Lotteries make science fairer

ABSTRACT

I argue that peer review systems for assigning scientific funding make things less fair than do lotteries that assign funding to research proposals at least partly on the basis of chance. Even though lotteries assign funding randomly, while peer review does so on the basis of morally weighty considerations, lotteries are no more or less fair than peer review as a funding disbursement mechanism. Despite this parity, lotteries make the broader institution of science fairer, as compared to peer review. They do so because they serve to spread the benefits of being a scientist more evenly throughout the scientific community.

KEYWORDS:

• Science funding
• fairness
• public policy
• justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Peter Gildenhuys is a philosopher of science working in the Philosophy Department at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania USA. His primary research interests are in philosophy of biology, with a focus on evolutionary theory. His scholarship also includes work in bioethics. He has a doctorate from the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh.

Notes

1 Gillies (2014) defends a lottery mechanism for funding allocation while Avin (2015) argues for a mixed approach in which a lottery is combined with a preliminary screening process. See also the discussion in Roumbanis (2019).

2 Elster writes that ‘to be rejected by fortune [is] less dishonourable than to be rejected by the community’ quoted in Roumbanis (2019, 1012); perhaps honour or dignity are moral values relevant to funding allocation, too.

3 Indeed, ‘juror’ and ‘conscript’ are also assigned partly on the basis of the morally weighty criterion of age (thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out).

4 It is an interesting question, though moot in the present context, whether fundamental DANS’s fairness is a function of whether their assignment is beneficial or deleterious. It seems at least prima facie plausible that deleterious ones require greater compensation than those which improve the assignees’ welfare to the same degree.

5 Sufficientarians might reject the intuition that the more unevenly distributed a benefit conferred by a fundamental DANS, the more unfair (or at least bad) the assignment of the DANS. Instead, they might contend that, provided those assigned the fundamental DANS all profit to some extent (to be determined by their current welfare and the minimum they’re owed), any ‘excess’ benefits conferred to the assignees may be distributed in any fashion without the excess distribution being unfair. Accordingly, depending upon how the threshold of minimum benefit is specified in the case at hand, sufficientarians might well reject the conclusion defended here that lotteries make science fairer.