Scientific Objectivity, Value Systems, and Policymaking

At its annual meeting in August 1999, the Ecological Society of America held a symposium, the goal of which was to promote discussion of the relationships among scientific objectivity, value systems, policy decisions, and communication between scientists and nonscientists. The participants, who were selected to represent a range of thinking in these areas, were asked to present their views on the general topic rather than to address a specific agenda. The major objectives of the symposium were (1) to explore the interrelationships among science, values, and policy; (2) to reveal the value system underlying the scientific judgments that support a policy position or management decision; (3) to understand how communication between scientists and nonscientists is influenced by language and values; and (4) to examine how scientific information is translated into policymaking and management decisions. Although framed here in the context of ecology, these issues are of great concern for all scientists because they address the role of science and scientists in society. “Dear Member of the Scientific Community, please join Dr. (Famous Scientist) and over 170 other esteemed scientists in support of our (fill in the blank) cause.” Over the last several years, biologists and ecologists have been deluged with calls from activists to advocate a variety of environmental causes. The purpose of these calls is to persuade a group of scientists to demonstrate to policymakers that they support a specified action on a particular issue. One example is a request for scientists to sign a letter to former Vice President Gore advocating establishment of a government interagency committee on invasive species. The letter was most likely one factor prompting President Clinton to issue Executive Order 13112, which established the National Invasive Species Council. The way that scientific information is presented may carry unintended meanings, especially to nonscientists. Science magazine published an article (Vitousek et al. 1997) announcing the unsurprising discovery that humans have become the dominant species on earth and illustrated the concept with a cover that showed the dark shadow of a human form cast upon a sunlit landscape. Perhaps Science did not intend to cast humans as an ominous presence on Earth. Other communications may explicitly advocate policy positions based on the individual's or group's interpretation of what constitutes the best current science. For example, the Sound Science Initiative of the Union of Concerned Scientists anticipates criticisms of what it considers sound science and provides advice on how to counter arguments that conflict with its policy positions. These examples can be multiplied many times over. Ecologists have debated among themselves whether to assume the role of policy advocates. Alarmed by the loss of pristine ecosystems to study, many ecologists say that environmental change is occurring too rapidly and that society should adopt policies to prevent, slow, or manage the changes to yield outcomes that they consider desirable. Statements that purport to be objective (in the sense of value free) and politically neutral (in the sense of advocacy free) are frequently based on the unstated values of the scientist, who often feels no obligation to express how personal values have influenced scientific judgment. Contrary to prevailing opinion, the scientific community is fully engaged in politics. Its lack of impact (if that is in fact the case) is due more to inexperience than to unwillingness to join the political debate. The question before us is whether this engagement comes at a cost too dear. The potential problem is this: Scientists who are perceived to have a political agenda lose their credibility, and policymakers can therefore ignore any scientific information they provide (Rykiel 1997). The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis published an essay at their Web site (www.nceas.ucsb.edu) by Fred Wagner (1999) entitled “Analysis and/or Advocacy: What Role(s) for Ecologists?” Wagner's essay focuses on the dichotomy of analyst (objective, impartial, value free) versus advocate (biased, value laden). Wagner fears that ecologists who take the role of advocate will lose their credibility in policymaking because policymakers and the public will perceive their scientific statements as biased by their political agenda. Scientists, he claims, should be as neutral as possible in playing the role of analyst to environmental policymakers and should eschew the role of advocate for particular policies that are best decided in a larger social context. He summarized his position in these terms: “Ecologists should impartially communicate scientific evidence.” Harold Mooney and Paul Ehrlich (1999) responded to Wagner's essay in a letter on the same Web site, asserting that “scientists have a responsibility to give their knowledge on relevant issues related to public welfare.” This assertion is not contrary to Wagner's position. However, Mooney and Ehrlich conflate imparting scientific knowledge with imparting a value judgment advocating a preferred decision or policy. They assert their underlying value that human welfare is the basis upon which scientists must decide what is good and what is bad policy. Because they believe the world to be in a situation that is inimical to ecosystem health, they believe that ecologists should become advocates of policies that seek to ameliorate the damaging effects of the population–environment interaction. They conclude, “If ecologists are not going to advocate steps to ameliorate it, who should?” Thus Wagner, Mooney, and Ehrlich all advocate engagement of scientists in the policymaking process, but Wagner recommends that ecologists behave as impartial providers of scientific information whereas Mooney and Ehrlich suggest that ecologists act as lobbyists for the policies they think are best. This debate illustrates in microcosm the struggles of ecologists to define an appropriate place between impartiality and advocacy. Scientists typically portray the information they provide to the public as objective and value free, with the implication that those traits confer greater weight to their opinions than should be accorded to the value laden opinions of nonscientists. The notion that scientific judgments are value free is disputed by both observers and practitioners of science (e.g., Costanza 2001). How can scientists be objective and at the same time advocate policies that embody value judgments? By definition, there