Inmaculada de Melo-Martin

Many have advocated for engaging publics with science as a way to advance various important goals: democratizing science, increasing social benefits, producing better science, and promoting trust. The enthusiasm for what public engagement can achieve has, however, been mitigated because of several problems. These include conflicts between goals, disagreements between scientists and publics about which of these goals are more important in particular cases, and implementation problems. Here we call attention to a deeper problem that has been neglected: the goals that public engagement is said to seek are ambiguous and can be conceptualized in a variety of distinct ways. We argue that conceptualized in certain ways, some of the goals are worth pursuing and their achievement could help transform knowledge production and further the positive effects on science in society. We show, however, that common engagement strategies are often inadequate as means to attain the goals so understood. Under other conceptualizations, achieving these goals, though not insignificant, is unlikely to produce substantial changes to the relationships between science and society. In these cases, engagement strategies might well constitute appropriate means, but it is not obvious that the benefits would be worth the costs. Finally, some possible conceptualizations of some of these goals would render them undesirable. Although some engagement strategies could achieve them, it is problematic to try to do so. The upshot of our arguments is that without clarifying the meaning of the goal that we hope to achieve by engaging the public with science, we are bound to make incorrect assessments both about the worthiness of the goal and whether it can be accomplished by engaging the public. These challenges do not show that public engagement with science should be abandoned, but they provide further reasons to temper our expectations regarding what public engagement can achieve and when it might be worth doing so.

Although it seems both ethically and epistemically appropriate to engage with publics to ensure that values used in research consider the interests of relevant stakeholders, doing so successfully faces serious challenges. Because values play central roles in drug and medical device research, using the USA Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) attempts to incorporate stakeholders’ values can offer insights into these problems. I point out challenges regarding the incorporation of what are arguably legitimate but conflicting values from relevant stakeholders. Identifying these challenges is necessary to determine what strategies might be more likely to address them.

Reprogenetic technologies, which combine the power of reproductive techniques with the tools of genetic science and technology, promise prospective parents a remarkable degree of control to pick and choose the likely characteristics of their offspring. Not only can they select embryos with or without particular genetically-related diseases and disabilities but also choose embryos with non-disease related traits such as sex. Prominent authors such as Agar, Buchanan, DeGrazia, Green, Harris, Robertson, Savulescu, and Silver have flocked to the banner of reprogenetics. For them, increased reproductive choice and reduced suffering through the elimination of genetic disease and disability are just the first step. They advocate use of these technologies to create beings who enjoy longer and healthier lives, possess greater intellectual capacities, and are capable of more refined emotional experiences. Indeed, Harris and Savulescu in particular take reprogenetic technologies to be so valuable to human beings that they have insisted that their use is not only morally permissible but morally required. Rethinking Reprogenetics challenges this mainstream view with a contextualised, gender-attentive philosophical perspective. De Melo-Martín demonstrates that you do not have to be a Luddite, social conservative, or religious zealot to resist the siren song of reprogenetics. Pointing out the flawed nature of the arguments put forward by the technologies' proponents, Rethinking Reprogenetics reveals the problematic nature of the assumptions underpinning current evaluations of these technologies and offers a framework for a more critical and sceptical assessment.

Reliable scientific knowledge allows us to better understand the natural world, grounds interventions to improve health and wellbeing of humans and other entities, contributes to economic development, and informs policymaking. Ensuring the integrity of scientific research is necessary to advance these various benefits and to safeguard the public's warranted trust in science. Although a variety of complex factors are likely to play a role in advancing or hindering research integrity, some evidence shows that institutional and national policies can be more or less conducive to promoting research integrity and preventing misconduct. I focus here on Spain. I critically assess Spanish legislation and institutional policies and argue that while they proclaim ethical values consistent with fostering research integrity and preventing misconduct, these values fail to be put into practice. I explain some factors that contribute to these failings, and I also offer some suggestions that could contribute to ensuring the respect of ethical values already enshrined in Spanish policies.

