Anne Schwenkenbecher

It's easy to say that people who hold extreme antisocial beliefs should be held responsible for those beliefs. But in fact, many extremists operate within what philosophers call impoverished epistemic environments - epistemic "bubbles" and echo chambers whose inhabitants might be ignorant of the truth, or subject to manipulation. But does that mean responsibility for extreme beliefs therefore lies with the wider public? And if so, what are we to do about it?

Determining appropriate mechanisms for transferring and translating research into policy has become a major concern for researchers (knowledge producers) and policymakers (knowledge users) worldwide. This has led to the emergence of a new function of brokering between researchers and policymakers, and a new type of agent called Knowledge Broker. Understanding these complex multi-agent interactions is critical for an efficient knowledge brokering practice during any given policymaking process. Here, we present (1) the current diversity of knowledge broker groups working in the field of biosecurity and environmental management; (2) the incentives linking the different agents involved in the process (knowledge producers, knowledge brokers and knowledge users); and (3) the gaps, needs and challenges to better understand this social ecosystem. We also propose alternatives aimed at improving transparency and efficiency, including future scenarios where the role of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies may become predominant in knowledge-brokering activities.

Evidence-based policy (EBP) has become widely embraced for its commitment to greater uptake of scientific knowledge in policymaking. But what legitimizes EBP and in what respect are evidence-based policymaking practices better than other policymaking practices? In this article, we distinguish and refine three potential legitimizers of EBP. We suggest that evidence-based policymaking practices are better because they “follow the science,” because they focus on “what works,” or because they “follow the rules.” We discuss some consequences, for advocates of EBP, of consciously adopting one or other of these legitimizers. Finally, we examine whether it is appropriate to switch from advocating for EBP to advocating for evidence-informed policy.

Background
Evidence-based policymaking is a paradigm aimed at increasing the use of evidence by actors involved in policymaking processes. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a heavy reliance on emerging evidence for policymaking during emergencies.

Objective
This study describes the focus and types of evidence in journal articles self-described as relevant to policymaking using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, identifying gaps in evidence and highlighting author stated perceived biases specifically in evidence-based policy making.

Design
Evidence mapping.

Data sources
We systematically searched SCOPUS, PubMed and LexisNexis for literature identifying policy-relevant evidence available on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eligibility criteria
The study included only peer-reviewed literature identified as ‘article’, ‘book chapter’, ‘review’ covering the period from January 2020 to December 2022. Inclusion criteria required that articles have an abstract, authorship attribution and are written in English.

Data extraction and synthesis
A minimum of two authors independently extracted and coded for every level and final outputs were compared for consistency.

Results
A total of 213 articles met the inclusion criteria and were reviewed in this study. Lead authorship affiliations were from 50 countries with 70% of the outputs from developed economies including USA (20.2%), UK (18.3%) and Australia (7.5%). The most common purpose of the articles was the presentation of research findings the authors considered of relevance to policy (60.1%), followed by work that examined the impact of policy (28.6%) or highlighted or supported a policy need (22.5%), while some papers had multiple stated purposes. The most common challenges in policymaking identified by the authors of the reviewed papers were process failures and poor evidence utilisation during policymaking.

Conclusions
The evidence map identified the need for an interdisciplinary policy approach involving relevant stakeholders and driven by quality research as a progressive step towards prevention of future public health crises/pandemics.

There seems to be a striking parallel between the features of psychopaths and those of agential groups, including states and corporations. Psychopaths are often thought to lack some of the capacities that are constitutive of moral agency. Two features of psychopaths are commonly identified as grounds for limiting their moral responsibility: (i) their lack of relevant emotional capacities and (ii) their flawed rational capacities. Roughly, the first argument is that the lack of moral emotions such as sympathy, guilt, or shame negatively impacts moral perception and therewith an agent's capacity for moral reasoning. The second argument is that psychopaths are diminished in their agency as such, not just in their moral agency; they are erratic and impulsive and show other significant failures of rationality. Using the 2020 Juukan Gorge disaster in Western Australia as a case study, I conclude that deliberate or reckless corporate irrationality cannot be grounds for diminished corporate moral responsibility. Corporate agents are chiefly responsible for core aspects of their moral agency, including their internal epistemic structures and decision‐making processes. They have obligations to establish or maintain internal epistemic integrity and consistency.

