Shaping Science and Technology Policy: The Next Generation of Research

1. Ethics, Politics, and the Public: Shaping the Research Agenda

Introduction Despite the enormous sums of public money spent on scientific research in the United States—total federal research and development funding of $127 billion in FY 2004 (AAAS 2004)—there is not enough to fund every worthy project. Establishing an agenda for public research is thus an important and controversial task. This chapter compares four approaches to setting the federal agenda for publicly funded scientific research , focusing on the role of ethics advisory committees and lay participation in each. My primary concern is with the normative justification of each of the approaches, especially with regard to their implications for democratic politics. Three of the approaches have played important roles in the public funding of scientific research, and one points toward a plausible alternative. The first approach grants scientists sole authority to determine what projects they will pursue; the second continues to allow scientists considerable autonomy but imposes ethical constraints on research as determined by expert advisory committees. The third approach allocates federal science funding according to the results of 10 1 Ethics, Politics, and the Public Shaping the Research Agenda  .  self-interested lobbying by research institutions, universities, and other interested parties, complemented by public policy efforts to stimulate the commercialization of publicly funded research. None of these approaches provides a way to ensure that the public research agenda meets the needs and interests of ordinary citizens. The fourth approach, in contrast, seeks to integrate scientific and ethical concerns into a democratic political process involving the lay public. Ethics advisory committees, in this approach, do not have the task of establishing ideal ethical standards to be implemented by scientists and policymakers. Their goal is rather to articulate and clarify the ideas and ideals already implicit in contemporary practice. From this perspective, I argue, research ethics can be seen as one component within a system of democratic representation. And because representation in a democracy depends on the participation of the represented, establishing an ethically informed and publicly representative research agenda requires institutions that facilitate public involvement in the politics of science policy. The Ideology of Autonomous Science The leading approach to setting agendas for publicly funded science long granted scientific communities sole authority to determine its direction. During most of the Cold War era, an implicit “social contract for science ” gave scientists generous public funding and extensive freedom from political control in exchange for new defense, medical, and consumer technologies. This social contract was always a fragile construction , and scientists’ autonomy was never as complete as some nostalgic critics of political efforts to regulate science now claim.1 Nonetheless, it is widely agreed that until at least the early 1980s, two basic premises governed U.S. science policy: the scientific community is capable of regulating itself; and if it is allowed to regulate itself, science will produce technological benefits for society (Guston 2000, 66). Within this approach to setting the public research agenda, priorities are established both informally by particular scientific communities and formally by peer review. The use of peer review in the selection of projects, the allocation of grants, and the evaluation and publication of research results forces scientists to justify their projects to other scientists , occasionally to scientists from other disciplines, but generally not Brown: Ethics, Politics, and the Public 11 to nonscientists (cf. Chubin and Hackett 1990). Ethical considerations, according to this view, ought to affect the research agenda only insofar as individual scientists or particular scientific communities allow such considerations to influence their research priorities. Although some scholars have long argued for extending peer review processes to involve nonscientists (cf. Guston 2003, 35; Fuller 2000, 135–47; Funtowicz and Ravetz 1992), their suggestions have yet to enjoy more than token support. The image of science as a self-regulating community has been justified in various ways.2 Perhaps most commonly, scientists have argued that they deserve political autonomy because the scientific community is defined by its distinctively apolitical mode of pursuing truth, and the pursuit of truth is good in itself. Polanyi (1962) thus compared the scientific community to an economic market, in which scientists select problems and methods in order to produce as much truth as possible. Individual scientists adjust their efforts in response to the results achieved by other scientists, producing an aggregate result unanticipated and unattainable by any individual working alone. Political control of science, then, like political control of the market, promises only to disrupt this sublime process of mutual...