Reprogenetic technologies have been enthusiastically embraced by well-known authors who argue that these technologies increase reproductive choice, contribute to a reduction of suffering by eliminating genetic diseases and disabilities, and offer the opportunity to improve the human condition by creating beings who will live much longer and healthier lives, have better intellectual capacities, and enjoy more refined emotional experiences. Indeed, some take reprogenetic technologies to be so valuable to human beings that they believe their use is not only morally permissible but morally required. More often than not, however, proponents of reprogenetic technologies treats these technologies as mere value-neutral tools, limiting their assessments to risk and benefit considerations. In this chapter I bring insights from philosophy of technology regarding the value-laden nature of technologies to bear on bioethical analyses of reprogenetics. I challenge proponents’ assumption that an evaluation of risk and benefits is all is needed to determine the moral permissibility or impermissibility of developing and using reprogenetic technologies. I argue that a robust ethical analysis requires attention to the relationship between contextual values and technological development and implementation, as well as to the ways in which technologies reinforce or transform human values by mediating our perceptions of the world and our reasons for action. Ignoring the value-laden nature of reprogenetic technologies results not just in incomplete ethical evaluations but in distorted ones.

Science is our most reliable producer of knowledge. Nonetheless, a significant amount of evidence shows that pluralities of members of publics question a variety of accepted scientific claims as well as policies and recommendation informed by the scientific evidence. Scientific misinformation is considered to play a central role in this state of affairs. In this paper, I challenge the emphasis on misinformation as a primary culprit on two grounds. First, the phenomenon of misinformation is far less clear than what much discussion about the topic would lead one to believe. The evidence regarding the amount of misinformation that exits as well as its role in people’s harmful behaviors is at best conflicting and at worst completely useless. Second, the prominence given to misinformation and its harms on people’s behaviors disregards the role of values in policymaking and treats scientific information as if it were the only information necessary to make policy decisions. At a minimum, these problems call for caution regarding the emphasis on this phenomenon. After all, if the problem is incorrectly diagnosed, the solutions that are being offered to address the problem of misinformation are bound to at best inadequate and at worst dangerous.

Philosophers of science have come to accept that contextual values can play unavoidable and desirable roles in science. This has raised concerns about the need to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate value influences in scientific inquiry. I discuss here four such concerns: epistemic distortion, value imposition, undermining of public trust in science, and the use of objectionable values. I contend that preserving epistemic integrity and avoiding value imposition provide good reasons to attempt to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in science. However, the trust and the objectionable values concerns constitute no good reason for demarcation criteria.

Biobanks are important resources for improving public health and individual care. Some legal frameworks can be more or less conducive to advancing the potential benefits of biobanks. The purpose of this article is to assess biobanking legislation and practices in Spain to determine how well they fare in such a regard. We focus here on some of the primary ethical values that ground relevant legislation and that we believe are consistent with promoting biobanking benefits: the value of scientific research; efficient use of scarce resources; and respect for the dignity of donors. We argue that although Spanish regulations advance these values in important ways, they also have provisions that undermine them and thus risk limiting the potential benefits of biobanks. We offer some suggestions for improvement.

During emerging public health crises, both policymakers and members of the public are looking to scientific experts to provide guidance. Even in cases where there are significant uncertainties, there is pressure for experts to “speak with one voice” to avoid confusion, allow officials to make evidence-based decisions rapidly, and encourage public support for such decisions. This can lead experts to engage in masking of information about the state of the science or regarding assumptions involved in policy recommendations. Although experts might have good reasons for masking disagreements, uncertainties, or assumptions when offering policy advice, we argue that this strategy can result in epistemic harms. Using the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that public health authorities masked two types of information necessary for laypersons to evaluate public health recommendations: (1) experts’ disagreements about the scientific evidence and (2) the role of values in making inferences from the science to policy positions. We contend that this resulted in epistemic harms against laypeople that provide a pro tanto case against masking information. We further argue that when the science is in flux and policies need to be implemented despite significant uncertainties, there is an all-things-considered case against masking the types of information discussed.

