Values in Science, Public Reason, and the Shifting Boundaries of the Political Forum

Abstract

Speaker: Gabriele Badano, University of York Chair: Jonathan Seglow, Royal Holloway University There is a ‘near consensus’ emerging in philosophy of science that value judgements are ineliminable from all levels of scientific work, including the very core of scientific inquiry (Lusk, 2021, p. 102; Schroeder, 2021, p. 546). Which values should then be employed by scientists? This paper aims to develop a novel answer to this question, labelled ‘the public reason view’, and defend it against the currently dominant family of responses, focused instead on citizens’ values. To place this answer on firm ground, however, I first need to bring together the near consensus mentioned above and recent discussions about the role of science within Rawlsian public reason liberalism (Badano and Bonotti, 2020; Bellolio, 2018; Bellolio, 2019; Dahlquist and Kugelberg, 2023; Kappel, 2021; Reid, 2019). In the background of these discussions is a distinctly one-dimensional picture of the proper functioning of scientific inquiry, which is described across the board as trading in factual knowledge, without any mention of values. However, the phenomenon of inductive risk, i.e., the unavoidable chance that some of the many decisions contributing to one’s scientific theory might be wrong, implies that the job of scientists necessarily involves value judgements. I argue that once we acknowledge this fact, at least scientific advisors to policymakers cannot be considered part of what Rawlsian public reason liberals call ‘background culture’ of society any longer. They should finally be recognised as having a duty to follow public reason – a duty that is needed to create a barrier against any problematic values that scientific researchers might have entered into their research. Indeed, communicating the output of that research to government officials without employing public reason as a filter would risk what I call the ‘rule of non-public values’, threatening the legitimacy of any ensuing political decision. Next, I aim to specify how scientific advisors to policymakers should approach values judgements to satisfy public reason, arguing that they should work from within a conception of justice that is political, rests on reasonable foundations, adopts reasonable priority rules, and gives some weight to all relevant reasonable considerations. Drawing on examples of science controversies ranging from GM crops to empirical research into gender discrimination in STEM academic departments, I show that these requirements provide concrete guidance to scientific advisors. Also, I argue that scientific researchers at large are not morally bound by them but should instead communicate their value judgements by following specific norms of transparency that facilitate scientific advisors’ public reasoning. Finally, I contrast my public reason view with arguably the dominant family of responses to the ‘which values in science’ question, which posits that scientists should instead rely on values that are shared or at least common among actual citizens (Douglas, 2005; Elliott, 2017; Intemann, 2015; Lusk, 2021; Schroeder, 2021). Specifically, I aim to attack such family of approaches by demonstrating that they share several problematic features with the now marginal ‘external conception’ of public reason liberalism (Quong, 2011, ch. 5).