Is There Such a Thing as a Moral Expert?

There's a caricature of a philosopher as an ivory tower Don who cannot really boil an egg or deal with anything practical. Isn't it a bit dangerous putting these sorts of people into the public realm where life and death decisions are actually made not just theorised about? Well I think philosophy has enormously changed certainly since the immediate post-war time when I read philosophy and went on to teach it. And after that it became inevitable that philosophers and everybody else but philosophers in particular should begin to have views on political issues. We weren't like sailors falling into wells but we did actually think it wasn't part of our duties to think about real issues. But all that is radically changed and it changed a