The growing commercialization of science has raised concerns about financial conflicts of interest (COIs). Evidence suggests that such conflicts threaten the integrity of research and the well-being of research participants. Trying to minimize these negative effects, federal agencies, academic institutions, and publishers have developed conflict-of-interest policies. Among such policies, recommendations or requirements to disclose financial COIs to potential research participants and patients have become commonplace. Here, I argue that disclosing conflicts of interest to potential research participants fails to achieve the weighty moral goals that presumably ground such policies. This is so either because disclosure is simply a wrong means for achieving some of the goals in question or because, although disclosure could be an appropriate means for some of those goals, the way in which it is implemented prevents fulfillment of the desirable moral aim.

Philosophers of science, particularly those working on science and values, often talk about the need for science to be socially responsible. However, what this means is not clear. In this paper, we review the contributions of philosophers of science to the debate over socially responsible science and explore the dimensions that a fruitful account of socially responsible science should address. Our review shows that offering a comprehensive account is difficult. We contend that broad calls for socially responsible science that fail to attend to relevant dimensions are not the solution, as they preclude meaningful changes to research institutions and practices. We conclude that narrower, more explicit accounts are more likely to lead to substantive transformation.

When the COVID-19 surge hit New York City hospitals, the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College, and our affiliated ethics consultation services, faced waves of ethical issues sweeping forward with intensity and urgency. In this article, we describe our experience over an eight-week period (16 March through 10 May 2020), and describe three types of services: clinical ethics consultation (CEC); service practice communications/interventions (SPCI); and organizational ethics advisement (OEA). We tell this narrative through the prism of time, describing the evolution of ethical issues and trends as the pandemic unfolded. We delineate three phases: anticipation and preparation, crisis management, and reflection and adjustment. The first phase focused predominantly on ways to address impending resource shortages and to plan for remote ethics consultation, and CECs focused on code status discussions with surrogates. The second phase was characterized by the dramatic convergence of a rapid increase in the number of critically ill patients, a growing scarcity of resources, and the reassignment/ redeployment of staff outside their specialty areas. The third phase was characterized by the recognition that while the worst of the crisis was waning, its medium- and long-term consequences continued to pose immense challenges. We note that there were times during the crisis that serving in the role of clinical ethics consultant created a sense of dis-ease as novel as the coronavirus itself. In retrospect we learned that our activities far exceeded the familiar terrain of clinical ethics consultation and extended into other spheres of organizational life in novel ways that were unanticipated before this pandemic. To that end, we defined and categorized a middle level of ethics consultation, which we have termed service practice communication intervention (SPCI). This is an underappreciated dimension of the work that ethics consult services are capable of in times of crisis. We believe that the pandemic has revealed the many enduring ways that ethics consultation services can more robustly contribute to the ethical life of their institutions moving forward.

Several have argued that the aims of scientific research are not always independent of social and ethical values. Yet this is often assumed only to have implications for decisions about what is studied, or which research projects are funded, and not for methodological decisions or standards of evidence. Using the case of the recently developed HPV vaccines, we argue that the social aims of research can also play important roles in justifying decisions about (1) how research problems are defined in drug development, (2) evidentiary standards used in testing drug “success”, and (3) clinical trial methodology. As a result, attending to the social aims at stake in particular research contexts will produce more rational methodological decisions as well as more socially relevant science.

Dissent is thought to play a valuable role in science, so that scientific communities ought to create opportunities for receiving critical feedback and take dissenting views seriously. There is concern, however, that some dissent does more harm than good. Dissent on climate change and evolutionary theory, for example, has confused the public, created doubt about existing consensus, derailed public policy, and forced scientists to devote resources to respond. Are there limits to the extent to which scientific communities have obligations to seek and engage dissenting views? We consider the two main criteria that have been offered for what constitutes “normatively appropriate dissent” or the sort of dissent that ought to have the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously. Many have argued that dissenters must (1) engage in uptake of criticism against their own views and (2) share some standards for theory appraisal. We argue these criteria ultimately are unsuccessful.

