Why Democracies Need Science

Harry Collins, Robert Evans

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509509645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

We live in times of increasing public distrust of the main institutions of modern society. Experts, including scientists, are suspected of working to hidden agendas or serving vested interests. The solution is usually seen as more public scrutiny and more control by democratic institutions – experts must be subservient to social and political life. In this book, Harry Collins and Robert Evans take a radically different view. They argue that, rather than democracies needing to be protected from science, democratic societies need to learn how to value science in this new age of uncertainty. By emphasizing that science is a moral enterprise, guided by values that should matter to all, they show how science can support democracy without destroying it and propose a new institution – The Owls – that can mediate between science and society and improve technological decision-making for the benefit of all.

Part I
Introduction

1
Science as a Moral Choice

What kind of society do we want to live in? There is plenty wrong with Western societies: huge and growing inequalities; unstable and corrupt financial systems; political systems whose logic places national self-regard above the terrible suffering of distant nations; and politicians for purchase. Worse, in Western societies we are no longer confident about our basic values. The realization that a sense of moral superiority was often a thin disguise for the exploitation of colonized peoples, and now the fear that exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources is risking our collective future, are causing us to question what we have traditionally thought of as progress. Maybe the exploited peoples had it right and a calm life in tune with nature, however short, and however bereft of technological goods, is better than the endless quest for more, for further, for faster.

This book deals with questions one level down from these concerns, taking it that the difference in quality between our lives and those of our distant ancestors does represent progress. There has been material progress, such as freedom from high rates of maternal and infant mortality and relief from the struggle to eat and stay warm, and, to a less marked extent, there has been moral progress, with the weak no longer living in continual fear of the strong. The problem that we address here is the potential or actual erosion of our style of life which is coextensive with the erosion of certain once-cherished values. We address one part of this problem: the role of science in society.

In earlier works – discussed later under the heading ‘Three Waves of Science Studies’ – we argued that, in spite of the huge enrichment of our critical understanding of the nature of science that has taken place since the 1970s, it is still important and intellectually possible to value expertise. Big arguments can be based on shallow foundations and we base our ideas about expertise on the commonsense view that it is better to give more weight to the opinions of those who, literally, know what they are talking about. But there are all kinds of experts who know what they are talking about: astrologers and astronomers; chemists and alchemists; tealeaf readers and econometricians. In our earlier arguments, there is only a brief justification of scientific expertise as opposed to other kinds of expertise. Here we complete another step in the Third Wave project by justifying scientific expertise in particular while making it as hard for ourselves as possible by accepting pretty well everything from the social constructionist critique of science that has emerged since the 1960s – The Second Wave. These days, academic discussions of science and technology grow ever more polarized, but the view here fits neither pole; it endorses the enriched understanding and critique of old models of science that came with the cognitive revolution of the 1970s but it also aims to preserve a special place for science in society.

The moral case for scientific values

We are interested in problems that can be understood in terms of the shared values and practices of social groups. As particular practices are repeated over time and become more widely shared, the values that they embody are reinforced and reproduced and we speak of them as becoming ‘institutionalized’. In some cases, this institutionalization has a formal face to it, with rules and protocols written down, and specialized roles created to ensure that procedures are followed correctly. The main institutions of state – parliament, courts, police and so on – along with certain of the professions, exhibit this formal character. Other social institutions, perhaps the majority, are not like this; science is an example. Although scientists are trained in the substantive content of their discipline, they are not formally instructed in ‘how to be a good scientist’. Instead, much like the young child learning how to play ‘nicely’, the apprentice scientist gains his or her understanding of the moral values inherent in the role by absorption from their colleagues – socialization.¹ We think that these values, along with the values that inform many of the professions, are under threat, just as the value of the professions themselves is under threat.

The attacks on science come from many sources. From the outside, science is beset by post-modernist analysis that sees no truth, only ‘accounts’; it is beset by environmentalist critiques that see science as an instrument of ecological disaster; and it is beset by political regimes that see value only in economic terms, or, in America, can make political capital by contrasting science unfavourably with religion. Even in our own subject – the social studies of science – one never hears an argument or a position defended on the grounds that it is ‘scientific’; the very idea would be dismissed as naïve since it is now believed there no longer is such a thing as science distinct from society. Science is also under attack from the inside. Scientists, thinking to defend their culture from politicians wishing to reduce taxes, rush to embrace the idea that they can deliver material and cultural goods to society – science is in there with capitalism forging new start-up companies, providing impactful outputs that increase productivity and efficiency, and entertaining the masses with astonishing revelations about the nature of the heavens. But you need a long spoon to sup with the devil. The danger is that soon science will be valued only for its material and entertainment value. The intention may be good but too many scientists are selling their profession in the wrong marketplace.