Many philosophers accept the idea that there are duties to promote or create just institutions. However, are the addressees of such duties supposed to be individuals—the members of the citizenry? What does it mean for an individual to promote or create just institutions? According to the “Simple View,” the citizenry has a collective duty to create or promote just institutions, and each individual citizen has an individual duty to do their part in this collective project. The simple view appears to work well with regard to—you guessed it—“simple” scenarios, but it is riddled with further questions and problems. In this chapter, we raise five problems for the Simple View: (a) we suggest that one cannot develop a view concerning the citizenry’s duty to promote just institutions in isolation from a conception of the ontological relationship between the state and its citizens; (b) we argue that it is not obvious that the citizenry is the right entity to be attributed duties in the first place; (c) we show that a plausible account of collective duties to promote just institutions must not remain silent on the complexities and difficulties amorphous, unorganized groups face vis-à-vis collective action; (d) we contend that without allocation principles for contributory duties amongst the citizenry, or—alternatively—a method for practical deliberation that is action-guiding in collective action contexts, the claim that the citizens have a collective duty to promote just institutions remains moot; and, finally (e) we demonstrate that the problem of reasonable disagreement is a serious threat to a collective duty to promote or create just institutions—it potentially undermines such a duty altogether and allows for conflicting contributory duties amongst the citizenry. We hope that our discussion will ultimately help improve existing theories and conceptual frameworks to better understanding citizens’ obligations to promote justice under non-ideal conditions.

We-reasoning as Moral Deliberation Moral agents facing collective-action problems regularly encounter a conundrum: together, we can effect change whereas, individually, we are inefficacious. Further, what appears individually rational can be collectively suboptimal. An individual agent may employ different types of reasoning in deciding how to act vis-à-vis such problems. Reasoning in the I-mode, she takes her individual agency and efficacy in the world as the starting point: What is the best thing she can do given the circumstance and given what others do? It is act-based, best-response reasoning. The preferences of agents deliberating in the I-mode may well be other-regarding: e.g. they may aim at furthering the group's interest or collective good. We-mode reasoning, or ʻwe-reasoningʼ, in contrast, is pattern-based: we infer our course of action from what is collectively best by way of acting as part of the group rather than for the sake of the group. I-mode reasoning with pro-group preferences (pro-group I-mode reasoning) and we-reasoning will often generate the same result, in particular in so-called strict joint necessity cases – where each agent's contribution is necessary for realizing a specific collectively available option. I-mode reasoning will regularly generate socially suboptimal results in so-called wide joint necessity cases – such as voting or carbon footprint reductions. Moral deliberating agents use both kinds of reasoning and contextual factors seem to function as important triggers. But can we-reasoning help us determine our moral obligations vis-à-vis collective action problems?

When evidence-based policymaking is so often mired in disagreement and controversy, how can we know if the process is meeting its stated goals? We develop a novel mathematical model to study disagreements about adequate knowledge utilization, like those regarding wild horse culling, shark drumlines and facemask policies during pandemics. We find that, when stakeholders disagree, it is frequently impossible to tell whether any party is at fault. We demonstrate the need for a distinctive kind of transparency in evidence-based policymaking, which we call transparency of reasoning. Such transparency is critical to the success of the evidence-based policy movement, as without it, we will be unable to tell whether in any instance a policy was in fact based on evidence.

In order to make sense of collective doxastic reasons we need an account of group belief. Once we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of group belief it turns out that for some group beliefs we need not invoke collective epistemic reasons. However, we do need them for better understanding how and why different social identity groups will hold beliefs whose evidence-base is irreducibly social and tied to them being that kind of group. This short article is a commentary on Veli Mitova's 2022 article "The collective epistemic reasons of social-identity groups".

‘Wicked problems’ are tricky to solve because of their many interconnected components and a lack of any single optimal solution (1,2). At the science–policy interface, all problems can look wicked: research exposes the complexity that is relevant to designing, executing and implementing policy fit for ambitious human needs (3,4). Expertise in philosophical research can help to navigate that complexity (5)...