Although there is increased recognition of the inevitable--and perhaps sometimes beneficial-- role of values in scientific inquiry, there are also growing concerns about the potential for commercial values to lead to bias. This is particularly evident in biomedical research. There is a concern that conflicts of interest created by commercialization may lead to biased reasoning or methodological choices in testing drugs and medical interventions. In addition, such interests may lead research in directions that are unresponsive to pressing social needs, when it is profitable to do so. Feminist philosophy of science seems particularly well situated to provide resources to help address such concerns because this literature has both 1) theorized about how to minimize biases in science, e.g., sexist or androcentric biases, and 2) generated accounts of objectivity that do not require individual scientists to be value-neutral or disinterested. Two such accounts are assessed in relation to concerns about commercial bias: those offered by feminist empiricism and standpoint feminism. We argue that standpoint feminism is more promising because it has resources to address, not just the epistemological, but also the inescapably ethical dimensions of commercial bias.

Despite increasing recognition of the ways in which ethical and social values play a role in science (Kitcher 2001; Longino 1990, 2002), scientists are often still reluctant to acknowledge or discuss ethical and social values at stake in their research. Even when research is closely connected to developing public policy, it is generally held that it should be empirical data, and not the values of scientists, that inform policy. According to this view, scientists need not, and should not, endorse non-epistemic values related to their research, as doing so may bias their assessment of what the evidence is. As a result, debates over science-based policy tend to be construed solely as empirical discussions to be..

Recently, some have proposed moral bioenhancement as a solution to the serious moral evils that humans face. Seemingly disillusioned with traditional methods of moral education, proponents of bioenhancement believe that we should pursue and apply biotechnological means to morally enhance human beings. Such proposal has generated a lively debate about the permissibility of moral bioenhancement. We argue here that such debate is specious. The claim that moral bioenhancement is a solution – whether permissible or not – to the serious moral problems that affect human beings is based on several problematic framing assumptions. We evaluate here three of such assumptions: the first rests on a contested understanding of morality, the second consist in a mistaken conception of human moral problems, and the third relates to problematic presuppositions grounding the interpretation of existent scientific evidence presented to defend moral bioenhancement. Once these framing assumptions are identified and critically evaluated, it becomes clear that the moral bioenhancement debate is misguided

Although science is our most reliable producer of knowledge, it can also be used to create ignorance, unjustified doubt, and misinformation. In doing so, agnotological practices result not only in epistemic harms but also in social ones. A way to prevent or minimise such harms is to impede these ignorance-producing practices. In this paper, I explore various challenges to such a proposal. I first argue that reliably identifying agnotological practices in a way that permits the prevention of relevant harms is more difficult than it might appear. I focus on an identifying criterion that many find apt for the task: bad faith motives. I then consider an objection—that reliable criteria are unnecessary to successfully address the concerns raised by agnotological strategies—and I show that it fails. I conclude by exploring other ways of conceptualising the problems attributed to agnotological practices. In particular, I challenge the focus on misinformation as the main problem of concern.

A significant amount of scientific evidence shows that childhood vaccination constitutes one of the most successful and cost-effective public health interventions of the last century. It has saved millions of lives. Nonetheless, many parents are reluctant or outright hostile to having their children vaccinated. Similarly, in spite of the fact that vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are highly effective in protecting people against death and serious illness, about a third of adults in the United States are still unvaccinated as of July 2022. What leads people to be skeptical of vaccines or to refuse them altogether?The dominant narrative answering this...

Pregnant women are insistently urged to limit or eliminate risks to their fetuses. This is done even when the risks to fetuses are only theoretical or minimal, and the health and well-being of the pregnant woman is at stake. When using reproductive and reprogenetic technologies, however, evaluations about what risks are acceptable to impose on embryos change radically. In the context of these technologies, women are not only allowed to impose risks on embryos, but actively encouraged to do so-insofar as they can be urged to use these technologies for various reasons. This article explores the problematic beliefs and social norms regarding motherhood that shape these apparently inconsistent risk evaluations.