Harmful Research and the Paradox of Credibility

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how to deal with research that threatens to cause harm to society—in particular, whether and in what cases bans and moratoria are appropriate. First, it asks what normative resources philosophy of science may draw on to answer such questions. In an effort to presuppose only resources acknowledgeable across different comprehensive worldviews, it is claimed that the aim of credibility provides a good basis for normative reflection. A close analysis reveals an inner tension inherent in the pursuit of credibility, referred to as the paradox of credibility: Although the aim of credibility involves the goal of being trusted, the immediate pursuit of the goal of being trusted as much as possible can run counter to and undermine the pursuit of credibility. From this inner tension, considerations are derived on what it means to uncompromisingly strive for trustworthiness. When applied to the problem of harmful research, it becomes apparent that it is important to distinguish between different types of cases. Some cases allow science to prevent harm while relinquishing credibility in the associated research area. In contrast, other cases demand preserving subject-specific scientific credibility in order to manage potential harm.

KEYWORDS:

• Harmful research
• forbidden research
• credibility of science
• epistemic trust
• trustworthiness
• normativity in philosophy of science

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to guest editor Martin Carrier and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. The research underlying this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the SOCRATES Center for Advanced Studies at Leibniz Universität Hannover.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 This is at least true in a world like ours, where the limitedness of resources means that no research question can be addressed by considering every conceivable hypothesis and collecting every potentially relevant set of data.

2 This cause of value-ladenness is a matter of principle – and not simply a matter of practical difficulty – because certain key epistemic assessments, such as whether a given hypothesis is sufficiently confirmed to be considered acceptable or justified, cannot be answered at all (in a non-arbitrary way) without considering questions of value in a broader sense. That, at least, is what the argument from inductive risk implies in what Steel (2016, 711) calls its ‘descriptive’ reading, which he attributes to Winsberg (2012), Steele (2012) and Wilholt (2009).

3 This current understanding of political philosophy has perhaps been most influentially advanced and advocated by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas (for explicit accounts, see, for example, Rawls 1985 and Habermas 1996), but it underlies countless other important works of contemporary political philosophy as well, such as Dworkin 1985; Larmore 1987; Waldron 1993, and many others.

4 The only conceivable conception of the value of scientific knowledge that could do without credibility would be one based solely on the intrinsic value of truth. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this possibility.) Relying on intrinsic value alone, however, does not take one very far with respect to questions of value in the search for knowledge, because the intrinsic value of truth does not help to determine which of the infinite number of yet undiscovered truths are the significant ones worthy of our finite resources for inquiry (Kitcher 1993, 93–95). Moreover, the version of an axiology based solely on intrinsic value that we would have to consider would have to be a particularly extreme one. For if by the value of truth one means the value of true beliefs for everyone (in the spirit of Aristotle's (2011) remark that ‘one always desires to live because one always desires to know’, Eudemian Ethics 1245a 9-10), then science still needs credibility in order to contribute to the realisation of this ideal. Only if value is seen solely in the fact that someone (perhaps an epistemic elite like Plato's (2006) philosopher-kings) has come to partake of the truth, one can do without credibility (outside the epistemic elite). (Not accidentally, the philosopher-kings are distinguished by their unconditional love of truth, see especially Politeia 485b-c and 490a-c.) There still remains the aforementioned problem that concrete epistemic goals are underdetermined by this axiology. I consider this extreme position outlandish and inherently problematic enough to be allowed to ignore it.

5 Admittedly, in the case of both honour and credibility, these are paradoxes only in a rather broad and loose sense. (Appiah does not use the term.) There are, using the paradox of credibility as an example, certainly two arguments, each of which is prima facie plausible, that lead to contradictory conclusions: Since the goal of credibility involves striving to be epistemically trusted, it also seems to involve prioritising investigations that will lead to results that are welcome and likely to be believed. Since the goal of credibility involves striving for rational authority, it can only be pursued by being uncompromising in disregarding the nature of the expected results when prioritising research approaches. Resolving the contradiction by recognising the weaknesses of the first of the two arguments in particular, however, does not require cracking particularly hard philosophical nuts. With regard to the continuum of philosophical situations of paradoxical character (Sainsbury 2009, 1–2), therefore, these ones may fairly be described as positioned on the rather shallow end.

6 This amounts to agreeing with Van Fraassen (1980, ch. 5), who insisted that a why-question is individuated, among other things, by the relevance relation between explanans and explanandum it requires (which is usually only implicitly and contextually given). Therefore, why-question sentences that sound or read the same can express different why-questions in different contexts.

7 This is not altered by the fact that achieving practical goals often requires nothing more than reliability in an instrumentalist sense. For me to use modern thermodynamics to predict certain aspects of the behaviour of a gas, it is arguably not important whether it is true that the gas is made of molecules. But thermodynamics can be of no use unless some of its derivable consequences about observable quantities are true.

8 Kourany addresses a different possible disanalogy between the two cases that she thinks she can resolve – namely, that synthetic genomics research can be skilfully constrained in a way that does not significantly slow down scientific progress. She suggests that the same could be said about cognitive group differences. But the disanalogy I want to emphasize exists quite independently from this discussion.

9 What about research that is financed and massively promoted by interested parties (such as industry associations or political organisations)? Does it also have to be considered an ‘uncoerced initiative’ that the scientific community has to contend with? The destructive strategies of the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel lobby of sowing doubt (about the harmfulness of second-hand smoke or about the reality of anthropogenic climate change) through scientific-looking dissent show that this is not a purely academic question (Oreskes and Conway 2010). It brings up the issue of whether one can identify forms of ‘epistemically detrimental dissent’ in science for which it is permissible for the scientific community to ignore it instead of repeatedly spending resources on putting things right. From my point of view, the decisive question is whether an episode of research pursues a genuine epistemic interest – that is, whether in any respect it is still effectively designed to aim at establishing truth – or whether its sole aim is to prevent or delay the acceptance of true results (cf. Wilholt 2020). But this criterion is controversial because it throws us back to arguing about the goals and intentions behind a line of research, and these are (possibly) elusive. Other authors have therefore attempted to find criteria or indicators of epistemically harmful dissent that are more readily applicable (Biddle and Leuschner 2015; Biddle, Leuschner, and Kidd 2017; Miller 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [Grant Number 470816212 KFG 43 SOCRATES].