Provide expertise or facilitate ethical reflection? A comment on the debate between Cowley and Crosthwaite

Do Ethical Guidelines Give Guidance? A Critical Examination of Eight Ethics Regulations

“…There simply are no quick fixes in the world of ethical decisionmaking. 25 Ethical competence is needed to deal with the problems as they arise. Our upbringing has supplied us with such competence to some degree, but it can be sustained and developed by ethics education and ongoing development of the relevant skills and sensitivities.…”

Rethinking Moral Expertise

“…As a result, it cannot be claimed that philosophers are moral experts if they cannot claim to be better than ordinary people in exercising judgements about morality. Very similar considerations have also led others to reject or hedge the concept of moral expertise [10]. For example, Cowley argues that in respect of non-abstract moral quandaries like euthanasia, even if moral philosophers have greater familiarity with philosophical theory, they are no better situated than educated laypersons to determine what to do.…”

“…They, 'like everyone else' are invoking 'second order intuitions to stipulate that one consideration outweighs the other' [6]. Few, it is to be expected, would accept the concept where the effect is to suggest that moral philosophers have 'privileged knowledge on what is morally right' [10]. Yet even the exceptional few who do argue for moral expertise, notably Singer [17] and Gesang [12], neither venture so far as to say that moral philosophers possess 'command knowledge' in the sense of telling people what they must do.…”

“…An example of the former is the ability to speak a natural language which is a tacit knowledge laden activity. 10 Everyone, or almost everyone, in the United Kingdom can learn to speak English fluently by just living in the country and interacting with other English language speakers on a regular basis. Thus, the ability to speak English in the UK is ubiquitous but since it is a tacit knowledge laden activity, it is also recognised as a domain of expertise by Collins and Evans' theory of expertises.…”

“…It has to be pointed out that not all people who are able to do something expertly are able to talk about it in a way that reflects their expertness; to be able express oneself adequately requires 'interactive ability' [4]. 10 If it was not than we should already be surrounded by robots that speak natural languages fluently or we should have translating devices (such as Google translate) that actually work perfectly. 11 Note that speaking English fluently is considered to be a specialist skill in non-English speaking countries such as Spain or Italy.…”