Douglas on values: From indirect roles to multiple goals

Highlights

• Heather Douglas’s influential account of values in science can be distilled into four major claims.

• Douglas’s distinction between direct and indirect roles is ambiguous between two interpretations.

• Both interpretations of the direct/indirect roles distinction have significant weaknesses.

• Appropriate and inappropriate values can be distinguished based on the goals of science in each context.

• Value influences should also be made as explicit as possible.

Abstract

In recent papers and a book, Heather Douglas has expanded on the well-known argument from inductive risk, thereby launching an influential contemporary critique of the value-free ideal for science. This paper distills Douglas’s critique into four major claims. The first three claims provide a significant challenge to the value-free ideal for science. However, the fourth claim, which delineates her positive proposal to regulate values in science by distinguishing direct and indirect roles for values, is ambiguous between two interpretations, and both have weaknesses. Fortunately, two elements of Douglas’s work that have previously received much less emphasis (namely, her comments about the goals of scientific activity and the ethics of communicating about values) provide resources for developing a more promising approach for regulating values in science.

Introduction

Over the past fifteen years, Heather Douglas has published a series of influential pieces that challenge the “value-free” ideal for scientific reasoning (see e.g., Douglas, 2000, Douglas, 2003, Douglas, 2008, Douglas, 2009). In the process, she has stimulated a wave of interest in the argument from inductive risk (e.g., Biddle and Winsberg, 2010, Brown, 2013, Elliott, 2011a, Elliott, 2011b, Steel, 2010, Steel and Whyte, 2012, Steele, 2012, Wilholt, 2009, Winsberg, 2012). According to this argument, scientists are forced to make value judgments when choosing the standards of evidence required for accepting hypotheses (Churchman, 1948, Rudner, 1953). While it is relatively uncontroversial that values can legitimately influence many aspects of science (e.g., decisions about what research projects to pursue or how to apply scientific findings), the inductive-risk argument goes further by showing that even the appraisal of hypotheses should not be value-free.¹

Douglas contextualizes the inductive risk argument in a broader framework. First, she emphasizes that scientific practice is permeated by numerous small-scale decisions that must be made under inductive risk (see e.g., Douglas, 2000). Second, she argues that scientists have ethical responsibilities to avoid causing negligent harm to others as a result of the way they make these decisions (Douglas, 2009). Finally, she insists that while scientists ought to consider the harmful consequences of making erroneous decisions (an “indirect” role for values), they should not slant their reasoning with the goal of bringing about consequences that they find appealing (a “direct” role for values) (Douglas, 2009).

The next section of the paper distills this framework into four major claims. Section 3 then introduces an important problem with Douglas’s account. Namely, her distinction between direct and indirect roles for values, which is an important element of her approach to regulating values in science while rejecting the value-free ideal, is ambiguous between two interpretations. Section 4 argues that both interpretations have significant weaknesses. Fortunately, Section 5 shows that two elements of her account that have previously received much less emphasis (namely, her comments about the goals of science and the ethics of expertise) provide resources for developing a promising new account of values in science.