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The Moral Status of the Expert in Contemporary Society
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15325 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1989 |
8,799 Words |
| Author
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John P. Hittinger
John P. Hittinger is associate professor and chairman of the
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the College
of St. France in Joliet, Illinois. He has written articles on
political philosophy for This World and Social Justice Review
and has contributed a chapter to Jacques Maritain: The Man and
His Metaphysics, recently published by Notre Dame Press. |
If there is any single type of character in contemporary society who regularly receives adulation and respect, it is the "expert." Former Sen. Jacob Javits once said to a conference of experts: "You guys have a duty, a solemn obligation, to give us the answers." And indeed we invariably turn to the experts for answers to the pressing questions of life. The basis of their authority is the claim to specialized knowledge and a corresponding mastery of techniques that can produce some desired effects.
An attempt to simply catalog and classify the types of experts functioning in our society today would be a huge undertaking. More than 50 percent of college and university faculty make themselves available for special consultation and expert testimony in one form or another. The media has created a demand for expert commentary--there is even a Directory of Experts written explicitly for them. There also exists a voracious demand for self-help books written by experts.
The proliferation of experts and the areas to which they lay claim has raised some concerns about the moral status of experts in our society. Are all who claim to be experts really so? Acting under the guise of science and expertise, are some really furthering an ethical or political aim? We shall attempt to delimit the role of the expert and to explain the cultural dynamic by which the expert so easily goes beyond the parameters of that role. We shall restrict ourselves to examining there phenomena: first, the use of expert witnesses in courts of law; second, the emergence of the therapeutic expert, especially in the field of sexual behavior; and third, the influence of experts and movie stars in the realm of politics.
The Expert Witness
The use of expert witnesses in court has grown tremendously in the past decade. An expert witness must be able to state opinions with "reasonable certainty" and help the judge or jury reach a more valid conclusion than would be possible without the expert's testimony. Or in other words, an expert witness is a person, who by virtue of experience and training, has greater knowledge than the general populace in a particular field. Most typically, expert witnesses are drawn from the fields of medicine or engineering and testify in malpractice or product-liability cases. Given the highly technical nature of these cases, this is to be expected. But experts from other fields are now being asked to testify also. Economists, psychologists, historians, and sociologists are testifying in any number of
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