cannot be neutral advocates of a policy. Many biologists and ecologists see no problem with using their scientific credentials to champion personal policy preferences (Lackey 2001). These individuals apparently do not recognize that their purportedly objective scientific judgments may be seen as compromised by their failure to state explicitly what their values are and how those values have influenced their scientific interpretations. Pouyat (1999) described some commonly heard criticisms that scientists are too removed from the real world, are not providing solutions to problems, and have not joined the political process. Yet when scientists join the political process, they are accused of loss of objectivity and bias, and their interpretations of knowledge and its application to policy development become just another opinion to be weighed along with all others in a political process that makes no sense to a scientific problem solver. Pouyat (1999) cites this incident: “Not one biologist or ecologist was asked to testify in a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on proposed legislation to reform the Endangered Species Act,” because “biologists and ecologists have a political agenda and there was no need to hear their views because the Committee already had testimony from several environmental groups.” He concluded that “if biologists and ecologists wish to be taken seriously in the policymaking process, they must work at being viewed as members of the scientific community rather than as part of the advocacy community” (p. 284).> According to Pouyat (1999), policymakers want the truth from scientists, not their personal opinions. This, of course, is an impossible expectation (Allen et al. 2001) that policymakers would not think to ask of themselves. The best that scientists and anyone else can do is separate, to the extent possible, what they believe to be objective reality from interpretations colored by their value systems. Carpenter and Gunderson (2001) suggest that the truth is that we must keep learning about how systems respond to our management and discard our notions of “once and for all” fixes for problems of biocomplexity. Finally, we must deal with the question of whether we will soon see the notion that there is such a thing as scientific objectivity replaced with normative science, wherein facts are weighed in proportion to their ability to fit preconceived “visions” of how the world ought to be. Postmodern philosophers deny that science is objective and suggest that scientists who strive for objectivity are naive realists. If there is no objective reality; if there are multiple, equally valid objective realities; or if there is no way to separate objective and subjective realities, then there is no point in trying to be objective and claims of objectivity are therefore false. Many scientists today have no qualms about using their credentials to advocate their values. Is this the wave of the future? Is ecosystem health, for example, a false paradigm whose proponents take advantage of the ecological ignorance of the public to advance the agenda of a small group of ecologists who claim to know what is best for human welfare? Or is ecosystem health a valid paradigm that can lead to a better way of ensuring human welfare? Are scientists supposed to stick to explaining what is possible and leave it to society to choose what is best? The articles that follow describe the reasoning behind various positions on these issues. In the first article, Lackey (2001) points out the pitfalls of allowing simple analogies to replace complex ecological realities. He examines the issues surrounding the concept of ecosystem health to illustrate the inherent conflicts that arise when values confound scientific analysis in the formulation of policy. He addresses the “insertion of personal values under the guise of ‘scientific’ impartiality.” Wagner (2001) makes the case that objective scientific information is distorted by political considerations. Wagner thinks that there is such a thing as objectivity in science and that it must be free of political influence to provide a sound scientific basis for policymaking. He illustrates his argument with examples drawn from federal agencies. He proposes two requirements to free scientific research from agency bias: (1) placing responsibility for policy setting and for research in separate, independent institutions; and (2) developing policies publicly rather than internally within an agency. Carpenter and Gunderson (2001) contend that environmental policies must be flexible because ecological systems are constantly changing. They illustrate the need for adaptive management using a computer game that challenges stakeholders to implement policies to sustain an integrated social-economic-ecological system. Using this model, stakeholders can visualize the results of imposing their values on the integrated system and experience the difficulty of managing for sustainability. Ecological economics is one of the new normative sciences that is based explicitly on values. Costanza (2001), a founder of ecological economics, argues that there is no such thing as scientific objectivity. He describes how science and values have been combined in this new field, and he suggests that the valuation component can be clearly distinguished from the scientific analysis component. His view is that policy is driven more by how we would like the world to be than by the scientific research needed to implement policy. He calls for nothing less than changing our vision of the way the world works and how we would like the world to be. Franz (2001) contends that the mere fact that science is done by humans introduces a value-based element to decisionmaking. He asks if there is a human value that is uniquely ecological. The lesson of ecology is that humans cannot exist without other species. In the interest of preserving humanity, people therefore have a special obligation to nature. Franz coins the new term vivantary to represent this previously unnamed responsibility. He suggests that humanity's vivantary responsibility should have the same legal standing as the widely recognized fiduciary responsibility of financial institutions. Allen and colleagues (2001) offer a middle ground between the philosophical extremes of modernist naive realism and the postmodernist denial of objectivity. Their choice of a middle ground is focused on concepts of quality and narrative that are little discussed in scientific circles. They propose that, instead of just stating the facts and assuming that truth emerges