Science and Values

Values in Science: An Educational Perspective
by Douglas Allchin

1. The Fact/Value Distinction

2.  Values in Science

Epistemic Values

Clearly, science is a goal-directed activity, and any goal-directed activity may be said to value both the goal and the things that contribute to that goal.  Hence, science may be said to value:

•	Reliability
•	Testability
•	Precision
•	Accuracy
•	Repeatability
•	Conceptual Simplicity

These are all what we would call “epistemic” values rather than moral values. That is, they are the values that tend to produce knowledge.

Scientists also value objectivity, and while it’s popular to dismiss the claim that science is objective on the basis that every person or corporate body comes from a particular perspective, there is obviously a strong sense in which scientific inquiry does require objectivity.  Specifically, as Allchin notes, it requires the use of purely apersonal criteria for evaluating its efforts.  Specifically: 
“Race, nationality, religion, class or other social attributes of the researcher should not matter to the validity of the conclusions.”

Some other aspects of the value of objectivity (formulated by Robert Merton) are:

•	organized skepticism
•	disinteretedness
•	openness or transparency

Moral Values

There is a moral dimension to the epistemic values of science in the sense that one can do a great deal of harm by representing as scientific knowledge, conclusions that were not achieved by such means.  The scientific establishment can and has been compromised in this way many times in the past.

We also do place ethical constraints on scientific inquiry, though Allchin is really not adequately clear that these constraints do not originate from with science itself, and if all one really cared about was the advancement of scientific knowledge, it would often be useful to ignore such scruples.

Allchin notes that some reasonably good data was collected by Nazi scientists who experimented on horrendous conditions on Jews, homosexuals and other persecuted groups.  Some scientists today believe that since the data exists it ought to be used; others argue that using such data constitutes an implicit endorsement of the manner in which it was gathered.

In contemporary contexts, we do a great deal of experimentation on non human primates and other animals for the benefit of humanity.  This has moral problems of its own, but it is also produces suboptimum results.  In strictly epistemic terms it would often be better to do the experiments directly on people.  

Science in the U.S. has a long history of being dominated by white males, though this has changed lately to some degree.  The value of equal opportunity may be seen as having been imposed from the outside, but science itself benefits from cultural and cognitive diversity to the extent that its expression remains consistent with the epistemic values noted above.

In the past, some feminists have argued that objectivity itself is an inherently patriarchal value, but this view doesn’t have much going for it.  The kernel of truth in the radical feminist critique of scientific objectivity is that a male dominated science may sometimes over value objectivity to the detriment of other valuable things, like caring human relationships. 

Values exported from science

There’s no doubt that the egalitarian and impersonal nature of science have helped to shape social values outside of science.  Countries that do not have functioning democracies also tend to lack a tradition that permits one to criticize a person’s views without it being interpreted as a personal attack.  Although people who live in countries with a scientific culture still take the criticism of their views personally, it is rare to find an educated person who believes that that people who express contrary opinions need to be imprisoned or killed.  

Still, Allchin notes that there are some ways in which science has made us think that all social problems have scientific or technical solutions, though it is easy to see that this is not the case.  Many problems, like whether we ought to try to reduce our carbon emissions in order to curtail global warming, do not have scientific solutions at all.  Science should help us to discover the most effective way of achieving that goal, but the risks of doing one thing rather than another are estimated on the basis of the values we attach to various possible outcomes.  Science alone can not figure out the value of a human life, for example.  Though, again, it can help us to figure out exactly how much value we attach to a human life- It’s about 6.2 million dollars in the U.S., in case you are curious- and it’s the only way we have of trying to determine how different policies will affect human lives.

(It is worth thinking about this sort of thing at a personal level.  For example, suppose you are smoker, and you are confronted by a doctor or scientist who claims that the scientific evidence is overwhelming that you shouldn’t smoke.  This doesn’t actually make any sense.  All she can really tell you is the statistical likelihood that smoking will kill you or negatively affect your health before a certain age.  On that basis, and some solid statistical reasoning, it’s up to you to decide whether you enjoy smoking enough to make it worth the risk.)

The Ways in Which Sciences are and are not Value Free
by Hugh Lacey

Lacey defines and defends the claim that science is value free as the claim that certain values actually are constitutive of scientific practice.  These are:  impartiality, neutrality, and autonomy.

