In this issue of the Report, James L. Bernat proposes an innovative and sophisticated distinction to justify the introduction of permanent cessation as a valid substitute standard for irreversible cessation in death determination. He differentiates two approaches to conceptualizing and determining death: the biological concept and the prevailing medical practice standard. While irreversibility is required by the biological concept, the weaker criterion of permanence, he claims, has always sufficed in the accepted standard medical practice to declare death. Bernat argues that (...) the medical practice standard may be acceptable on the ground that proving circulatory or brain permanence is sufficient to assure complete accuracy for death diagnosis. -/- The topic requires public deliberation: processes to survey people's opinions and mechanisms to channel their opinions into policy-making. What is at stake is the nature of our society. Do we want an expertocracy, in which an enlightened few design policies for the greater good of the majority and exploit the lack of public knowledge to achieve compliance? (shrink)

Over recent years, science and technology have been reassessed increasingly in ethical terms. Particularly for life science governance, ethics has become the dominant discourse. In the course of this ‘‘ethical turn’’ national ethics councils were set up throughout Europe and in the United States to advice politics in ethically controversial issues such as stem cell research and genetic testing. Ethics experts have become subject to traditional warnings against expertocracy: they are suspected to unduly influence political decision-making. However, any reliable (...) ethics expertise has to reflect societal disagreements in moral issues. Therefore, expert dissent is a normal feature of legitimate ethics expertise. Based on theoretical considerations we argue that in principle, expert dissent does not cause problems for political legitimacy; rather, it enhances the salience of politics: obviously decisions on ethical issues cannot be taken on the basis of expert knowledge alone. We therefore conclude that expert dissent, not consent, supports politics. Focussing on Germany and Austria, we show how politics deal with expert dissent in practice. While in Germany politics acknowledge dissent and use it to foster a fundamental political debate, Austrian politics attribute authoritative power to ethics expertise and try to construct an overall consensus. This illustrates how the drawing of boundaries between politic and expertise differs. (shrink)

In my article, I want to focus on the critique Cristina Lafont makes to expertocracy and epistocracy, mainly through the institution of judicial review, to which she dedicates chapter 7 and part of...

Aristocracy of sex -- Industrial aristocracy -- Expertocracy -- Mass and elite politics -- Democratic religion.

SUMMARYThis paper examines the formal filters of the public's political will defended by JS Mill as consistent with the best form of representative government. Holding that institutions must adjust to democratic society, and that democratic society must be improved to achieve wise rule, Mill rejects secret ballots and electoral pledges, and advocates a constitutional council and graduated enfranchisement. He also recommends but does not require the indirect election of the President and a unicameral legislature. Mill's historically sensitive approach puts pressure (...) on interpreters to be sensitive to their own political and social context when applying Mill's ideas. In particular, obviously undemocratic measures such as plural voting should be adjusted to reflect Mill's view that the ratio between legitimacy and competence is constantly changing. The continual readjustment between the powers of masses and elites is the way that Mill's Considerations on Representative Government manage to avoid the now-traditional charge of expertocracy. (shrink)

Asserting, narrating, educating -- Maieutic and academic philosophy -- Life, subjectivity, assimilation -- The life of assertive beings, linguistic dissidence -- Ordinary language, theories, and explanations -- The ordinary and its truth -- Expertocracy and the education of individuals -- Freedom, necessity, creativity -- Reacting to the world -- Telling stories about assertions and arguments -- Concreteness and critique -- Arriving at the end of asserting -- Epilogue to the history of philosophy.

