Society's Choices Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine (1995) / Chapter Skim
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Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science
Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science
Pages 388-408
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From page 388... ...
On the one hand, many contemporary areas of ethical choice implicate such technical knowledgeability that few but the possessors of relevant expertise can hope competently to address the issues involved, while, on the other, it is not now supposed that those who have expert knowledge are ethically privileged or more likely to make virtuous decisions than anybody else in our society. In dominant sensibilities, to know more than other people about human respiration is quite a different capacity than knowing when it is right to turn off the respirator.
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From page 389... ...
Specifically, I mean to describe a relationship between credibility and virtue by drawing attention to the importance of trust relations in the making of scientific knowledge. I suggest that while those trust relations continue to be vitally important in modern science it has become harder and harder to appreciate them.
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From page 390... ...
The homage paid to science is best evident in the very existence of a public stock of formal natural knowledge. All those who believe that the earth goes around the sun, that DNA is the genetic substance, that there are such things as electrons, and that light travels at 186,000 miles per second are, by so believing, doing scientists honor.
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From page 391... ...
I argue the importance of trust relations among scientists as a general matter, and I describe the historical development of a sensibility which makes it hard for those trust relationsand hence the role of virtue in the scientific community to be appreciated; (2) I describe the pre- and early modern culture which forged a publicly recognized link between the integrity of individuals, on the one hand, and their ability and willingness to speak the truth, on the other; (3)
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From page 392... ...
This too is a fully general maxim of assent. Specialized scientific expertise is no invention of the modern era: even in antiquity practitioners of the mathematical sciences astronomy, optics, and statics, as well as pure mathematics itself were understood to possess arduously acquired special knowledge and skills which set them apart from the common culture, with the consequence that only other specialists were in a position adequately to assess knowledge-claims in these domains.3 The view that there exists a special, universal, and efficacious "scientific method," though intermittently denied by eminent scientists as well as historians and sociologists of science, represents a particular form of the attribution of expertise, and we ought to have a better understanding of what the public believes about "method" in science and its potency.
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From page 393... ...
Yet all forms of collectively held natural knowledge, including the most valued bodies of modern scientific knowledge, are utterly trust-dependent. The seventeenth-century modern rhetoric which rejected trust and authority signaled skepticism about ancient authority and credulous acceptance of hearsay testimony.
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From page 394... ...
The new empirical and experimental practitioners of the seventeenth century relied massively upon trust in human testimony about the natural world, and, indeed, it is impossible that they could have produced any recognizable body of natural knowledge had they not done so. The "public" experiments so vigorously advocated by Royal Society publicists were rarely witnessed by more than a handful of practitioners, and more rarely still replicated by distant others.
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From page 395... ...
Scientists are sometimes skeptical of relevant claims, and they do sometimes aim to replicate claims or subject them to independent scrutiny, though the extent of such skeptical replication has undeniably been grossly exaggerated in popular portrayals of scientific practice. However, the ineradicable role of trust is as apparent in acts of .
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From page 396... ...
Indeed, contemporary culture possessed rich resources for identifying the limitations and inadequacies of common sense, the unreliability of uninstructed observation, and the liability of "the vulgar" towards delusion and credulity. The same "modern" tendency which insisted upon direct observation as a bulwark against trust in ancient authority also cautioned that not everyone was capable of reliable observation and that experience always needed to be instructed by educated reason.
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From page 397... ...
By the end of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century such writers as Francis Bacon were offering influential arguments for the special civic utility of scientific studies and their special suitability for gentle participation.~7 The founding of the Royal Society of London in 1660 is witness to the impact of those arguments, and the person of its most eminent member the Honourable Robert Boyle, son of the Earl of Cork—embodied the conjunction of scientific inquiry and gentlemanly virtue. The Society's first historian aptly described the early Royal Society as an organization predominantly made up of "Gentlemen, free, and unconfined." The culture surrounding the seventeenth-century gentleman offered a quite special appreciation of the bases of gentle truthfulness.