Provisionally, these values may be roughly defined as follows:

Impartiality:  “There is no proper role for moral, social and any other non-cognitive values in the appraisal of the soundness of scientific understanding.”

•	Concrete example:  A scientist who provides evidence that the offspring of siblings who marry are typically healthy and rarely suffer from genetic defects is not refuted by evidence that he is a sexual deviant.

Neutrality:   Scientific understanding is not biased toward any particular value-outlook.  

•	Concrete example:  A scientific understanding of atomic energy can be used to help reduce global warming or to wipe out all life on earth.

Autonomy:  Scientific research practices are not constrained by political, religious, or other non-cognitive goals.  

Concrete example:  The scientific determination of the age at which a human fetus becomes a person is not constrained by moral or religious views about the acceptability of abortion.

How the sciences are not value free

Lacey then goes on to point out that the values above are not sufficient to drive or direct scientific inquiry; i.e., there is nothing about impartiality, neutrality, and autonomy that actually require any sort of science to be done at all. 

Hence, the values that drive scientific inquiries are different, and they constitute the manner in which science is not value free.

Of particular interest to Lacey is the value of control, specifically human control over natural objects.  Put simply, it is interesting to observe that most scientific research seems to have the purpose of increasing human power over nature.

Since the alternative may be difficult to grasp, consider that the core values of science Lacey identified above are compatible with science helping humans to live in harmony with nature while having a minimum impact on natural objects.  He writes: 

“Thus, e.g., those who cite the value of organic farming over that of the agricultural practices spawned by recent innovations of genetic engineering tend to be dismissed on the ground that they run counter to the trajectory being shaped by the modern valuation of control ("globalization").”

Consider the manner in which we assess the value of new technologies.  Most human beings unreflectively value the fact that a new technology makes some activity easier to control the world than before.  But it is not fundamentally irrational or unscientific to prefer less control.  (The gate on my driveway now has an automatic opener, but I actually don’t think this has improved my life very much at all.) 

Lacey now goes on to make a rather cumbersome argument concerning the tendency of science to engage in what he calls “materialist strategies,” which appears to mean explanatory strategies that reduce phenomena to lawlike interactions between elementary physical constituents.  Most scientists would claim that where these strategies are used it is because this is what produces the most fruitful theories. Lacey, however, believes that what we count as a fruitful theory is being dictated by the value of control.  In other words, scientists are less likely to pursue theoretical frameworks that do not satisfy this external imposed value.

I would suggest that Lacey exaggerates the extent to which control is an externally imposed social value.  In fact, the predictive accuracy of a theory (which is a form of control) is the primary means by which it is tested.  Theories that make no predictions offer no means for disconfirmation and are not properly regarded as scientific theories at all. 

	

A Bouquet of Scientific Values
by Noretta Koertge

Koertge returns to Merton’s list of scientific values

Universalism  (open to all)
Disintestedness (no social agenda)
Communality  (freely shared)
Organized skepticism  

She notes that while these are all part of the ideal notion of scientific inquiry, it’s easy to point out significant departures in practice.   Science has certainly at different times and places been an organization of elitists with very strong and nefarious social agendas.  The desire for glory in being the first to demonstrate or discover something undermines the communal aspect of science to some degree as well.

But some of this is self-correcting, and in fact when people correctly criticize science for failing to conduct itself according to its stated values, they sometimes fail to notice that the lapses themselves are first pointed out within the scientific community.

For example, scientists concerned with fame and fortune often do sloppy research and rush their results to press, which only ends up harming their scientific reputation when these results are examined.  

Science as problem solving

Koertge summarizes Popper’s account of science as a problem solving activity.  The kinds of problems that arise in science have been categorized in the past.  Roughly speaking they are:

1.	Explaining a surprising fact.
a.	All our honeybees are dying.
2.	Explaining a known regularity.
a.	The sun rises in east.
3.	Unifying apparently disparate phenomena. 
a.	Living and non living matter.
4.	Resolving conflicts between theories.
a.	General relativity and quantum mechanics.

