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Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine (1995)

Chapter: Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science

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Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
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Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science

STEVEN SHAPIN, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego

There is as much modern uneasiness about putting scientists in a position to make ethical decisions as there is about releasing them totally from such responsibilities. On the one hand, many contemporary areas of ethical choice implicate such technical knowledgeability that few but the possessors of relevant expertise can hope competently to address the issues involved, while, on the other, it is not now supposed that those who have expert knowledge are ethically privileged or more likely to make virtuous decisions than anybody else in our society. In dominant sensibilities, to know more than other people about human respiration is quite a different capacity than knowing when it is right to turn off the respirator.

That, indeed, is a way of stating the problem. If these sensibilities did not obtain, then there would be widespread contentment that doctors should disconnect life-support systems and molecular biologists should determine the nucleotide sequence of the entire human genome without any intervention by "ethical experts" or those trusted to represent the concerns and preferences of interested parties. But there is no such contentment. Authority to speak on what is true is disengaged from authority to speak on what is good.

As a lay member of late-twentieth-century American society, I recognize that sentiment and have found myself endorsing it frequently enough. I have not routinely imputed special virtue to scientists and physicians, just as I am sure that few modern scientists regard themselves, or wish to be regarded, as moral paragons, with all the attendant responsibility. I have no very clever ideas about how the relationship between morality and ex-

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

pertise ought to be managed, and, while in general I like the idea of opening up decision-making processes to a range of interested parties, I am not comfortable with the notion of ethical expertise. For all that, I do not expect that my personal views on such matters ought to be of the slightest interest to anyone.

It is, rather, as an historian of early modern science and as a sociologist of scientific knowledge that I feel I might have something to contribute to contemporary debates over science and ethics. I want to draw attention to how the modern state of affairs just outlined came to be. Historical perspectives occasionally have the capacity to encourage a more disengaged look at present predicaments, while the fact that the divorce between expertise and virtue is, as I shall indicate, a strikingly recent one can prompt the thought that there may be some point in seeking to "unwind" a bit of history. There is nothing inherently "natural" about the late-twentieth century distinctions between virtue and scientific knowledgeability. The historical record offers a vision of alternative arrangements. Moreover, the same historical perspective can suggest that the modern disengagement between virtue and expertise may be more in the appearance than the reality. To the extent that we accept such a disengagement as real, right, and proper, I suggest that we are storing up problems not just for scientists' moral authority but for their credibility.

Indeed, I want to approach the problem of scientists' moral authority by way of an historical inquiry into their credibility, the grounds on which scientists' pronouncements about the natural world are taken as true, objective, or reliable. Just because personal morality and knowledgeability are so widely considered as distinct in the modern condition, I start by outlining a scheme of things in which they were not reckoned to be so in the past. I shall describe a culture in which the credibility of scientific claims and the moral standing of those who make the claims are intertwined. Specifically, I mean to describe a relationship between credibility and virtue by drawing attention to the importance of trust relations in the making of scientific knowledge. I suggest that while those trust relations continue to be vitally important in modern science it has become harder and harder to appreciate them. One consequence of the invisibility of trust is the very attitude towards the disengagement between virtue and expertise which gives our modern dilemma its basic shape.

WHAT IS THE BASIS OF SCIENTISTS' CREDIBILITY?

Why do we believe what scientists tell us about the natural world? Why do we trust them to tell the truth? The fact of that trust, as well as its enormous extent and consequences, should be in no doubt. Most of our formal knowledge of the natural world is derived from no other source

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

than what scientists tell us, or, more precisely, from what is told us by their apparent spokespersons: those who teach science, those who are represented as applying it in our personal domains, those who write or speak about it in the public culture. That we have to trust them for almost all aspects of our formal natural knowledge should also be in no doubt. For practical reasons alone we are unlikely to subject scientists' claims to effective personal skepticism. If indeed we know these things at all, we take on faith the principles of aerodynamics and hydrostatics, the role of DNA in heredity and development, the chemical structure of benzene. And the public "we" includes scientists as well as the laity, for scientists are largely in the position of laypersons when it comes to the specialist knowledge of other types of scientists.

Just noting the extent of the trust-dependency of our natural knowledge is enough to set some current worries about "antiscience" into perspective. The homage paid to science is best evident in the very existence of a public stock of formal natural knowledge. All those who believe that the earth goes around the sun, that DNA is the genetic substance, that there are such things as electrons, and that light travels at 186,000 miles per second are, by so believing, doing scientists honor. Nor is that honor restricted to blind acceptance. Many of those who doubt that CFCs are the cause of a shrinking ozone layer, that the burning of fossil fuels is raising global temperatures, or that organic change is accounted for by natural selection of small continuous variations, may likewise be regarded as doing science honor. Here, skeptics may be questioning where the real scientists are in disputed territory, or whether, indeed, any of the claims in question have the legitimate status of "science." Yet in so doing they reinforce the notion that there is such a thing as real science-objective, true, and powerful. Similarly, legitimate concerns over the "use" and "consequences'' of scientific knowledge do not affect the honor paid to science: the very problems that science is said to generate flow from the recognition of its potency.

The point to which I wish to draw attention here is not whether the public trusts science, or trusts it enough. Opinions can legitimately differ about whether there is a problem of insufficient public confidence and respect for some group of scientists or some corpus of scientific knowledge. Rather, starting from the observation that public trust in science is enormous, I want to pose some questions about the basis of that trust. On what grounds, on the basis of what understandings, do we trust scientists to tell the truth about the natural world, as opposed to some other group of practitioners like psychics or captains of industry? I will argue that an important element of our response to the question "Why trust scientists?" proceeds from an understanding of what kind of people scientists are and how they relate to the sources of their knowledge and to other members of

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

the scientific community. Are scientists thought to be exceptional in respect of their personal morality, their rugged individualism, the extent of their disinterestedness, their skepticism? And are any or all of those personal traits regarded as sufficient to ground our confidence in scientific reliability and truthfulness? Or are scientists understood to be ordinary people whose extraordinary knowledge is guaranteed by characteristics of the institutions in which they are placed? We trust science, in large part, through having some sort of understanding of what scientists are like, individually and collectively.