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From page 398... ...
In particular, the special reliability and objectivity of the scientist's testimony continued strongly to be associated with the special virtues of the scientist's personality. What was said of Boyle and Newton in the late seventeenth century continued to be applied to heroic scientific truth-seekers.
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From page 399... ...
talents are naturally associated with virtue, have always dwelt with pleasure upon the views given of Newton by his contemporaries; for they have uniformly represented him as candid and humble, mild and good."2~ In eighteenth-century England the chemist Joseph Priestley wrote that "A Philosopher ought to be something greater, and better than another man." If the scientist was not already virtuous, then the "contemplation of the works of God should give a sublimity to his virtue, should expand his benevolence, extinguish everything mean, base, and selfish in this] nature," and such sentiments were standard in the British natural theological tradition well into the nineteenth-century.22 Dorinda Outram's splendid biography of the early-nineteenth-century anatomist Georges Cuvier shows how the French public was given to understand the causal relationship between special scientific gifts and special personal virtues, and how objectivity was seen to flow from personal authenticity.23 And Charles Paul describes how the eloges delivered to the eighteenth-century Paris Academy of Sciences repeatedly pointed to the special personal virtues of great scientists: simplicity, righteousness, modesty, candor, frankness, and sincerity.24 Great nineteenth-century scientists were widely advertised as moral heroes.
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From page 400... ...
Disinterested and objective knowledge was produced by interested and, occasionally, irrationally acting individuals: "A passion for knowledge, idle curiosity, altruistic concern with the benefit to humanity, and a host of other special motives have been attributed to the scientist. The quest for distinctive motives appears to have been misdirected." There is no satisfactory evidence that scientists are "recruited from the ranks of those who exhibit an unusual degree of moral integrity" or that the objectivity of scientific knowledge proceeds from "the personal qualities of scientists." Rather, what underpins scientific truthfulness was said to be an elaborated system of institutional norms, whose "internalization" guarantees that transgressions will generate psychic pain and whose implementation by the community guarantees that transgressors will be found out and punished.29 Of course, such arguments against the so-called "motivational level of analysis" served important disciplinary purposes: they demarcated sociology from psychology and showed the legitimacy of social-structural answers to questions about scientific objectivity.
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From page 401... ...
Vigilance can do serious damage to science for the reason that trust relations among scientists are constitutive of the making, maintenance, and extension of scientific knowledge, that is, to the capacity of the scientific community to produce consensual knowledge upon which others may rely. Only when that trust dependency is ignored or seen solely as a problem for science do vigilance models possess
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From page 402... ...
In this respect, they endorse the seventeenth-century "modern" rhetoric of epistemic individualism. Yet, as I have sought to show, individualistic rhetoric, however important as a cultural evaluation of how proper knowledge ought to be secured, fails to represent the realities of scientific practice.
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From page 403... ...
If what I have had to say about the fundamental role of trust in science is broadly correct, then some aspects of the modern sensibility that separates virtue and credibility can be usefully reassessed. In that sensibility, what is agreed upon among scientists as "the facts of the matter" is widely considered an unproblematic element in any potential discussions over "what then ought to be done" as a morally relevant decision.
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From page 404... ...
Scientific knowledge will be seen as reliable insofar as scientists are subject to internal and external vigilance and, in that sense, the relevant invigilated experts will inevitably take part in ethical decisions involving specialized knowledge. Yet, if scientists are seen as no more honest and selfless than anyone else, then it follows that they will not be accorded any more moral authority than anyone else.
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From page 405... ...
Kuhn. "Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science," in idem, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977)
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From page 406... ...
6. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ed.
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From page 407... ...
4. I draw attention here to the special significance of gentlemanly codes for early modern English science.
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From page 408... ...
33. For reflective study of the public credibility of science and its bases, see, e.g., Brian Wynne, "Public Understanding of Science Research: New Horizons or Hall of Mirrors?
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