from the enumeration, scientists use narrative exposition to combine objective and subjective elements of science. They maintain that there is no single truth contained in context-free, “objective” information, and that many equally true narratives can be constructed from a single set of facts. However, in contrast to nonscientific storytelling, the narrator of a scientific story must take responsibility for the narrative and give reasons for the particular interpretations of the information on which the narrative is based. In essence, the path between the extremes is narrative explanation that is subject to testing and reinterpretation. Scientists naively believe that they know how to communicate and that it is the nonscientists who need to be educated to receive their message (Pouyat 1999). In the concluding article, Weber and Word (2001) discuss what happens when scientists and nonscientists attempt to communicate. In their studies, they have noted that scientists perceive communication as the sending of data that are received and absorbed by nonscientists. However, that view ignores the frame of reference of the receiver. They point out that nonscientists assume that scientists are advocating a position, while scientists believe that they are only providing objective information. Scientific knowledge is communicated in a public context of multiple frames of reference that may be disjointed, overlapping, or conflicting. Weber and Word support the view that facts take on meaning only when they are embedded in a story (narrative) that organizes them. Their work suggests that the education of biologists and ecologists could usefully include a communications component aimed at understanding the multifaceted interactions between what scientists say and what nonscientists hear. A key feature of this set of articles is that there is a continuum between the artificially dichotomized aspects of science: objective versus subjective, value free versus value laden, neutral versus advocatory. These concepts are not polar opposites without middle ground, as has been suggested in connection with the “science wars” (Gould 2000). Scientists can be guided by the standard of objectivity even if absolute objectivity is unattainable. Scientific procedures are aimed at minimizing subjectivity, not at the unattainable goal of eliminating it. At the heart of virtually every environmental issue is the question of what is best for people. Human welfare is the basis for essentially all governmental policymaking. The Endangered Species Act of 1973, widely considered a model of consideration for other species, begins with this finding on the part of the US Congress: “These species of fish, wildlife, and plants are of esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people.” Even when it appears that concern is entirely focused on another species or a wild land ecosystem, the underlying premise is that what is good for other species and ecosystems must ultimately be good for people. Although every scientist is just as confusing a mixture of impartiality and advocacy as every nonscientist, each scientist adheres to a methodology that seeks to reduce the subjective element as much as possible (Ford 2000). Understanding this subtle but fundamental distinction between science-based and nonscience-based forms of argument is crucial to understanding what the scientist has to say to society. Of course scientists have values. Therefore, nonscientists are not asking too much of scientists to distinguish their values from their scientific interpretations, given that this distinction can never be complete and perfect. The views expressed in the box below are not meant to be a thorough discussion of issues related to extinction. They are intended only as an example of one possible way to draw the distinction between scientific interpretation and an individual's values as part of a science-based policy evaluation. Scientists can and should be both objective and concerned. However, they bear a special responsibility to make a distinction between scientific statements and the values they associate with those statements. As the human population grows ever larger and the global ecosystem is increasingly burdened by human habits, it is incumbent on scientists to express their values. Scientists are often the first to perceive effects and processes that may be harmful to humans. They are in effect an early warning system (Pouyat 1999), the human equivalent of the canary in the coal mine. However, when scientists fail to distinguish their value system from the scientific information they are providing, they compromise the integrity of the scientific process and its potential contributions to society. I wish to express special thanks to the authors of this issue of BioScience. Without them, there would have been neither a symposium at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting nor this stimulating special issue. My viewpoint as a scientist is based on the question, What is the science? Reaching an answer would go something like this: Research reports indicate that many species are becoming extinct because of human actions. Here is the evidence that species are in danger of extinction. These species perform ecological functions that are necessary to maintain certain ecological properties. Here is what is likely to happen if current trends continue. My objective scientific opinion of what I read is that the evidence is weak, strong, or insufficient. Here is the uncertainty associated with the reported conclusions. If the evidence is insufficient or weak, here is the science that needs to be done to reduce uncertainty. My viewpoint as a citizen is based on the question, What are my values? I value biodiversity and would choose to have more species rather than fewer. I believe that other species have a right to exist and that humans should not cause species to become extinct. I believe on the basis of the scientific evidence that the loss of species can harm humans through mechanisms that result in degrading the ecological properties cited earlier. I value human life and believe that we should do what is necessary to protect our population and culture. My interpretation of where the current trend may lead is to more extinctions. Therefore, I advocate a policy that governments should take whatever action is necessary to prevent the extinction of any species, because such a policy ultimately benefits the human population of Earth. The evidence is equivocal at this time, but the problem is potentially so injurious to humans that I advocate this policy.