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Epistemethics: Virtue and judgment in medicine, law, and politics| old_uid | 7220 |
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| title | Epistemethics: Virtue and judgment in medicine, law, and politics |
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| start_date | 2009/06/19 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle des actes |
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| summary | The good can be a guide to the true: here is this essay’s central claim. I develop it by drawing on the literature of medical decision-making. Medical decisions can provide a model for bringing ethical judgments to the aid of epistemic ones to mitigate a familiar dilemma of modern democratic self-governance.
The dilemma is that many of our most important decisions, both personal and political, rest on technical and esoteric theories understood by only a few. But the values of democratic equality and individual autonomy require that such decisions be made by lay citizens. This quandary arises with greatest personal immediacy in the medical context, where patients must choose among competing specialists’ opinions. It arises too in legal settings, in the efforts of juries to decide among conflicting expert witnesses, and in politics, when voters struggle to decide which candidates advocate better policies in technical areas such as financial reform, energy policy or regional stability.
Such situations might seem to imply a stark choice between accuracy and equality. But here I propose an approach to reconciling expertise with democratic choice, an approach that restores a lost measure of epistemic agency to lay decision-makers. This approach rests upon a recognition that our ethical virtues have an epistemic aspect, and so our common culture of ethical virtues, involving a capacity to recognize these virtues in others, provides a basis for discerning accuracy in experts. In medical decision-making, patients who display attentive and cooperative virtues while their doctors exhibit sympathetic and communicative virtues arrive at a more accurate understanding of their condition. By designing our adjudicative and political institutions to elicit similar displays of virtues, we can render those institutions better at discerning truth. Thus, I propose a number of reforms, ranging from establishing direct questioning of witnesses, to observation of inter-expert dialogue, to moderated jury deliberations. In politics, reforms include increasing the prospects for media interventions that can disrupt staged appearances and so reveal character. |
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| oncancel | Lieu inhabituel |
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| responsibles | Origgi |
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