News - Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics - Faculty of Philosophy

[Important! Event date changed] 21th January 2021: Research seminar online - Matt Bennett (University of Essex): When experts meet policy: Recommendations and judging trustworthiness.

We have the pleasure to invite you for a research seminar in the ‘BIOUNCERTAINTY’ research project. The seminar will take place on Thursday, January 21th, at 5:30pm on MS Teams (link below).

Abstract: The pandemic has raised in acute form a number of questions about how non-expert citizens relate to the scientific experts thrust to the forefront of public health decision-making. One such question concerns what some refer to as the novice/expert problem, or at least one version of that problem: how can novices make good judgements about whom to trust about, say, the safety of vaccines, if those novices are ex hypothesi incapable of verifying the claims made by experts? In this paper I suggest a (modest) lesson about this problem that I think we can learn from the pandemic: our solution to this problem depends on whether the experts are offering factual testimony or making recommendations. When experts are not just consulted on the facts, but asked what we should do, the conditions for their trustworthiness change.

Matt Bennett works at the University of Essex as a Senior Research Officer on the Leverhulme funded project "Competition and Competitiveness". He is part of an interdisciplinary team investigating conceptual, historical, and normative questions about competition and competitive social relations, including market competition and agonistic practices. He is interested in post-Kantian European philosophy (especially Nietzsche), ethics and political philosophy (especially trust and responsibility) and bioethics and philosophy of healthcare (especially end-of-life and palliative care).

Join the meeting here

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