Changes

The purpose of the engagement would be to formulate a clear policy regarding the use of the vaccine for pandemic influenza. The U.S. holds only a limited stock of the vaccine, so a decision had to be made regarding who to give the vaccine to in the event of a breakout. Bernier and the Health officials realized that this issue was not purely a professional, medical issue, but that there were ethical considerations that needed to be taken as well. They Citizens are the “repository of our core public values” and therefore are the best to decide on ethical and normative issues (Bernier & Wills-Toker, 2014). Therefore, the officials decided that (legitimate) ethical decisions must be made by the public.

The With the above goal in mind, the organizers carefully selected the participants using both “inclusion” and “exclusion”. They selected participants that would reflect and represent the spectrum of the citizenry, while purposefully choosing participants without a medical or professionally-related background to focus solely on society’s values as opposed to the empirical findings. In this way, the organizers attempted to engineer their participating public to express norms that reflected the kind of public the organizers wished to reach.