Scientific freedom: its grounds and their limitations
Introduction
Appeal to scientific freedom or the freedom of scientific research is commonplace in contemporary debates over research ethics and over science policy. Two recent examples may serve as illustrations. In March 2009, the World Congress for Freedom of Scientific Research convened at the European Parliament in Brussels. It was the second meeting of the congress and featured on its program, among others, the European Commissioner for Science and Research, members of several European governments, as well as a handful of Nobel laureates. The first meeting of the congress had been initiated in response to restrictive legislation on stem cell research in Italy, and resulted in a declaration pronouncing the freedom of scientific research a ‘requirement for democracy, a civil and political right and one of the most important guarantees for man’s health and well-being, as long as it does not provoke damages to others’ (World Congress for Freedom of Scientific Research, 2008, p. 1).
The year before, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a statement entitled Scientific freedom and the public good, which was publicly endorsed by Steven Weinberg, Harold Varmus, Leon Lederman and many other scientists. The statement was formulated under the impression that the US administration under President George W. Bush had attempted to tamper with the findings of government research on issues like stem cells, climate change, sex education and contraceptives. In response, the UCS statement insists on government scientists’ freedom ‘to conduct their work without political or private-sector interference’, and calls on Congress and the executive branch to codify this freedom (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2008).
On that note, there are in fact countries that provide constitutional protection for the freedom of scientific research, including Germany, where this has been an element of constitutional tradition since the mid nineteenth century. In the present German constitution, the chapter on basic rights contains the stipulation that ‘Art and science (Wissenschaft), research and teaching are free’.1
Despite its frequent and often emphatic endorsement, it is not always particularly clear what kind of liberties and protections a principle of freedom of research is intended to entail. Two very decisive ambiguities need to be noted at the outset. On the one hand, freedom of research can be understood just to imply that the scientists involved in research should themselves decide which projects and approaches to pursue. Call this the ‘freedom of ends’. But over and above the freedom of ends, the principle of freedom of research is sometimes also appealed to in order to support the claim that society or the state must provide for the resources required to conduct all the research that the scientists deem important. This I shall call the ‘freedom of means’—recognizing, of course, that the associated claims need not always be quite as utopian as the expression suggests.
A second ambiguity concerns the question of who is the subject of the freedom. At first glance, this seems to be the individual scientist. But curiously, certain limitations of scientists’ freedom, such as their dependence on research group leaders, or on supportive reviews by their peers for grant approval, are not commonly criticized under the rubric of freedom of research. Thus, it sometimes appears to be rather the right of a research community or even an entire discipline to determine its own research agenda by means of appropriate procedures of self-government which is the major concern behind appeals to scientific freedom.
What will concern me in this paper is the question why. Why should the human activity of scientific research enjoy any of these particular liberties? Today, the principle of freedom of research is almost always offered without explicit argument. One task of this paper will therefore be to reconstruct its grounds. Two major ways of arguing in favor of scientific freedom have been devised since at least the times of the Enlightenment, one of which one might call an epistemological argument, and the other a political one. They have both been historically important for establishing the idea of freedom of scientific research, but history will not be my main focus in this paper. My aim in reconstructing the arguments will be to probe their strengths and limitations in the contemporary context, in order to find out what kinds of liberties can reasonably be implied by the principle of freedom of research, and to assess what really is achieved by appealing to it in public debates about science.
Section snippets
The epistemological argument
What I will call the epistemological argument is a line of reasoning defined by its core premise, which can be formulated as follows: a principle of freedom of research creates optimal conditions for our collective search for knowledge. Variations of this premise have already been asserted by many of the early modern defenders of the freedom of philosophizing, including Campanella, 1975, Descartes, 1965, Milton, 1918, Spinoza, 1925. Obviously, in order to add up to a substantial argument,
Qualifications and limitations regarding the epistemological argument
As a first qualification, we will have to address the question of which variety of freedom of research can be supported by the epistemological argument. The claim that a principle of freedom of research leads to epistemically advantageous cognitive diversity is based on the researchers’ (or research groups’) ability to make a choice that reflects their local knowledge and their individual prospects for credit. This means that the epistemological argument can only support a principle of
The political argument
As noted above, there is a second line of reasoning which could be used to argue in favor of freedom of research and which is largely independent of the epistemological argument. It is in essence a political argument and arises from the consideration that scientific knowledge has become an important input for the democratic process. In making their political choices, citizens are in many ways relying on their beliefs about what the world is like, and ever so often they turn to science in order
Qualifications and limitations regarding the political argument
One distinguishing feature of Enlightenment arguments for free inquiry is that they presuppose the subjects of this freedom to be participants in a public intellectual discourse—as perhaps most characteristically expressed in Immanuel Kant’s emblematic assertion that the ‘freedom in question’ was the ‘freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’ (Kant, 1991, p. 55). It has been argued to be doubtful whether scientists can still lay claim to this kind of role in contemporary
Conclusions
To wrap up the discussion of the political argument, I will briefly summarize its strengths and limitations. The argument rests on strong grounds, namely on the protection of an important precondition for the democratic process. Even so, it is worth noting that this is far from establishing an argument that trumps all other societal concerns. The principle supported by it stands in competition with other principles that can be defended as preconditions for the democratic process. This may be of
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