Professions, professionalism and moral leadership

A society is made up of institutions: transport systems, educational systems, healthcare services, providers of housing, food producers, police, lawyers, the military, sportspersons, entertainers, churches, political institutions, businesses and banks. The moral life of a society is, in part, an aggregate of the moral substance of these institutions. In institutions like religion, the moral role is explicit. But religion is also the most obvious example of how the moral leadership role of an institution can decline. In the UK, the established church – the Church of England – is still saying all the right things, but hardly anyone is listening. In the US the situation is different, with religious institutions still strong, but there are many competing ideas, very few of which are ready to confront the dominance of free-market capitalism. And it is probably free-market capitalism that has had the most corrosive influence on democratic life in the second half of the twentieth century, not least because it has subverted and undermined the notion of professionalism.

In some of the earliest work on the nature of professions (e.g., by Durkheim and later Parsons²), professions such as law and medicine are explicitly linked with the moral qualities expected of their practitioners and the stabilizing effect this had on society as a whole. In contrast, the contemporary idea of professionalism has a more managerial and ideological meaning in which ideas of autonomy and personal responsibility are used to retain some degree of market power but also, within organizations, to discipline workers by creating normative expectations of duty, responsibility and care. This marketization of the professions, in which professionalism ‘becomes more commercially aware, budget focused, managerial, entrepreneurial and so forth’ undermines the idea of professions as repositories of moral standards.³

In many spheres of work, these changes in work practices are clearly visible. Professionalism is widely trumpeted as a value for workers of all sorts, and new professional bodies spring up all the time to protect this new jurisdiction. Whilst, for many, the contemporary demands of professionalism are experienced as attempts by those in more senior positions to devolve responsibility to those lower down the organizational hierarchy, for those with genuine autonomy there is evidence that the old moral codes no longer apply. When one of the authors of this book was young, the banks could be held up as an object lesson in integrity. The success of ‘The City’ – London’s ‘square mile’ – was said to be based on the fact that everyone knew that a handshake could seal a deal that would never be broken. Collins’s mother told him about her friend, who worked in a bank, once spending the entire night searching for the mistake that had caused a discrepancy in the accounts amounting to a halfpenny. But Thatcher’s doctrines – ‘greed is good’, and ‘there is no such thing as society’ – backed up by Reagan’s free-market religion, led to Enron, to crash after crash, and a succession of corruption scandals such that, nowadays, in so far as the banks offer leadership, it is in unbridled self-interest.

In the UK it sometimes feels as if there are now hardly any institutions that the citizen can trust: politicians fiddle their expenses, celebrities turn out to be sex offenders, newspapers hack into the voicemails of private citizens to source stories, energy companies have tariff structures so complicated it is impossible for consumers to make good choices, sports administration is corrupt and performances aided by organized regimes of doping, food labelling is no longer accurate and so on, with a new revelation every week or so. Ironically, the time now required to check and re-check is, in economic terms, colossally inefficient, just as living in some regions of the developing world can be colossally inefficient because of the day-to-day corruption against which market theorists rail. The value of self-interest that the religion of the market promotes is nowadays driving our societies backwards just as once it drove them forward.

Notice, then, that the concern of this book is out of kilter with much contemporary social science: we are not attempting to solve problems of inequality or inter-generational justice. We agree these problems are serious but so much effort is already directed at them that we risk producing a sociological monoculture. In contrast, we are concerned with preserving the fragile tissue of democratic norms and values that is being eroded by the day-to-day violence, corruption and crude exercise of government-sponsored force in many nations around the world and by the growing corrosion of our own ‘Western’ societies, driven by an unconstrained free-market ideology. In contemporary science and technology studies, the predominant motif is to eliminate the division of powers between science and politics in order that science and technology can become socially responsible. In contrast, our motif is to safeguard the division of powers so that science and technology can act independently of society! Most social analysts think that democracy needs protecting against scientific and technological experts; we argue that scientific and technical experts have the potential to protect democracy!

The difference arises out of what you think about society: if you think our existing societies are benign, then it may be wise to make science and technology answer to them, but if you think our societies are becoming more corrupt and less benign, then you might want science and technology to retain their independence. The principle will be familiar to the academic readers of this book who insist that their own independence of thought be protected by university tenure or its equivalent. Indeed, it is quite striking that university academics are so strident in their justifications of tenure, while at the same time many demand that science answers to the demands of society. We base our argument around the norms of science and it is not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Elective Modernism
• Part III Academic Context
• Part IV Manifesto
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement