Science is not value-free

An interesting comment, addressing a rather strange earlier comment, makes some very valid points.

A few months ago there was a poorly argued and rather confusing comment by Ulf Büntgen (Buntgen, 2024), which began:

I worry about climate scientists becoming climate activists because scientists should not have an a priori interest in the outcome of their studies. I am also concerned about activists posing as scientists, as this can be a misleading form of instrumentalization.

The article did not really define the goals of its concern and the general statement that “scientists should not have an a priori interest in the outcome of their studies” is simply untenable. It’s one thing to say that scientists should beware of confirmation bias (very reasonable), but quite another to say that scientists must have no interest in the answer. Shouldn’t a doctor working on a vaccine want it to work? Shouldn’t a conservation biologist want the endangered species he works with to survive? Shouldn’t a climate scientist want sea levels to rise? The idea that scientists don’t care about their results is bizarre.

This is, of course, an appeal to the “value-free ideal” of science, which was once considered a valid goal but was soon recognized by philosophers as a fallacy, although it still prevails among some scientists and members of the general public. The comment from van Eck et al. makes this point very clear and provides a far more realistic guide to how climate science in particular can be successful when scientists are open about the values ​​that guide them and transparent about the reasons for their advocacy or even their activism.

In my public lectures on communication, I often point out that a scientist’s advocacy (proposing concrete actions) results from a combination of his knowledge of science (what is) and his values ​​(what he considers important):

It is true that knowledge of “what is” does not alone determine what “ought to be” (something Hume recognized centuries ago), and that therefore science per se does not determine politics. But advocating policies divorced from science is a recipe for inefficiency and failure.

A major problem with Büntgen’s argument (and other criticisms of so-called “stealth advocacy”) is that since no scientist lives up to the value-free ideal, anything a scientist advocates can be rejected by demonstrating that he has values ​​or preferences has, God forbid, a political stance. In fact, we see this dynamic emerging all the time – for example, Patrick Brown explains that any science that appears in science or nature (apparently his own) is at risk because the editors of these magazines have expressed political opinions (and express their values ​​explicitly).

There are two possible answers to this dynamic. Scientists can hide their values ​​and avoid expressing their opinions, or they can be transparent about them and make clear how they motivate their advocacy. The former approach is fragile because scientists have values ​​and opinions, and their work will still be declared tainted if it is politically inconvenient. The latter approach is robust because the scientist looks after his interests and does not have to defend an untenable ideal.

People are often sold on the idea that science (and by extension scientists) is purely objective (think Mr. Spock from Star Trek) and that science transcends the messy business of being human. But while science as a process manages to overcome many individual biases (through replication, repeated testing, and successful predictions), there are still strong traces of the values ​​of previous generations of scientists in what we study, how we study it, and who can study it.

When someone is confronted with a scientist’s advocacy with which they disagree, it can be tempting to criticize it, not for the values ​​on which it is based, but for the audacity of advocating anything at all. Such criticism avoids expressing one’s own values ​​without explicitly stating why they differ – which can indeed be unpleasant. Another approach is to attack the science directly and, again, not discuss the values ​​that animate the advocacy. But let’s be clear: None of these approaches are good faith arguments – they are merely tactical in nature.

People and scientists who value rationality should reject it.

References

1. U. Büntgen, “The importance of distinguishing between climate science and climate activism,” npj climate protectionVol. 3. 2024.

2. CW van Eck, L. Messling and K. Hayhoe, “Challenging the Neutrality Myth in Climate Science and Climate Activism,” npj climate protectionVol. 3. 2024.