This paper is in four parts: (1) I argue the importance of trust relations among scientists as a general matter, and I describe the historical development of a sensibility which makes it hard for those trust relations and hence the role of virtue in the scientific community-to be appreciated; (2) I describe the pre- and early modern culture which forged a publicly recognized link between the integrity of individuals, on the one hand, and their ability and willingness to speak the truth, on the other; (3) I note some evidence that this traditional relationship between understandings of individual virtue and of intellectual honesty may be breaking down, and that the public is increasingly being offered a different view of the bases of scientific truthfulness; (4) I argue that this emerging new view of the bases of scientific credibility-one which takes as a matter of course the divorce between expertise and virtue-is just the framework which makes the idea of scientists' moral authority so problematic. I suggest that it is ultimately a misguided view and that an understanding of the nature of scientific work which does not recognize and enforce a degree of individual virtue threatens the moral economy in which scientific knowledge itself is created and maintained. Virtue and credibility, I will conclude, cannot stably be so disengaged as present-day sensibilities seem to accept. I suggest that a re-inspection of the cultural patterns outlined in (2) can inform the present debates over the ethical authority of science and ethical conduct in science.

I mean to focus upon scientists' honesty or sincerity as an element in the public credibility of their knowledge.1 However, I need to make a caveat against seeming to claim too much for such considerations. Suppose we say that there are three main features endemically implicated in assessments of what we are told, whether by scientists or others: the plausibility of the claim; the intellectual entitlement of the source; and the honesty of the source.2 First, all things being equal, we are likely to believe claims that accord with what we already know about the world, even if they are told us by people whose knowledgeability or expertise in the matter is slight. Just for that reason plausibility may be a trouble, rather than a positive resource, in fostering public trust in science, at least to the extent that novel or noncommon sensical claims are at issue. How can scientists

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

hope radically to revise or add to the public stock of knowledge unless there is some other basis for belief than plausibility?

Second, we are more likely to accept claims from sources of recognized expertise and knowledgeability than from those considered to lack these entitlements. This too is a fully general maxim of assent. Specialized scientific expertise is no invention of the modern era: even in antiquity practitioners of the mathematical sciences-astronomy, optics, and statics, as well as pure mathematics itself-were understood to possess arduously acquired special knowledge and skills which set them apart from the common culture, with the consequence that only other specialists were in a position adequately to assess knowledge-claims in these domains.3 The view that there exists a special, universal, and efficacious "scientific method," though intermittently denied by eminent scientists as well as historians and sociologists of science, represents a particular form of the attribution of expertise, and we ought to have a better understanding of what the public believes about "method" in science and its potency. Scientific specialization has, of course, vastly increased in modern times, but the problems that specialization poses for public belief are far from new.

Third,just because we are unlikely to be in a position directly to verify expert knowledge-claims, we must have some other warrants for believing them. Even our recognition that these people are experts has to be grounded on something other than our independent knowledge of their expertise, for example, upon our belief in the honesty of those who, directly or indirectly, vouch for their expertise. Accordingly, the acknowledgment of expertise is embedded within the recognition of honesty: experts have honestly reported how matters stand in the world; their legitimate possession of expertise has been honestly represented and vouched for. In this sense, the recognition of practitioners as truthful-individually or collectively-is a fundamental basis of public credibility. Other inducements to credibility must pass through a judgment that those who speak do so honestly.4 That is to say, against much modern sensibility, that scientists' authority to say what is true implicates some conception of virtuous behavior.

TRUST AND THE QUALITY OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

I want briefly to describe the historical development of a picture of scientists' relations with the natural world and with each other which has made the role of trust difficult to see and to value. I will suggest that this picture is systematically misleading, and later I will argue that it has come to constitute a major problem for an informed public view of what an honest scientist is and does, and, by extension, for the moral authority of science. Failure to appreciate the trust-dependency of science therefore endangers not only the public credibility of science but also, indirectly, the

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

economy in which scientists can continue to produce credible knowledge and to take a role in debates over the proper uses of science.

The sentiment that regards trust and authority in the guise of potential problems for genuine scientific knowledge has the most spotless of philosophical pedigrees. It is as old as modernity itself. The seventeenth-century "moderns" enjoined those who would reform traditional natural knowledge and set it upon proper foundations to reject reliance upon authoritative ancient texts and the hearsay testimony of other people. In one formulation, experience was to be preferred to authority, the Book of Nature to the texts of Aristotle and "old wives' tales." In another, rationally disciplined self-inquiry was deemed superior to the whole stock of Scholastic knowledge. Bacon and the English empiricists embodied the first tendency, Descartes and the Continental rationalists the other. Descartes locked himself up alone in his stove-heated room in order to set aside the authoritative knowledge he had acquired from the Schools, "resolving to seek no other science than that which could be found in myself." An individual, equipped with right method, need not rely for his knowledge upon any intellectual tradition, or upon the relations of any other person.5 In John Locke's view: "We may as rationally hope to see with other men's eyes, as to know by other men's understandings. So much as we ourselves consider and comprehend of truth and reason, so much we possess of real and true knowledge.... In the sciences, every one has so much as he really knows and comprehends. What he believes only, and takes on trust, are but shreds.6 In their different modes, both sets of "moderns" viewed reliance upon traditionally trusted sources as an inadequate basis for proper knowledge. The role of trust and authority was shown to stand against the very idea of science. Knowledge was supposed to be the product of a sovereign individual confronting the world. Our knowledge was said to be secure insofar as its producers were conceived as solitary. That sentiment is at the root of the modern disengagement between truth and the social virtues. So far as truth-making is concerned, the social virtues may even be treated as an impediment.

Seventeenth-century moderns placed the solitary knower at the center of a scientific stage where he has remained-minority academic voices notwithstanding-until the present day. From those moderns we inherit the legacy of epistemic individualism, a legacy which makes the constitutive role of trust and authority in the making of knowledge hard to see and harder still to appreciate as a virtue. Yet all forms of collectively held natural knowledge, including the most valued bodies of modern scientific knowledge, are utterly trust-dependent. The seventeenth-century modern rhetoric which rejected trust and authority signaled skepticism about ancient authority and credulous acceptance of hearsay testimony. It did not, in practice, mean the wholesale rejection of trust in other people's narra-

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

tions as an adequate basis for empirical scientific knowledge. The Royal Society's motto-Nullius in verba-meant, in operational terms, Do not give ancient authority or indirect testimony your whole and unconditional trust.

