eprintid: 10174351
rev_number: 7
eprint_status: archive
userid: 699
dir: disk0/10/17/43/51
datestamp: 2023-08-01 07:33:01
lastmod: 2023-08-01 07:33:01
status_changed: 2023-08-01 07:33:01
type: article
metadata_visibility: show
sword_depositor: 699
creators_name: Wilson, James
creators_name: Hume, Jack
creators_name: O'Donovan, Cian
creators_name: Smallman, Melanie
title: Providing ethics advice in a pandemic, in theory and in practice: A taxonomy of ethics advice
ispublished: inpress
divisions: UCL
divisions: B04
divisions: B03
divisions: C06
divisions: C01
divisions: F58
divisions: F16
note: © 2023 The Authors. Bioethics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
abstract: The pandemic significantly raised the stakes for the translation of bioethics insights into policy. The novelty, range and sheer quantity of the ethical problems that needed to be addressed urgently within public policy were unprecedented and required high-bandwidth two-way transfer of insights between academic bioethics and policy. Countries such as the United Kingdom, which do not have a National Ethics Committee, faced particular challenges in how to facilitate this. This paper takes as a case study the brief career of the Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) for the NHS Covid-19 App, which shows both the difficulty and the political complexity of policy-relevant bioethics in a pandemic and how this was exacerbated by the transience and informality of the structures through which ethics advice was delivered. It analyses how and why, after EAB's demise, the Westminster government increasingly sought to either take its ethics advice in private or to evade ethical scrutiny of its policies altogether. In reflecting on EAB, and these later ethics advice contexts, the article provides a novel framework for analysing ethics advice within democracies, defining four idealised stances: the pure ethicist, the advocate, the ethics arbiter and the critical friend.
date: 2023-07-28
date_type: published
publisher: Wiley
official_url: https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13208
oa_status: green
full_text_type: pub
language: eng
primo: open
primo_central: open_green
verified: verified_manual
elements_id: 2041322
doi: 10.1111/bioe.13208
lyricists_name: O'Donovan, Cian
lyricists_name: Wilson, James
lyricists_id: CODON27
lyricists_id: JGSWI10
actors_name: O'Donovan, Cian
actors_id: CODON27
actors_role: owner
full_text_status: public
publication: Bioethics
issn: 0269-9702
citation:        Wilson, James;    Hume, Jack;    O'Donovan, Cian;    Smallman, Melanie;      (2023)    Providing ethics advice in a pandemic, in theory and in practice: A taxonomy of ethics advice.                   Bioethics        10.1111/bioe.13208 <https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13208>.    (In press).    Green open access   
 
document_url: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10174351/1/Wilson%20et%20al_Providing%20ethics%20advice%20in%20a%20pandemic%2C%20in%20theory%20and%20in%20practice.pdf