其伦理建议，或者完全回避对其政策进行伦理审查。在反思 EAB 以及后来的这些伦理咨询背景时，本文提供了一个在民主国家内分析伦理咨询的新框架，定义了四种理想化的立场：纯粹的伦理学家、倡导者、伦理仲裁者和批判性朋友。