The new empirical and experimental practitioners of the seventeenth century relied massively upon trust in human testimony about the natural world, and, indeed, it is impossible that they could have produced any recognizable body of natural knowledge had they not done so. The "public" experiments so vigorously advocated by Royal Society publicists were rarely witnessed by more than a handful of practitioners, and more rarely still replicated by distant others. Experimentally produced phenomena became part of the stock of collective knowledge largely through the testimony of trusted authors. The experiment-called "crucial" by Robert Boyle-in which a barometer was carried up the Puy-de-Dôme in France in order to show that we lived at the bottom of an ocean of air yielded knowledge for Boyle insofar as he trusted Blaise Pascal, who narrated the experiment, who in turn trusted his brother-in-law, who carried the apparatus up the mountain and reported that the mercury level fell.7 Natural historical knowledge of distant phenomena similarly relied upon the narrations of trusted travelers: scientists who remained the whole of their lives in the south of England knew that the world contained polar bears, icebergs, regularly spouting geysers, and men "whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders" on no other basis. Many naturally occurring phenomena were accessible only to individuals privileged by space and time to see them, but knowledge of them became widespread through these persons' credible testimony. Those who never themselves witnessed the comet of 1664 knew its apparent motion through the heavens by trusting those who had, while the very notion of a comet's path only existed through trust relations since no one individual observed all of its positions. 8

Late-twentieth-century science is no less trust-dependent, and arguably it is more so. The great specialization of modern science means in a very obvious way that individual scientists do not hold the whole of their own discipline's knowledge, and still less that of science in general, in their heads. The chemical knowledge needed by biologists to conduct an assay, like the physical knowledge embodied in their instruments, is largely taken on trust and, often literally, "off the shelf." This much has been intermittently noted by modern scientists and commentators upon science. As Michael Polanyi observed in 1958, "The overwhelming proportion of our factual beliefs [are] held at second hand through trusting others."9

Modern scientists, no less than the laity, hold the bulk of their knowledge, even the knowledge of their own disciplines, so to speak, by courtesy. As students they acquire their knowledge from authoritative sources, and as mature practitioners they rely upon the trustworthiness of other expert sources. The sociologist Barry Barnes points out that to say that a society

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

"knows" something which no one individual in that society knows is proper speech only by virtue of recognizing the role of trust relations in constituting knowledge:

If an individual knows Euclid's geometry up to the twentieth theorem we can straightforwardly say that he is in a position to prove the twenty-first theorem: he knows all it is necessary to know. But imagine that this knowledge is spread over the members of a society, some known by some individuals, some by others. We cannot say of this society that it knows enough to prove the twenty-first theorem. To think of the society as an individual writ large in this way would be quite misconceived. Suppose that the different individuals, with the different necessary bits of knowledge, did not know each other, or how to find each other. Or suppose they did not trust each other, or know how to check on each other's trustworthiness. In both cases, the twenty-first theorem would remain unproven. The technical knowledge would have been present in the society, but not the necessary internal ordering-the necessary social relationships-for the proof to be executed. Individuals would have known enough mathematics, but not known enough about themselves.10

Trust appears as a "problem" in formal commentary on science just because its constitutive role is so rarely recognized and is so often vigorously denied. To judge that one holds one's knowledge at "second hand," as Polanyi himself says, is reckoned to identify its potential inadequacy.11 It is right to draw attention to the quantity of knowledge which scientists hold on no other basis than what they are told by trusted sources. Yet it is not right, save in a restricted sense, to juxtapose trust-dependency to more direct warrants for knowledge. Scientists are sometimes skeptical of relevant claims, and they do sometimes aim to replicate claims or subject them to independent scrutiny, though the extent of such skeptical replication has undeniably been grossly exaggerated in popular portrayals of scientific practice. However, the ineradicable role of trust is as apparent in acts of skepticism as it is in routine trust.

Suppose that a molecular biologist, declining to accept what authoritative sources claimed, was skeptical that the HIV virus contained RNA. Such a scientist might indeed secure an independent supply of the virus and subject it to analysis, and in so doing might rightly be said to be rejecting trust and seeking personal verification. But that act of focused doubt would only be possible if the skeptical scientist took on trust almost everything else relevant to the act: the identity of the virus sample with which he or she had been supplied, the identity and claimed purity of the reagents used in the assay, the labeled speed of the centrifuge and the proper working of other instruments, and the honesty of technicians and of the authors of papers and manuals functioning as necessary resources in performing this act of skeptical checking. It should, therefore, be evident that

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

each act of distrust would be predicated upon an overall framework of trust, and, indeed, all distrust presupposes a system of takings-for-granted which make this instance of distrust possible. Distrust is something which takes place on the margins of trusting systems.12

HONOR, HONESTY, AND FREE ACTION IN EARLY MODERN SCIENCE

I have sketched a general argument that trust is constitutive of the very idea of knowledge and that, despite much seventeenth-century and present day rhetoric to the contrary, the empirical knowledge of natural scientific communities is no less trust-dependent than other cultural practices whose knowledge is less highly valued. There must always be some practical solution to the question "Whom to trust?", while the content of the answer to that question varies from setting to setting and time to time.

Seventeenth-century answers to the question "Whom to trust?" in science do overlap considerably with those familiar to late-twentieth-century moderns. Early modern practitioners were, for example, more likely to believe the observation-reports and interpretations of skilled astronomers than of those with no such entitlements. Indeed, contemporary culture possessed rich resources for identifying the limitations and inadequacies of common sense, the unreliability of uninstructed observation, and the liability of "the vulgar" towards delusion and credulity. The same "modern" tendency which insisted upon direct observation as a bulwark against trust in ancient authority also cautioned that not everyone was capable of reliable observation and that experience always needed to be instructed by educated reason. Consequently, as I have already indicated, the recognition of expertise has always been a powerful inducement to assent.

