Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 3, 2009 DOI number: 10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00452.x © Society for Applied Philosophy, 2009, Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. μBlackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK JAPP Journal of Applied Philosophy 0264-3758 0264-3758 © Society for Applied Philosophy, 2009 XXX Original Article Philosophy and Public Policy Allen Buchanan Philosophy and Public Policy: A Role for Social Moral Epistemology ALLEN BUCHANAN  Part 1 of this essay argues that one of the most important contributions of philosophers to sound public policy may be to combat the influence of bad Philosophy (which includes, but is not limited to, bad Philosophy produced by accredited academic philosophers). Part 2 argues that the conventional conception of Practical Ethics (CPE) that philosophers bring to issues of public policy is defective because it fails to take seriously the phenomenon of the subversion of morality, the role of false factual beliefs in this subversion, and the vulnerability to the exploitation of our moral powers that our social-epistemic dependency entails. Given the serious risks of the subversion of morality through the propagation of false factual beliefs, CPE’s near exclusive emphasis on identifying sound moral principles greatly constrains its potential contribution to the Negative Task of Practical Ethics, the endeavour to reduce the incidence of the most grievously wrong behaviour. Practical ethicists should focus more on the ethics of believing, and develop a more sophisticated conception of the moral and epistemic virtues of individuals and of institutions, one that includes protective meta-virtues, whose function it is to guard us against the more frequent and predictable subversions of morality, including those subversions that are facilitated by the processes of belief-formation that our social institutions and practices foster. 1. The National Commission Paradigm and its Limitations Philosophers — at least those who work in Practical Ethics — tend to take a positive view of the role they see Philosophy playing in contemporary public policy. With under- standable pride they point to the proliferation of national Bioethics commissions in a number of countries and the prominent presence of academic philosophers in them. There have always been some who question either the value of such public deliberative bodies or the contribution that philosophers make to them, or both. But recently, new doubts have been raised by the patently ideological composition of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, as well as by the not unrelated fact that the Council’s Reports fall far short of accepted minimal standards for philosophical moral reasoning. 1 Perhaps this is an especially propitious time for a serious examination of the role of Philosophy in public policy. Perhaps; but it would be a mistake to begin such an inquiry with the assumption that Philosophy has generally played a positive role in public policy and that the issue before us now is how to prevent grossly biased and philosophically weak national commissions from changing that. For one thing, there is no particular reason to think that the most important role for Philosophy is in national commissions or other government-sponsored public deliberative bodies. There are a number of less direct