Midlevel Principles as Public Reason for Democratic Decisions on Implementation of Novel BiotechnologyKlemens Kappel
3 December 2020
Klemens Kappel (University of Copenhagen), 17:15 - 18:45, presents his project in the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar of the GRK "Collective Decision-Making”.
This seminar will take place as a Zoom meeting. Please send (if you haven’t already) an email to cdm.wiso@uni-hamburg.de if you want to register for the seminar. We invite everyone interested to attend!
Abstract
Novel biotechnologies offer great opportunities but decisions on whether and how to implement them in society involve complicated ethical dimensions, and are often surrounded by controversy, both in the bio-ethical community and among citizens. An important task for academic moral and political philosophy is to provide suggestions for how to appropriately resolve and tackle such controversies. This paper aims to present a suggestion that combines well-known ideas from bioethics and political philosophy. The proposal is what we call a midlevel principle public reason framework for public decision-making on bio-technology (MPPR). We argue that MPPR is attractive for several reasons, including reasons similar to Rawls’s justification of his public reason framework.