I have also noted that experts will not be believed unless their honesty in reporting what they know to be the case is also granted. How, then, were sincerity and truthfulness recognized at the origins of modern science? Here there was a variety of answers to the questions "Who told the truth about the world?" and "On what bases did they tell the truth?" In ancient Greece the role of the philosopher was defined around his love of truth. The philosopher was that exceptional person, set apart from civil society, who spurned worldly rewards and pleasures and dedicated himself solely to truth.13 He not only needed less of the world's goods and applause to produce his cultural goods, he positively needed disengagement from the mundane system of material rewards to seek truth and to be seen to do so. Only he who was free from worldly motives was free to conduct disinterested inquiry and to find truth. As the ancient story has it, when the philosopher Diogenes was asked by Alexander whether there was anything he wanted, the philosopher replied, "Yes, I would have you stand from

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

between me and the sun."14 Socrates prided himself on "how many things there are which I do not want." The integrity of the traditional philosopher's knowledge was recognized to flow from the special integrity of his person. By his love of truth alone the philosopher was understood to imitate God, the source of all truth.15

That ancient cultural appreciation of the philosopher's identity and its guarantee of his honesty persisted for many centuries, modified and reinforced by patterns of Christian intellectuality. In 1690 John Locke merely echoed Greek philosophical sentiments in announcing: "He that would seriously set upon the search for truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not, will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it."16 However, by the seventeenth century another type of social figure was increasingly participating in formal intellectual inquiry, bringing with him a different warrant for truthfulness. This figure was the gentleman. In the sixteenth century, humanist writers were urging that learning not be left to professional scholars and that gentlemen would increase their virtue as well as their social utility if they too participated in the life of the mind. By the end of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century such writers as Francis Bacon were offering influential arguments for the special civic utility of scientific studies and their special suitability for gentle participation.17 The founding of the Royal Society of London in 1660 is witness to the impact of those arguments, and the person of its most eminent member-the Honourable Robert Boyle, son of the Earl of Cork-embodied the conjunction of scientific inquiry and gentlemanly virtue. The Society's first historian aptly described the early Royal Society as an organization predominantly made up of "Gentlemen, free, and unconfined."18 The culture surrounding the seventeenth-century gentleman offered a quite special appreciation of the bases of gentle truthfulness. Gentlemen were said to tell the truth because they were free of any inducements to do otherwise. He who lied revealed his servility, baseness, and cowardice: he was, as both Montaigne and Bacon said, brave towards God and a coward to his fellow man.19 Within a traditional honor culture, the imputation of fear and baseness was a grave act. Truthfulness was a measure of honor, and to represent another as mendacious was precisely to dispute his identity as a man of honor, a gentleman. Accordingly, it was only the accusation that a man lied which, in early modern society, could reliably provoke a challenge to a duel.

Reputation for truthfulness was, therefore, basic to the identity of a gentleman, while early modern English gentle culture offered a rich repertoire of appreciations of why the gentleman was a reliable truth-teller. On the surface, these accounts look different from those explaining philosophical veracity. They were, for the most part, secular in idiom. Among

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

the most important understandings of the gentleman's truthfulness was an attributed causal link between the integrity of his social and economic circumstances and the integrity of his word. It was not that the gentleman was he who possessed the most money or the most power: the king and the great courtiers had more of those commodities. But those who had need to flatter, or those who were duty bound to represent their country's interests, might be under an obligation to deceive. On the other hand, those who possessed very little money or power were routinely in a position where they needed to seek advantage, or, if servants, were required to submerge their integrity in their masters' interests. Hence, both want or need, and very great power, induced departures from truthfulness. However, the English gentleman liked to see himself at the "golden mean" of the social order, and this was considered to be the position where integrity was unconstrained.

The gentleman told the truth because no influences worked upon him to shift his narratives out of correspondence with what he believed to be the case. His integrity was recognized to flow from his capacity for free action, and that same free action underwrote the truthfulness of his word. Conceptions of innate honor were, in that culture, bound up with notions of free action, gentle identity, and truth-telling. Understandings of the philosopher's and the gentleman's truthfulness therefore differed. But they concurred in two respects: (1) the truthfulness of both the philosopher and the gentleman emerged out of the acknowledgment that these were quite special sorts of persons, and (2) for both, the virtue of the person underwrote the veracity of his narratives.

FROM VIRTUE TO VIGILANCE

The culture which thus tied intellectual veracity to personal virtue persisted in European and, later, in American culture. In particular, the special reliability and objectivity of the scientist's testimony continued strongly to be associated with the special virtues of the scientist's personality. What was said of Boyle and Newton in the late seventeenth century continued to be applied to heroic scientific truth-seekers. When Boyle died in 1691 the funeral sermon advertised the spotless character of a "Christian Virtuoso": "He could neither lie, nor equivocate."20 In 1725 the editor of his works wrote of Boyle's "candour" and "fidelity" as adequate grounds for belief, even in the most philosophically implausible claims: "We may certainly depend upon this, that what Mr. Boyle delivers as an experiment or observation of his own, is related in the precise manner wherein it appeared to him: no one ever yet denied, that he was a man of punctual veracity." Into the nineteenth century, commentators on Isaac Newton insisted upon the relationship between his genius and his moral

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

makeup. In 1857 the philosopher and historian of science William Whewell wrote that "those who love to think that great [scientific] talents are naturally associated with virtue, have always dwelt with pleasure upon the views given of Newton by his contemporaries; for they have uniformly represented him as candid and humble, mild and good."21

In eighteenth-century England the chemist Joseph Priestley wrote that "A Philosopher ought to be something greater, and better than another man." If the scientist was not already virtuous, then the "contemplation of the works of God should give a sublimity to his virtue, should expand his benevolence, extinguish everything mean, base, and selfish in [his] nature," and such sentiments were standard in the British natural theological tradition well into the nineteenth-century. 22 Dorinda Outram's splendid biography of the early-nineteenth-century anatomist Georges Cuvier shows how the French public was given to understand the causal relationship between special scientific gifts and special personal virtues, and how objectivity was seen to flow from personal authenticity.23 And Charles Paul describes how the eloges delivered to the eighteenth-century Paris Academy of Sciences repeatedly pointed to the special personal virtues of great scientists: simplicity, righteousness, modesty, candor, frankness, and sincerity. 24

