Values, standpoints, and scientific/intellectual movements

Looking beyond values: The legitimacy of social perspectives, opinions and interests in science

This paper critically assesses the current debates in philosophy of science that focus on the concept of values. In these debates, it is often assumed that all relevant non-epistemic influences on scientific research can be described as values and, consequently, that science carries social legitimacy if the correct values play their proper role in research. I argue that values are not the only relevant non-epistemic influences on research: not unless our definition of values is so broad that it becomes unmanageable. Other factors also affect the authority and social legitimacy of science. I employ political theorist Iris Marion Young's concepts of social perspectives, opinions and interests to attempt a differentiation of contextual influences relevant to scientific research. While problems arising from these influences may overlap, they often differ in important ways too. As a consequence, I argue that contextual influences cannot be managed jointly but require distinct and complementary strategies.

Pro-Diversity Beliefs and the Diverse Person's Burden

Pro-diversity beliefs hold that greater diversity leads to better results in academia, business, politics and a variety of other contexts. This paper explores the possibility that pro-diversity beliefs can generate unfair expectations that marginalized people produce distinctive bonuses, a phenomenon we refer to as the "diverse person's burden". We suggest that a normic conception of diversity, according to which non-diversity entails social privilege, together with empirical research on psychological entitlement suggests an explanation of how the diverse person's burden can arise in many social settings. We also suggest structural and institutional remedies to address the diverse person's burden, as well as an individual virtue we label positional awareness.

Value management and model pluralism in climate science

Non-epistemic values pervade climate modelling, as is now well documented and widely discussed in the philosophy of climate science. Recently, Parker and Winsberg have drawn attention to what can be termed "epistemic inequality": this is the risk that climate models might more accurately represent the future climates of the geographical regions prioritised by the values of the modellers. In this paper, we promote value management as a way of overcoming epistemic inequality. We argue that value management can be seriously considered as soon as the value-free ideal and inductive risk arguments commonly used to frame the discussions of value influence in climate science are replaced by alternative social accounts of objectivity. We consider objectivity in Longino's sense as well as strong objectivity in Harding's sense to be relevant options here, because they offer concrete proposals that can guide scientific practice in evaluating and designing so-called multi-model ensembles and, in fine, improve their capacity to quantify and express uncertainty in climate projections.

The Epistemic Dignity of Knowledge Developed Through Nursing Practice

In this article, I revisit a philosophical idea from Intermodernism about generating knowledge through nursing practice and examine how this may enhance the epistemic dignity of knowledge. Epistemic dignity is an evaluation of knowledge (formalized in theories) as possessing quality and worth as scientific knowledge and as held in esteem by a disciplinary community and others. The philosophical turn toward the practice of science is discussed along with contemporary work on theoretical virtues as qualities of scientific theory. In addition, I suggest that what we may refer to as uniquely nursing knowledge is knowledge that is generated through nursing practice and ground in disciplinary perspective.

When is it Safe to Edit the Human Germline?

In the fall of 2018 Jiankui He shocked the international community with the following announcement: two female babies, "Lulu" and "Nana," whose germlines had been modified by the cutting edge, yet profoundly unsafe CRISPR-Cas9 technology had been born. This event galvanized policy makers and scientists to advocate for more explicit and firm regulation of human germline gene editing (GGE). Recent policy proposals attempt to integrate safety considerations and public input to identify specific types of diseases that may be safe targets for human GGE (Sarkar forthcoming; Guttinger. 2019. "Editing the Reactive Genome: Towards Postgenomic Ethics of Germline Editing." Journal of Applied Philosophy. "Editing the Reactive Genome: Towards Postgenomic Ethics of Germline Editing." Journal of Applied Philosophy. "Editing the Reactive Genome: Towards Postgenomic Ethics of Germline Editing." Journal of Applied Philosophy; Lander et al., 2019). This paper argues these policy proposals are inadequate in different ways. While Sarkar (forthcoming) intends to incorporate input from the disability community for the purpose of deciding the value of human GGE, I argue that his strategy for doing so is inadequate. I'll argue that an iterative, deliberative process is a more appropriate framework for allowing the disability community to inform policy on human GGE. Further policy proposals have been framed in terms of monogenetic or single-gene diseases (Guttinger. 2019. "Editing the Reactive Genome: Towards Postgenomic Ethics of Germline Editing." Journal of Applied Philosophy. "Editing the Reactive Genome: Towards Postgenomic Ethics of Germline Editing." Journal of Applied Philosophy. "Editing the Reactive Genome: Towards Postgenomic Ethics of Germline Editing." Journal of Applied Philosophy; Lander et al., 2019). I argue that this way of conceptualizing disease is not what matters for deciding which disorders are viable candidates for human GGE. Instead, what matters is that (1) the disease in question must have (among its set of causes) genes that have a high degree of causal control with respect to the disease and (2) alternative nucleic acid sequences variants that are likely to produce traits deemed desirable must be identified. Previous policy proposals leave (2) unspecified. What conditions must be met for satisfying condition (2) should not be left to individual scientists to decide for themselves. The present proposal offers some guidance on this issue.

Citizen Science and Scientific Objectivity: Mapping Out Epistemic Risks and Benefits

Given the importance of the issue of scientific objectivity in our democratic societies and the significant development of citizen science, it is crucial to investigate how citizen science may either undermine or foster scientific objectivity. This paper identifies a variety of epistemic risks and benefits that participation of lay citizens in scientific inquiries may bring. It also discusses concrete actions and pending issues that should be addressed in order to foster objectivity in citizen science programs.

Multiple diversity concepts and their ethical-epistemic implications

A concept of diversity is an understanding of what makes a group diverse that may be applicable in a variety of contexts. We distinguish three diversity concepts, show that each can be found in discussions of diversity in science, and explain how they tend to be associated with distinct epistemic and ethical rationales. Yet philosophical literature on diversity among scientists has given little attention to distinct concepts of diversity. This is significant because the unappreciated existence of multiple diversity concepts can generate unclarity about the meaning of "diversity," lead to problematic inferences from empirical research, and obscure complex ethical-epistemic questions about how to define diversity in specific cases. We illustrate some ethical-epistemic implications of our proposal by reference to an example of deliberative mini-publics on human tissue biobanking.