Why Ethics Commissions? Four Normative Models

Abstract

Ethics commissions are government advisory commissions mandated to give expert advice on contentious moral issues. As this requires making explicit value judg- ments, members with expert knowledge of ethics have a natural place as members of such commissions. Apart from these commissions being widespread, their rec- ommendations assume a special normative authority within the legislative process. This raises many fundamental questions concerning the nature of moral expertise and how such commissions should deal with the political contexts in which they operate. Through a reading of the relevant discussions in the literature in which the underlying normative ideals are located, this article reconstructs four normative models of the proper role of ethics commissions. This reconstruction seeks to con- tribute to analytical clarity and to elucidate the underlying disagreements concern- ing our expectations of ethics commissions. The four models, labeled ‘commission consensus model’, ‘society-proxy model’, ‘correctness model’, and ‘deep pluralism model’, differ from one another in terms of two main dimensions: the expertise and the public/political dimensions. After describing the models, giving examples from the literature on how they can be explicated, and describing an empirical example of a commission that has approximated the ideals, the strengths and weaknesses of the four models are discussed before the article concludes by asking whether there is one correct model of ethics commissions.