Great nineteenth-century scientists were widely advertised as moral heroes. The experimental biologist Claude Bernard influentially portrayed the special personal kindliness and modesty of those pursuing experimental truth. Such self-denial was necessary to preserve that "absolute freedom of mind" which allowed the experimentalist to be skeptical even of his own favored theories and to submit himself to truth alone. 25 Celebration of scientific heroism and virtue arguably reached its apogee in accounts of the life of Louis Pasteur: "Like his scientific prowess, Pasteur's moral fiber was incomparable. ... [His] spiritual life was imbued with lofty ideals: sincerity, honesty, decency, and affection for truth."26 In early-twentieth-century Germany, Max Weber's essay on "Science as a Vocation" advertised the intensely self-denying "passionate" and "inner devotion'' necessary to pursue the life of modern specialized research.27 For many educated Americans Sinclair Lewis's characters of Max Gottlieb and Martin Arrowsmith (1925) came to represent the very special nature of the scientist's vocation:

To be a scientist [says Dr. Gottlieb]-it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being a bond-salesman . . . It makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious-he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.28

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

A picture of scientists as moral heroes, and an appreciation that their virtuous heroism underwrote the truthfulness of their claims, thus persisted well into this century. Yet some time around the 1930s-one ought to be no more precise than that-a quite different understanding of the scientist's character, and a different view of what guaranteed the truth of scientific knowledge, began to be made available to the public. One of the most interesting sites in which this view surfaced was closely associated with the origins of the academic discipline known as the sociology of science.

By the late 1930s and 1940s Robert K. Merton, one of the most influential American sociologists, was presenting it as a matter of course that scientists "were as other men," and that the production of objective knowledge could not possibly be underwritten by the dispositions and temperaments of individual practitioners. Disinterested and objective knowledge was produced by interested and, occasionally, irrationally acting individuals: "A passion for knowledge, idle curiosity, altruistic concern with the benefit to humanity, and a host of other special motives have been attributed to the scientist. The quest for distinctive motives appears to have been misdirected." There is no satisfactory evidence that scientists are "recruited from the ranks of those who exhibit an unusual degree of moral integrity'' or that the objectivity of scientific knowledge proceeds from "the personal qualities of scientists." Rather, what underpins scientific truthfulness was said to be an elaborated system of institutional norms, whose "internalization" guarantees that transgressions will generate psychic pain and whose implementation by the community guarantees that transgressors will be found out and punished.29

Of course, such arguments against the so-called "motivational level of analysis" served important disciplinary purposes: they demarcated sociology from psychology and showed the legitimacy of social-structural answers to questions about scientific objectivity. Nevertheless, these and similar appreciations of the scientist's personality and communal relations fed into a public culture which was, in any event, increasingly being made aware from a variety of sources that the scientific "vocation" was rapidly changing from a "calling" to a "job." The scientist was not understood as "called" to a passionate search for truth but to be doing a job like any other, except that its products counted as truth. Meanwhile, a small number of psychological studies of scientists broadly supported that understanding while pointing out that scientists were not notably competent in their individual command of the formal principles of logical reasoning. 30 When James Watson's The Double Helix (1968) caused such apparent public delight (and mock consternation) about the all-too-human face of modern science, Robert Merton was joined by a number of leading statesmen of science in saying, in effect, "I told you so." John Lear described Watson's book "as therapy for those who think of science as a realm permeated with

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

unalloyed idealism and of scientists as plumed knights searching always and exclusively for truth."31

Thus, by the middle of the twentieth century it appears that the causal link posited by early modern gentlemanly culture between truth-telling and virtuous free action had been turned upside down. In fact, we still know relatively little about current lay attitudes towards science and scientists, and we ought to know much more, yet it is not unreasonable to assume substantial overlap between what the public is persistently told about science and scientists and what they may come to believe.32 And what the public is pervasively told is that objective scientific knowledge is not now guaranteed by the participation of virtuous "Gentlemen, free, and unconfined," but by institutions which most vigilantly constrain the free action of their members. Robert Merton was, accordingly, well aware of apparent lese majesty in declaring that "the activities of scientists are subject to rigorous policing, to a degree perhaps unparalleled in any other field of activity."33 The modern place of knowledge here appears not as a gentleman's drawing room but as a great Panopticon of Truth.

"AFTER VIRTUE" AND ITS EFFECTS

I want to sketch some possible consequences of this changing appreciation of the grounds of scientific credibility, drawing out the link between credibility and moral authority outlined at the beginning of this paper. These notes are frankly speculative, intended not as definitive conclusions but as promptings to reflect on the nature of the modern predicament and, from this somewhat unfamiliar historical and sociological perspective, to consider anew what might be done about it.

As an historian and sociologist, I am unaccustomed to making recommendations about what scientists and policymakers "ought to do." (That is to say, my academic community tends to have its own institutional separation between our expert knowledge and our moral authority.) Nevertheless, I feel that the historical understandings outlined above license a suggestion that some present-day initiatives for dealing with alleged problems of ethical behavior in science are in danger of getting it quite wrong.

If what I have had to say about the fundamental and ineradicable role of trust in science is broadly correct, then systematic attempts to subject the conduct of the scientific community to vigilant policing are more likely to kill the patient than to cure the disease. Vigilance can do serious damage to science for the reason that trust relations among scientists are constitutive of the making, maintenance, and extension of scientific knowledge, that is, to the capacity of the scientific community to produce consensual knowledge upon which others may rely. Only when that trust dependency is ignored or seen solely as a problem for science do vigilance models possess

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

their apparent appeal. Vigilance as a solution to problems of dishonesty amounts in practice to the enforcement of skepticism and distrust among scientists. Scientific reports may be fraudulent, so scientists are enjoined more and more systematically to replicate others' experiments and observations, and to ensure that their own reports will stand up to others' more vigorous skeptical scrutiny. Inference from evidential findings is to be more tightly controlled, so scientists are recommended more thoroughly to report exactly what was done and exactly how it was done. And if they will not do so, then, it is said, external means must be put in place to ensure skepticism and distrust.

