Let us consider certain types of oaths sworn by people. The most common type of oath is a marriage oath. Before witnesses, a person swearing a marriage oath may swear something such as "I, John, take you, Mary, to be my lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part." Although such a vow does not explicitly pledge exclusive sexual fidelity, such a vow implicitly suggests such a thing, and seems to imply that one partner will be faithful to another partner for the remainder of his life (or at least a good long time). So having heard her husband recite such an oath, a wife has at least some basis for thinking that her husband is not fooling aound with some other woman. The marriage oath creates at least some expectation of good behavior that the husband will be expected to live up to.
There is another type of oath sworn by public servants in the United States, people such as members of the House of Representatives, senators and governers. The oath goes something like this: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter." Such an oath does not promise terribly much. But at least it creates an expectation that the person swearing will do the job that he has been given. So if a newly elected US senator swears such an oath, we will have reason to expect that he will at least occasionally show up at the US Senate to cast votes, and that he will not spend the next six years only doing things like touring the world on his yacht or hanging out at posh luxury destinations.
To become a President of the United States, you must swear an oath promising "I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Lyndon Johnson taking the Presidential Oath of Office
Then there is the oath sworn by doctors, the Hippocratic Oath. There is a tradition of swearing such an oath, dating back more than two thousand years. A modern version of the oath is below, and according to this page it is used by many medical schools:
"I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
I will not be ashamed to say 'I know not,' nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help."
Rather than using this oath, quite a few medical schools use an oath from what is called the Declaration of Geneva. The current version of the oath goes like this:
"AS A MEMBER OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION:
- I SOLEMNLY PLEDGE to dedicate my life to the service of humanity;
- THE HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF MY PATIENT will be my first consideration;
- I WILL RESPECT the autonomy and dignity of my patient;
- I WILL MAINTAIN the utmost respect for human life;
- I WILL NOT PERMIT considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient;
- I WILL RESPECT the secrets that are confided in me, even after the patient has died;
- I WILL PRACTICE my profession with conscience and dignity and in accordance with good medical practice;
- I WILL FOSTER the honour and noble traditions of the medical profession;
- I WILL GIVE to my teachers, colleagues, and students the respect and gratitude that is their due;
- I WILL SHARE my medical knowledge for the benefit of the patient and the advancement of healthcare;
- I WILL ATTEND TO my own health, well-being, and abilities in order to provide care of the highest standard;
- I WILL NOT USE my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat;
- I MAKE THESE PROMISES solemnly, freely and upon my honour."
Knowing that doctors have sworn oaths such as these, it is may be logical for us to expect that doctors will follow high standards of moral behavior. But anyone watching HBO's recent series The Crime of the Century will be shocked to discover that many thousands of doctors did not at all follow such high standards of behavior, and were some of the principal players in an opioid overdose epidemic that led to more than 500,000 unnecessary deaths by opioid overdoses in the United States alone.
Besides these professionals, there are very many professionals who do the equivalent of swearing an oath, by signing contracts pledging that their behavior will be good. For example, if you arrange for some remodeling of your house, you may sign a contract, and when the contractor or electrician or plumber signs the same contract, he will typically pledge to do work according to the prevailing professional standards. Contract programmers often sign contracts with clauses that are pledges to do work according to industry standards.
But what about scientists? Is there any oath that they swear to, one that should cause us to expect high moral behavior from them? It would seem that some oath of integrity would be even more necessary for scientists than for physicians. A physician has the power to control what you think about the state of your body, but scientists have a much broader power: the power to shape what billions believe about the basic nature of life, mind and the universe. A physician doing the wrong things can damage a few hundred lives, but if scientists such as a nuclear physicist or genetic engineer do the wrong thing, they may imperil millions or billions of lives. Nonetheless, the vast majority of scientists have never sworn any oath in which they promised to speak truthfully or act morally.