Actually, valuing answers to questions like this does not make science all that special.  They all have examples in everyday life.  What makes science different is the degree of rigor with which it pursues and criticizes the explanations that are provided.  

The value that science attaches to rigor is captured in Popper’s “falsifiability” criterion.  The basic idea is that every scientific theory must be subject to disconfirmation.  

In ordinary life we don’t like having our theories disconfirmed and we habitually ignore evidence against them. This is basically why superstitions are so prevalent.  If we actually took our superstitious beliefs seriously, we would see that the vast majority of times that they create specific expectations, those expectations fail to occur.  All we notice is the very few times our expectations are actually met, and we attach particular significance to those times.

Philosophers and cognitive psychologists call this tendency “confirmation bias” and it is ongoing area of research to determine why people evolved to think in this way.  This isn’t, btw, just about superstition, it is more about how we deal with information that has some positive or negative value.  We know, for example, that with something very scary, like a plane crash, we have a natural tendency to exaggerate its likelihood, and people who are afraid of airline travel will always be able to point to a fairly recent accident involving fatalities.  

This is the point of Koertge’s quotation of Francis Bacon.  

It was a good answer that was made by one who, when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods- ‘Aye’ asked he again, ‘but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?”  And such is the way of all superstition.  (Bacon, New Organon)

Again, this is very generalizable.  If you do X in an effort to achieve some goal G, and are successful at achieving G goal, then you naturally think that X is why you achieved G.  

“I took these vitamins and I stayed healthy all year.”  What you don’t have any natural interest in is:

•	How many people took the vitamins and got sick.
•	How many people didn’t take the vitamins and stayed healthy?

Science has to value the answer to these questions and that is why the scientific establishment rewards testing and refutation so strongly.  

Experimenta Fructus
 
Koertge notes that while there is a lot of diversity in the scientific community, in general the value of understanding nature is prior to the value of actually ameliorating the human condition.   This is actually where a lot of Frankenstein and “forbidden knowledge” imagery comes from.  

You can argue that even those who are primarily concerned with helping people should place a higher value on understanding the world, since ignorant attempts to help people often do a lot of harm.  But there is no denying that much scientific curiosity seems to have little value beyond the simple value of knowing itself.  Astrophysicists aren’t interested in discovering the nature of black holes and dark matter because they think it will help to cure cancer or end world hunger.

Weeds

There are many who believe that science paints an ugly picture of the world, and is therefore in conflict with aesthetic values.  Keats said

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."

But to many people the idea the materialistic picture of the world offered by science is not beautiful at all.  They hate the evolutionary picture according to which all human an animal existence is the result of a harrowing fight for survival, or the suggestion that the universe can be fully comprehended without believing in God or a an immaterial soul. 

There is an interesting discussion to be had here which we will mostly punt on for now.  The easy answer to these concerns is the culturally relativistic one:  our standards of beauty arose in a pre-scientific time, so judged by those standards the scientific point of view may appear ugly.  On the other hand, judged by the aesthetic standards of a scientific culture, untestable, non generalizable, contradictory and superstitious beliefs are ugly.  As Koertge points out, it doesn’t really make very much sense at all for someone who finds beauty in a painting or who takes pleasure in some physical activity to have her appreciation diminished once she understands how it is made.   

As we noted above, some feminists have expressed the view that science expresses the worst aspects of the human male.  Sandra Harding, for example, accuses Francis Bacon’s account of inquiry of this:  “both nature and inquiry appear conceptualized in ways modeled on rape and torture.”  

Even if this is easily dismissed as hyperbole, there isn’t any question that practicing scientists have to do things that ordinary people find appalling.  (Read, for example, about the history of grave robbing, which was practiced in the service of both medicine and art.)

It’s also worth noting that the repugnance that many people feel for the yuck factor of science is what keeps them from being able to put a suffering animal out of its misery or to dress the wounds of burn victims.

Uses of Value Judgments in Science
by Elizabeth Anderson

 Underdetermination

Popper’s criterion of falsifiability has it’s counterpart in the underdetermination thesis, which is usually credited to a philosopher named Quine.  According to this thesis, empirical evidence is never logically sufficient to either confirm or disconfirm a particular hypothesis.  If we are sufficiently committed to the truth of a particular hypothesis or background assumption, we can explain away conflicting data by supposing other auxiliary hypotheses to be true.