To suggest that skepticism and distrust should be very much more common in science is, in effect, to take the position that much of our modern structure of scientific knowledge should be unwound, put into reverse, and ultimately dismantled. Instead of laboratories for the production of new knowledge, we should build great facilities for the close reinspection of what is currently taken to be knowledge. Grants will be given for checking routine findings; published reports will look more and more like laboratory notebooks; libraries will have to be expanded to house an unimaginably vast literature reporting upon acts of distrust; relations between scientists will become uncoordinated, unproductive, and unpleasant. No one actually defends such consequences, largely because those effects of enforced skepticism have not been clearly foreseen. Nor would anyone seriously advocate measures that might lead to anything like these consequences if the constitutive role of trust in making scientific knowledge were more widely recognized. It needs to be understood that trust is a condition for having the body of knowledge currently called science. As Hardwig puts it, "the alternative to trust is ... ignorance."34

No doubt, those who argue for such measures do so in good faith, convinced that skepticism and distrust are the very essence of what it is to be scientific. In this respect, they endorse the seventeenth-century "modern" rhetoric of epistemic individualism. Yet, as I have sought to show, individualistic rhetoric, however important as a cultural evaluation of how proper knowledge ought to be secured, fails to represent the realities of scientific practice. Science is a trusting institution. Trust is not an epistemic problem for science; it is-if one wants to engage in such evaluations-an evident epistemic virtue. It is only by trusting others that scientists hold the vast bulk of their knowledge, that their knowledge has scope, that they can know things they themselves have not experienced, and, indeed, that they can be effectively skeptical when they wish to be. The very existence of highly interdependent, specialized, and differentiated knowledge-communities testifies to the real extent of that trust-dependency.

The point is not that vigilant policing is incapable of controlling some forms of undesirable behavior in science. Of course, the policing of sci-

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

ence does in principle have that capacity, just as it does in financial circles or in everyday life. The question to be asked before embarking upon such policing is whether the nature of the practice is likely to be distorted or destroyed by enforced skepticism, whether that for which the practice is valued, and supported, by society is itself critically dependent upon trust rather than its opposite. Put another way, are there any special reasons for exempting science from the sort of policing to which many other areas of everyday life are routinely subject?

I have suggested that there are such reasons. Take any institution in modern society with whose workings and products we are broadly satisfied. Then come to a reflective appreciation of the extent to which those workings and those products are trust-dependent and liable to be eroded by the imposition of vigilant skepticism. If we are on the whole satisfied with the quality of scientific knowledge, and if we understand that science is fundamentally a trusting institution, then we have adequate grounds for the exemption in question. I know more about science than about other modern specialized institutions, but I do not doubt that there are others that meet the conditions for exemption: one thinks of sectors of the financial system and the civil service. Policy in such matters ought to be informed by our best current understandings of the conditions in which geese lay golden eggs. My fear is that the historical and sociological understandings that currently seem to inform the relevant policy debates are not as good as they ought to be.

If what I have had to say about the fundamental role of trust in science is broadly correct, then some aspects of the modern sensibility that separates virtue and credibility can be usefully reassessed. In that sensibility, what is agreed upon among scientists as "the facts of the matter" is widely considered an unproblematic element in any potential discussions over "what then ought to be done" as a morally relevant decision. That is just a way of phrasing the disengagement between expertise and virtue which lies at the heart of the modern sensibility.

Yet, insofar as trust is critical to the making and maintenance of scientific knowledge, then the attribution of expertise-specialized knowledge of what is true-cannot be divorced from the practical recognition of virtue-in this case, of integrity and honesty. Agreement about the "scientific facts" is itself a moral matter. Being "trust-dependent," such agreement is no less interesting and no less problematic than "the ethical application" of agreed-upon facts. Our technical knowledge is only as secure as the moral economy in which it is produced. The "scientific portion" of any ethical decision contains institutionalized moral judgments, and the fact that we do not recognize them as such is itself an aspect of the modern condition.35 We just do not yet have a very satisfactory understanding of the processes by which scientists come to agree, or agree not to disagree, and hence how

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

the "facts of the matter" come to appear an unproblematic element in ethical decision-making.

It is the "vigilance model" of scientific objectivity that seems to generate some of our fundamental current dilemmas about the moral authority of science. Scientific knowledge will be seen as reliable insofar as scientists are subject to internal and external vigilance and, in that sense, the relevant invigilated experts will inevitably take part in ethical decisions involving specialized knowledge. Yet, if scientists are seen as no more honest and selfless than anyone else, then it follows that they will not be accorded any more moral authority than anyone else. The result may be a strange and an unsatisfactory situation in which those most intimately familiar with the "facts of the matter at hand" will neither be given, nor encouraged to take, any special role in the moral disposition of "the matter at hand." That we can contemplate this situation with equanimity is an expression of modern sentiment that holds the divorce between knowledgeability and virtue to be "natural,'' to be accepted as a matter of course. If, however, history holds any lessons, it is that the relationship between the two is a contingent matter. And what is historically contingent is historically revisable.

What is to be done? Again, I pretend to no special authority to participate in such discussions. Yet, as I suggested, the disengagement afforded by an historical perspective can loosen up our sense of possibilities. One idea would take seriously as a problem the link between questions of scientific honesty and moral authority introduced at the outset. If our current appreciation of the former leads to problems with the latter, then the remedy can only be to try to reconstitute an appreciation of the scientist as "more virtuous" than other people, and to disseminate that appreciation, without embarrassment, in the wider culture.

The moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre distinguishes between a "practice" and an "institution."36 A practice is an organized form of human activity which provides its members "internal goods," rewards which can only be secured by accepting the standards of excellence that belong to that practice and to it alone. By contrast, there are coherent social institutions which offer their members "external goods," those available through participation in the institution, but which do not differentiate that institution from others and which may even be had without accepting its internal standards. So, a person may, indeed, get money by cheating at chess or at science: chess or science may be widely seen just as a way of getting money. But then they do not have the status of practices. Chess and science are practices insofar as participants actually desire those internal rewards which can only be had by wanting to solve problems or extend understanding, and then doing so.

