As the financial crisis for the Euro deepens, the moral and ethical implications are immense. Should hardworking Germans be paying for the idiotic economic policies of Greece and other Mediterranean economies? Should todays governments be mortgaging the unborn children of the future to pay for welfarists? Should Central Banks be debasing their currencies with Quantative Easing and making the people of Europe who sensibly saved money, poorer? The legions of financiers who advise the European Commission may have their own answers, but when the Commission wants more ethical and philosophical answers, usually to scientific questions, it can turn to a group of advisors known as the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies, or EGE, to help it.
Obviously this group does not focus on economics, but instead on providing specialist information on the challenges being brought by advances in Science – such issues as Stem-Cell testing, animal cloning, nanotechnology and genetic modification. Lisbon commits the EU to promoting the advance of science and technology in Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union, and in Articles 6 and 9 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, states that it (the EU) will protect and preserve human health, but apart from these references, the EU’s commitment to medical ethics is not exactly clearly spelt out in the treaties.
The EGE group has been in existence for 10 years already, and has been established with a further 5 year mandate from 2011 to 2016, and is appointed by the Commission President. The President of the Commission is responsible for assigning the EGE its work programme each year, and the oversight for this, and day-to-day running and planning, is organised by the Bureau of European Policy Advisers.
The current composition of the Group consists of, almost exclusively, Western European people. Only one Professor from Poland represents Eastern Europe – Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic are all not represented. By expertise, the group consists of 4 Theologians, 5 lawyers or legal experts, and the rest being professors of health, ethics, medicine and genetics. The maximum number of experts in the group can be fifteen.
The EGE is legally paid for by European taxpayers. The costs produced by the group are assigned to Commission expenses, and as such, we pay for this group. And do the taxpayers get value for money? Legally, the members of the group are required to attend a minimum of 4 meetings a year, hardly demanding, and the EGE has the power to set up working and research groups, which would surely simply do the roles of the myriads of civil society groups and professional organisations that already do this work.
Anyone wanting expert moral and ethical advice can turn to such organisations as the British Medical Association, The Institute of Medical Ethics, the General Medical Council, The Ethox Centre at Oxford University, the established churches who have expert commissions themselves, or private charities, such as CARE (Christian Action Research and Education). All of these organisations, and hundreds more, can and do provide expert advice for free, costing the taxpayer nothing. And in the Lisbon Treaty, the EU does commit itself to consulting with such groups, removing the need for its own ‘in-house’ department (Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, Article 17.3).
As such, why the Commission sees a need for a group to advise it on ethics, when most probably every country in the EU has similar civil-society groups capable of providing this information at zero cost to Europe’s taxpayers, is a mystery. It is surely yet another example of the statist thinking at the heart of the EU project, demanding more and more power and departments to feed off taxpayers money, and the self-obsession and insecurity that grips the EU institutions, as they grapple for power and attempt to make themselves feel important, to feel that they matter.
Perhaps the moral-theologians inside the group can take some time off from biology and read some of Friedrich Hayek’s philosophical works, and then feed some of his conclusions to the Commission. We can but dream.