To take an example from ordinary life, consider the view that your husband loves you.  The fact that he pays no attention to you accept when he is angry and needs to beat on something would seem to be some evidence against this view.   But it is still possible to believe that he loves you if, for example, you believe that his violent and attentive behavior can be explained in other ways:  it’s the drinking, it’s his job, etc.

Take an example from science.  As a child you were probably taught that people once believed that the earth is at the center of the universe, and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and all the stars are in orbit around it.  This was a cherished notion and for many it was inextricably connected to the view that humanity is the center of God’s concern, which reflected the, which reflected the value of humanity.  
When Galileo adopted the Copernican view that the earth and the planets orbit the sun, he was tried and made to recant his views by the Catholic church.  The point here is that even to this day one can exploit the notion of relative motion and hold various basically untestable explanatory hypotheses that support the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe.

Since, according to underdetermination, there is not point at which one is logically required to give up a view it follows that one can legitimately hold on to any background assumption at all.  For example, one might, despite strong evidence to the contrary, continue to insist that human beings and chimpanzees do not have a shared evolutionary ancestry, and that the fact that over 98% of our DNA is coincidental or explicable by a different hypothesis. 

Anderson’s argument against value neutrality

We’ve already seen from Lacey that value neutrality is overstated in science, and his view that science inherently tends to support the value of “materialist strategies”.

Anderson proposes a further critique of value-free science.  We’ll look at just part of it.  On p. 4 Anderson proposes to examine the commitment impartiality, which she summarizes as follows:

Sound empirical theories neither (a) presuppose nor (b) support any non cognitive value judgments.

Anderson calls (a) “presupposition neutrality” and (b) “implication neutrality”, and she isolates two basic arguments for the view, a psychological argument and an argument about the nature of practical reason.

Psychological argument

The crux of the psychological argument is the belief that researchers who make value judgments concerning there area of research will not be in a position to evaluate the evidence.  This sounds quite plausible.  If, for example, you strongly believe in the value of racial and gender equality, you may have a very difficult time objectively evaluating evidence to the contrary.  

Anderson’s basic response to this view is that is properly aimed, not at scientists who hold strong values, but at what dogmatism.  (A dogmatist is someone who simply refuses to acknowledge any evidence against his or her view.)  This is right, but she fails to examine the claim that scientists with strong value judgments in their area of inquiry will find it difficult to objectively evaluate empirical evidence.  

For example, Anderson considers a feminist scientist who (a) holds the value of equal opportunity and (b) who strongly believes that women are not well-represented in politics and the work place because of gender discrimination.   Notice that (b) is an empirical claim.  The idea is that strongly holding (a) will make it difficult to consider evidence against (b).  

Anderson is very dubious of this.  She claims that strongly holding the value of equal opportunity isn’t the problem.  The problem is just a dogmatic commitment to a certain empirical explanation for underepresentation, viz., the belief that women are not well-represented because they have been denied equal opportunity.

Practical reason argument

The crux of the practical reason argument is simply the is-ought distinction.  Science can show us how to achieve goals that we value, but it is logically prevented from prescribing or valuing the goals themselves.

We’ve already criticized this view a bit, and Anderson provides a slightly different approach.  She identifies “emotional experiences” as those which make us feel either positively or negatively toward some object.  Anderson claims that these experiences are simply facts about us, but that they certainly do inform our value judgments.

For example, if you experience with horror the sexual abuse of women and children this might simply be regarded as an interesting fact about you.  Anderson, however, argues that this fact about you obviously is relevant to establishing the truth of the value judgment that such behaviors are morally wrong.  

To take this a step further, then, why can’t scientists legitimately regard people’s emotional experiences, including their own emotional experiences, as evidence in favor of value judgments?  Anderson’s very important point here is that the is-ought distinction is just an exaggeration of a legitimate point, namely that sometimes our emotional reactions are not good evidence for value judgments, and we need to be attentive to the conditions under which they undermine our good judgment.

The rest of this article is dedicated to a case study of divorce and how and to what extent the values of feminists who research divorce might cause them to be dogmatic concerning the design of studies and collecting and analyzing the evidence of its effects on families.