In September 2000 a bunch of scientists got together for a day-long meeting in which they debated whether there should be some type of oath for scientists, and what it might be. The meeting is discussed in the long article here. It seems that no agreement was reached about any oath for scientists.
I can imagine a good oath for scientists to swear. It might have elements such as this:
- "I promise to follow high standards of integrity, honesty and excellence in all experimental and observational activities, and in my reports about all such activities.
- I promise never to do work that imperils my fellow human beings.
- I promise never to claim understanding of matters I do not understand.
- I promise not to claim my team or my colleagues or my scientist predecessors have proven something that has not been proven.
- I promise not to describe speculations or theories as if they were facts.
- I promise to make no false statements about scientific matters."
But scientists swear no such oath. I can understand why a careerist scientist might not want to pledge to do no work that imperils his fellow human beings. Very much of US scientific funding comes from military spending or from corporations (some of which are more interested in making money than protecting the public from harm).
Some of the worst inventions in history are the fruits of scientific activity. By inventing the atomic bomb and the far more dangerous hydrogen bomb, the physicists held a gun to mankind's head, a gun that is still pointed at mankind's head, since thousands of nuclear weapons still exist. Besides inventing Zyklon-B, the chemical that enabled the gas chambers of the Holocaust, the chemists created the unnecessary inventions of napalm and the defoliation agent Agent Orange, which produced millions of pointless deaths and birth defects in the Vietnam War. The deaths coming from the sticky horror of burning napalm were some of the most painful deaths humans have ever suffered.
The biologists may be the next group of scientists to hold a gun to mankind's head. By tampering with genes, there may come from some biology lab a danger worse than COVID-19 (something which mysteriously originated in a city with a large lab for studying viruses). This should not surprise you when you consider that scientists do not pledge to avoid work that harms mankind. A recent Scientific American article is entitled "Why Scientists Tweak Lab Viruses to Make Them More Contagious."
The oath of office of people such as US senators and US presidents does not involve any pledge of truthfulness. But while running for office, a candidate for the US senate or the US presidency will typically state that he or she will tell the truth. In his or her speeches, the person may say something like this:
"I'm not like that other guy running. You can't believe that liar. But you'll get nothing but the truth from me."
But it seems that the typical person becoming a professor does not even informally promise to tell the truth. He may refer abstractly to "scientist codes of conduct." But it is hard to remember any professor or scientist who even informally pledged to tell nothing but the truth. Why should we not expect to get from materialist science professors behavior like that of the materialist communists of the Soviet Union, who had no regrets about lying whenever they thought it could be justified by some "ends justify the means" rationale? The rule of such communists seemed to be that it is okay to tell any lie, as long as it promotes the glorious final goal of promoting the triumph and survival of communism. We may wonder whether materialist professors think privately to themselves that it is okay to tell little lies whenever it promotes what they think is the "glorious final end" of getting people to believe in materialism or Darwinism.
When a scientist appeals to "scientist norms" or "scientist codes of conduct," he is generally not referring to anything that has been written down. It is not clear why something so nebulous should do very much to keep someone from going astray. There seems to be no well-known book devoted to articulating a scientist code of conduct.
Some of our scientists teach the appalling nonsense of free will denial. You should never expect moral behavior from anyone who advances such a doctrine. Instead, because he thinks he is not to blame for anything he does, you should expect him to act immorally whenever it benefits him.
I see that two people wrote a paper entitled "The Scientist's Pledge" proposing a pledge of rectitude scientists should make when getting a PhD. The paper states this:
"Medical students transition to their profession with the recitation of the Hippocratic Oath. However, no analogous oath has been widely adopted for students graduating with doctorates of philosophy (PhDs) in the various sciences."
As of this writing, the paper has been cited only one time. A similar paper entitled "A Scientist's Oath" has been cited only two times. It seems our professors are not very interested in affirming or pledging their good behavior.