The extent to which that idea seems embarrassing and old-fashioned is the extent to which we have a problem of scientific honesty and, therefore,

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

of moral authority. The Greeks had the notion of a philosopher as someone who loved truth and would not tell a lie, and the early modern English had their understanding of a gentleman as someone who valued the integrity of his word as he valued his sense of honor. If we are in fact serious about addressing problems of intellectual dishonesty and the erosion of moral authority, I doubt very much whether we can do better than try, over a long period, to revive and reinstall some such culture of virtue. This is not a "quick fix," but, at the end of the day, it may well be our only stable "fix." The Greeks and the early moderns understood that virtue had to be practiced and that it could be taught. Efforts at ethical education, if seriously intended and well-designed, are likely to have an effect. However, nothing can be as effective as the daily visibility of respected individuals who are seen to be doing science "for the love of truth," "for the pleasure of solving puzzles and getting it right,'' and not "for the love of lucre." Such individuals would be understood not to lie because nothing they wanted could be gained from a lie. The proposed solution must be recognized as having two sides. Just as one is saying that we ought specially to trust scientists, so one is saying that scientists ought to deserve to be regarded as specially trustworthy people.

And such individuals might, for that reason, possess a useful form of moral authority. There should be no illusions about the nature of the moral authority which the scientist-restored-to-virtue might have. It would be of a very general sort. If there really are such people as "ethical experts" in our society, then this scientist would not be one. Rather, he or she might have whatever general moral authority still attaches to someone reputed to be honest and selfless, to possess integrity, to love truth more than lucre. More than that cannot, I think, be reasonably hoped for in our society. Less than that should be considered unacceptable.

NOTES

1.  

I appreciate that the present committee is not primarily interested in questions of scientific honesty or dishonesty, but I shall be trying to show why-properly conceived-such questions are indeed germane to some of this committee's concerns about the moral authority of science.

2.  

This is a simplified version of an account of maxims of credibility developed in Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 5.

3.  

Thomas S. Kuhn. "Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science," in idem, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 31-65, esp. pp. 35-37.

4.  

This point has recently been nicely summarized in a philosophical idiom by John Hardwig, "The Role of Trust in Knowledge," Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991), 693-708, esp. pp. 700-701.

5.  

Rene Descartes, "Discourse on the Method," in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, eds.

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

   

and trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1955; orig. publ. 1637), 1, 79-130, quoting p. 86.

6.  

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1959; orig. publ. 1690), I, 115.

7.  

Robert Boyle. "A Defence of the Doctrine Touching the Spring and Weight of the Air," in idem, Works, ed. Thomas Birch, 6 vols. (London, 1772; text orig. publ. 1662), I, 118- 185, on p. 151. For studies of experimental performances and replication in seventeenth century England, see S. Shapin, "Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology," Social Studies of Science 14 (1984), 481--520; Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. chs. 2 and 6.

8.  

The management of empirical testimony in seventeenth-century England is treated in detail in Shapin, A Social History of Truth, esp. ch. 6.

9.  

E.g., Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. 207-208, 216, 240-241, 375, quoting p. 208. For a more recent, albeit limited, philosophical appreciation of trust in science, see, e.g., Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 8; also Michael Welbourne, The Community of Knowledge (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986); and the more full-bloodedly sociological Hardwig, "The Role of Trust in Knowledge."

10.  

Barry Barnes. About Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 82 (and see ch. 3, passim, for an excellent sociological appreciation of the role of trust and authority in science). As Hardwig ("The Role of Trust in Knowledge," 697) nicely puts it: "Knowing [is] not a privileged psychological state. If it is a privileged state at all, it is a privileged social state."

11.  

Accordingly, while pointing to the central role of trust in modern science Polanyi (Personal Knowledge, 217) described an ideal chain of skepticism whereby members of specialized scientific communities might validate each other's knowledge: even though scientist A was obliged to take the knowledge of scientist C on trust, he or she was able directly to check over the knowledge of B, who was, in turn, competent to assess C.

12.  

See Barry Barnes' concise account of the knowledge-dependency of skepticism with respect to anomalous scientific findings: About Science, 59-63, and, for practical trust in the "black-boxed" knowledge and routines of modern science, see Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch, "The Sociology of a Genetic Engineering Technique: Ritual and Rationality in the Performance of the 'Plasmid Prep' in The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Science, eds. Adele Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 77-114, esp. pp. 93, 102.

13.  

The "apartness" of the philosopher as a pervasive cultural trope is discussed in S. Shapin, 'The Mind is Its Own Place': Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England," Science in Context 4 (1991), 191-218, esp. pp. 192-198, and, for classic treatment of the vita contemplativa, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). See also Owsei Temkin, "Historical Reflections on a Scientist's Virtue," Isis 60 (1969), 427-438, esp. pp. 427-428.

14.  

Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden and rev. Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Modern Library, [1932]), 810.

15.  

Classic sources for these sentiments include Diogenes Lartius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. C.D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), quoting p. 66, and Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy, 3 vols. (London, 1655-1660).

16.  

Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 428.

17.  

S. Shapin. "'A Scholar and a Gentleman': The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early Modern England," History of Science 29 (1991), 279-327, esp. pp. 282- 299; Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ch. 6.

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

18.  

Thomas Sprat. The History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), 67; also 405-407. For the scientific significance of the gentlemanly wake-up of the early Royal Society, see Steven Shapin, "The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England," Isis 73 (1988), 373404, and, for Boyle as gentleman-scientist, see Shapin, A Social History of Truth, ch. 4. I draw attention here to the special significance of gentlemanly codes for early modern English science. I argue that those codes were influential for the subsequent development of the natural sciences while recognizing that Continental patterns showed significant difference.

19.  

Michael de Montaigne. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965; orig. publ. 1580-1588), 505; Francis Bacon, "Of Truth," in idem, The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon, Including His Essays .., ed. Joseph Devey (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852; orig. publ. 1597), 1-4.