Political Theory is a broad field, comprising subjects as varied as conceptual analysis, positive political theory, political philosophy, and the history of normative political thought. The present edited volume includes contributions to all of these fields: Contested concepts such as extremism or freedom are discussed, issues such as expertocracy, dirty hands, global poverty and inequality are tackled from a normative perspective; empirical topics such as the conditions of democratic stability or the relationship between rational action and informational inequalities are (...) illuminated from a theoretical point of view, and “Eastern” critiques of “Western” political ideals are presented. (shrink)

The contrast between the normative functions of political parties in representative democracies and their empirical working is stark and rapidly increasing. This article starts from a sober, realist account of the empirical state of affairs and from structural problems of democracy and participations – in terms of limits of time, information, qualification and relevant expertise – that have to be acknowledged by any realist–utopian proposal of alternatives beyond the exclusive alternative of ‘thin, realist democracy’ or emphatic ‘strong, participatory, direct, or (...) mass democracy’. We can do better. My search for institutional alternatives looks not for the replacement of political parties but for their relief. Many, not all, of their normative tasks can be shared with other functional networks, associations and organizations. In exploring such a new division of political labour I draw on older debates and designs of associative democracy and on recent discussions to democratize expertise and to expertise democracy in order to address urgent societal problems of high-risk decisions under conditions of extreme complexity, contingency, unpredictability and uncertainty and deep contestedness of our knowledge, problems that turn out to be unmanagable by party politics and representative democracy. (shrink)

The general thesis of this paper is that the motives of the currently dominant global educational governance are rooted in a specific cultural milieu in the time of the Cold War, more precisely in the late 1950s, heading to a harmonious world. The more specific thesis is that a series of failures in the achievement of this harmonized globe led to reforms in educational governance, leading eventually to the development of instruments like large-scale assessments, such as PISA. The concluding thesis (...) of the paper is that precisely because the idea of global governance is rooted in a specific culture, its instruments run the risk of only affecting formal structures of education in other cultures rather the inner activities of the ‘educational fabric’. (shrink)

최근 우리에게 부각된 『크리톤』의 해석적 과제는 의인(화된) 법률연설의 위상과 의미인데, 권위와 복종의 문제에 대한 하트(V. Harte) 등의 문제제기에 제대로 답해야 한다. 바람직함이 당연시되는 민주주의 역시 숙고의 대상인데, 거기에 이용될 만한 자산인 플라톤은 친민주-반민주 이분법 도식 하에 민주주의 반대편에 정위되어 둘 사이의 만남은 아주 제한적으로만 논의되어 왔다. 이 글은 이런 해석적, 실천적 과제에 부응하면서 『크리톤』에서 드러나는 민주주의에 관한 플라톤 철학의 적극적 함축의 실마리들을 탐색하려 시도한다. 우선 작품 서두가 부각하는 은밀함을 화두 삼아 소크라테스가 선생이나 조언자가 아닌 시민으로 설정됨을 확인하고, 이런 설정이 『변명』에서 (...) 『크리톤』전반부, 그리고 후반부로 이어지는 일련의 ‘소크라테스의 하강’과 그것을 관통하는 ‘로고스에 대한 복종’을 부각하기 위한 것임을 밝힌다(2절). 이어 전반부 대화와 후반부 법률 연설을 시민 소크라테스가 참여하는 두 대화 모델, 즉 대칭적 관계에서의 설득 모델과 비대칭적 관계에서의 설득 모델이라는 측면에서 조명한다. 먼저 전문가주의적 신념을 가진 소크라테스가 다중의 의견을 존중하는 크리톤과 나누는 대화인 전자에서는 당대 민주주의 절차와 정신에 대한 의식적 반성과 반영이 이루어진다는 점을 음미한다(3절). 그리고 법률에 빙의한 자신과의 대화인 후자에서는 민주주의 하 시민이 권위에 대한 복종을 ‘권위주의적’이지 않은 방식으로 받아들이는 과정이 재현된다는 점에 주목하는데, 특히 법률 연설이 전반부 논의와 연속적이며 ‘하물며’ 논법과 ‘자기 설득’이라는 장치 등에 의해 전반부 논의에 긴밀히 통합된다는 점을 선명히 하면서 하트 등 웨이스(R. Weiss) 식 해석의 강한 지점을 공략한다(4절). 끝으로 소크라테스의 하강과 은밀함을 통해 이 작품이 결국 플라톤 정치철학의 시작점과 끝점에 위치한 『변명』과 『법률』을 연결시키는 접점으로 드러난다는 점을 부각한다(5절). (shrink)