Ethics is not a branch of science, but a branch of philosophy (something many science professors wrongly scorn as irrelevant). Scientists often strive to make "value free" assessments of physical reality, and may regard a scientific paper as being "sullied" if it promotes a moral viewpoint. It is not at all clear why we should expect high moral behavior from those who may regard moral standpoints as distractions from scientific objectivity. The main operating principle of our scientists sometimes seems to be "behave and speak as your peers behave or speak" rather than "follow your conscience."
We currently have an ecosystem in scientific academia that rather seems to reward shady behavior rather than stringent truthfulness. The main performance metric used to judge professors is the number of published papers they have written and the number of citations such papers have got. Such metrics are used to determine whether professors get promoted or get tenure. There is a "publication bias" that disfavors papers describing null results, and favors papers claiming interesting results. The more interesting the claimed result, the more citations a paper will get, regardless of whether its research can be replicated.
In fact, papers with results that cannot be replicated are (according to one study) about 153 times more likely to be cited than papers with research that can be replicated. Such a system would seem to push experts towards poor conduct and shady speech, in which they use questionable research practices to produce false alarms, and claim research accomplishments that were not actually achieved, for the sake of getting higher numbers of paper citations. Given such an ecosystem, which seems to incentivize bad behavior, we should not be terribly surprised by honesty shortfalls from our experts.
Many scientists make statements that may have a corrosive effect on morality. Explain to a man some of the very many reasons for thinking that both his multifaceted mind and the mountainous degree of hierarchical organization and purposeful dynamism in his body may have a divine source, and such a man may regard himself as someone who should live up to some transcendent moral ideals. But if you do your best to hide such reasons and tell a man that he is "just an animal" (a lie that many modern scientists are fond of telling), such a man may have no tendency to act in a particularly moral way.
Instead of establishing a pledge of good conduct that scientists should swear, some of the science establishment these days is promoting a dubious "Trust Science" pledge. The pledge states the following:
“Trust in evidence-based, scientific facts is essential for providing sustainable solutions to today’s challenges. By adding my name to this declaration and pledge, I recognize the key role that scientific research and discovery play in improving quality of life for all. I pledge to trust science.”
An online page asking you to pledge such a trust has got the grand total of 4566 people to sign such a pledge. Oops, it seems the public has no great eagerness to pledge a trust in scientists.
Asking for "trust" is what goes on when you are not dealing with proven facts. No one would ever ask you to trust the belief that the sun is very hot or that microbes cause diseases or that planets have a gravitational pull. But if someone is asking you to believe something that is not a proven fact, he might ask you for a pledge of trust. A wife's husband might ask her to trust that he is faithful, but would never ask her to trust that he is a male.
The word "science" is defined in many different ways. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines science as "the careful study of the structure and behavior of the physical world, especially by watching, measuring, and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities." Theorists often go wrong, so there is no particular reason we should pledge to "trust science" defined in such a way. In fact, such a pledge would seem to be contrary to the true spirit of science, which is about trying to build up sufficient observations about a topic to eliminate a need for trust.
Nowadays what we read on the most popular science web sites is a strange mixture of fact, observational results, speculation, hype, clickbait, triumphalist legends, ideology, corporate propaganda and entertainment weakly rooted in observations. Rather than pledging to "trust science," people should pledge to subject the statements of scientists and science journalists to the same critical scrutiny they apply to the statements of politicians and political lobbyists, always asking, "What part of this is fact and what part is not fact?"
As for the clause "I recognize the key role that scientific research and discovery play in improving quality of life for all," it sounds like something straight from a PR desk. The quality of human life was not improved when atomic weapons or napalm were invented, and there is reason for suspecting that the qualify of life may have recently been very much harmed (or will one day be very greatly harmed) by reckless microbe research. Rather than asking for "pledges of trust" which sound like authoritarian oaths of fealty sworn in dictatorships, it would be better to work on improving scientist behavior and scientific truthfulness standards so that our trust in the work of scientists comes naturally rather than being ginned up by pledge-seeking sites.
No comments:
Post a Comment