20.  

Gilbert Burnet. "Character of a Christian Philosopher, in a Sermon Preached January 7, 1691-1692, at the Funeral of the Hon. Robert Boyle," in idem, Lives, Characters, and an Address to Posterity, ed. John Jebb (London, 1833), 368.

21.  

Peter Shaw. "General Preface," in idem, ed., Boyle's Philosophical Works (London, 1725), ix-xv.

22.  

William Whewell. Selected Writings on the History of Science, ed. Yehuda Elkana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 63. In this connection, see especially Richard Yeo, "Genius, Method and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760-1860," Science in Context 2 (1988), 257-284. Recent historical work on Newton's character has been notably more harsh.

23.  

Joseph Priestley. The History and Present State of Electricity, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (London, 1775), I, xxiii.

24.  

Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), esp. 63-64, 79, 94, 117.

25.  

Charles B. Paul. Science and Immortality: The Eloges of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1691- 1799) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), esp. 92-109.

26.  

Claude Bernard. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry Copley Greene (New York: Dover, 1957; orig. publ. 1865), esp. 28, 35-39, quoting p. 35.

27.  

P. Vallery-Radot. Louis Pasteur: A Great Life in Brief, trans. Alfred Joseph (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966; orig. publ. 1885), vi. As with Newton, recent historical work has taken Pasteur's reputation for personal virtue down several pegs.

28.  

Max Weber. "Science as a Vocation," in idem, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1991; essay orig. publ. 1919), 129-156, quoting pp. 135, 137. For useful treatment of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German scientist as moral exemplar and producer of wertfrei knowledge, see Robert N. Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), chs. 5-10.

29.  

Sinclair Lewis. Arrowsmith (New York: Signet, 1980; orig. publ. 1925), 267. For the cultural significance and scientific model of the character of Martin Arrowsmith, see Charles E. Rosenberg, "Martin Arrowsmith: The Scientist as Hero," in idem, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 123-131.

30.  

Robert K. Merton. The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. Norman W. Storer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973; quoting art. orig. publ. 1942), 275-276; see also 259, 290-291; idem, Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays (New York: Free Press, 1976; art. orig. publ. 1963), 34-35. The conclusion that scientists, even the great ones, "were as other men" was evidently being argued, against residual tendencies to the contrary, within the scientific community at the time: see, for example, G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; orig. publ. 1940), 78: "Ambition has been the driving force behind nearly all the best work.... We must guard against a fallacy common among apologists for science, the fallacy of supposing . . . that physiologists, for example, have particularly noble souls."

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
×

31.  

This work is usefully assessed in Michael J. Mahoney, "Psychology of Scientists: An Evaluative Review," Social Studies of Science 9 (1979), 349-375, esp. pp. 354-356.

32.  

Robert K. Merton. "Making It Scientifically," in James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA: Text, Commentaries, Reviews, Original Papers, ed. Gunther S. Stent (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980; orig. publ. 1968), 213-218;John Lear, "Heredity Transactions," ibid., 194-198 (quoting 194-195); see also reviews by Richard C. Lewontin (pp. 185-187, for comparisons with Martin Arrowsmith), Mary Ellman (pp. 187- 191), P.B. Medawar (pp. 218-224): [Watson's book ought to prevent anyone from going] "on believing that The Scientist is some definite kind of person." Some scientist-reviewers, to be sure, found Watson's portrayal of normal scientific practice both wrong and damaging to the reputation of science. At about the same time, Daniel S. Greenberg's The Politics of Pure Science (New York: New American Library, 1967) and his journalism for Science magazine did much to form a public awareness of scientists as entrepreneurs ''on the make." Indeed, Greenberg's semi-fictional "Dr. Grant Swinger" was somewhat more merely human than the average stockbroker.

33.  

For reflective study of the public credibility of science and its bases, see, e.g., Brian Wynne, "Public Understanding of Science Research: New Horizons or Hall of Mirrors?" Public Understanding of Science 1 (1992), 37-43; idem, "Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science," ibid., 281-304, esp. p. 298; also Marcel C. LaFollette, Making Science Our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910-1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

34.  

Merton, The Sociology of Science, 275-276.

35.  

Hardwig, "The Role of Trust in Knowledge," 707; also Shapin, A Social History of Truth, ch. 1.

36.  

The sociologist H.M. Collins has studied episodes of "extraordinary science," in which scientists cannot effectively appeal to "the facts of the matter" to settle disputes, since it is those facts which are being contested. In such episodes, scientists may invoke characterizations of participants' basic competence and morality in attempts to achieve resolution: Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

37.  

Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: I: Notre Dame University Press, 1984), esp. chs. 13-14. MacIntyre's views are brought to bear upon the problem of fraud in science by C.J. List, "Scientific Fraud: Social Deviance or the Failure of Virtue?" Science, Technology and Human Values 10, 4 (1985), 27-36, esp. 30-32.

Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
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Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
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Page 403
Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
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Page 404
Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
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Page 405
Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
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Page 406
Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
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Page 407
Suggested Citation:"Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science." Institute of Medicine. 1995. Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4771.
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Page 408
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Society's Choices: Social and Ethical Decision Making in Biomedicine Get This Book
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Breakthroughs in biomedicine often lead to new life-giving treatments but may also raise troubling, even life-and-death, quandaries.

Society's Choices discusses ways for people to handle today's bioethics issues in the context of America's unique history and culture—and from the perspectives of various interest groups.

The book explores how Americans have grappled with specific aspects of bioethics through commission deliberations, programs by organizations, and other mechanisms and identifies criteria for evaluating the outcomes of these efforts. The committee offers recommendations on the role of government and professional societies, the function of commissions and institutional review boards, and bioethics in health professional education and research.

The volume includes a series of 12 superb background papers on public moral discourse, mechanisms for handling social and ethical dilemmas, and other specific areas of controversy by well-known experts Ronald Bayer, Martin Benjamin, Dan W. Brock, Baruch A. Brody, H. Alta Charo, Lawrence Gostin, Bradford H. Gray, Kathi E. Hanna, Elizabeth Heitman, Thomas Nagel, Steven Shapin, and Charles M. Swezey.

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