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ABSTRACT
The idea for this special issue arose from years of multidisciplinary exchange on participation and communication in technology and medicine. Which epistemological, normative, and empirical questions do arise, when endeavors of public participation deal with rejection, skepticism, and critique? This question guides our multidisciplinary perspectives. The empirical examples and theoretical accounts point out that moral justification and social effects of deliberative techniques are as controversial as the question of how to deal with moral dissent. Comprised of five interdisciplinary accounts and followed by two comments, this collection offers a complex picture of deliberative processes. These accounts show that discourses at the intersection of academia, policy, and public institutions tend to render skeptical positions as irrational, personal, or uninformed attitudes, countering them with different techniques. These techniques, so our underlying hypothesis, can be clustered into three types: exclusion, engagement, and empathy. Consequently, the papers ask which prerequisites are needed to engage in deliberations about science and technology; they analyze what happens when engagement fails due to social exclusion or misrecognition; and they scrutinize the epistemic and moral functions of empathy in deliberative engagement. The two comments summarize these papers from a viewpoint of trust and epistemic injustice.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The German Ethics Council acts as an interface between the public, science, and politics. Its task is to discuss controversial issues and draw up recommendations for legislative, academic or societal action. The Council hosts frequent events, which are directed at the public including debates on organ donation. https://www.ethikrat.org/en/the-German-ethics-council/?cookieLevel=accept-all&cHash=1d3cc5092007e28668fb9d0e9026b707
2. The case presented in the following was conducted as part of the empirical research project ‘“I would prefer not to”. Organ donation between unease and criticism. A sociological and ethical analysis’, which was funded by the German Research Foundation under the grant number 252341816.
3. This point was also discussed in the literature during this time (see e.g., Machado Citation2019).
4. Shildrick (Citation2010), and others (see e.g., Schicktanz and Wöhlke Citation2017; Nair-Collins and Miller Citation2017) have shown that this phenomenon is all but a singular and purely subjective experience.
5. What he means, here, is a coercion of possible donors in the context of the opt-out solution.
6. The paper was initially accepted as a regular article in Social Epistemology, but later co-opted into the special issue due to the excellent thematic suitability.
7. Surely, being empathic will not end the ethical controversy about brain death. But this is not the focus here, as much ink has already been spent on this particular topic (Schlich and Wiesemann Citation2001; Truog and Robinson Citation2003; Veatch Citation2005; Singer Citation2018).
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Notes on contributors
Solveig Lena Hansen
Solveig Lena Hansen is a lecturer for ethics at the University of Bremen, Faculty 11 (Human and Health Sciences). Previously, she was a research associate at the University Medical Center Göttingen, where she is currently completing her habilitation. Her research topics include ethical aspects of health communication, obesity, organ transplantation, and fictional narratives.
Iris Hilbrich
Iris Hilbrich is a research associate at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Futures of Sustainability’ at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on biomedical research, sustainability, science and technology studies and participatory research methodologies.