WHEN & WHERE
Thursday, March 27, 2025
5pm-6:30pm Pacific Time
Buchanan Tower, Room 1112, 1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
The 20th century social contract for science removed societal responsibility for scientists pursuing basic research. It was not their job to be concerned with the societal impact of their work. The 21st century found such removal untenable (in part because of concerns about dual-use research) and now scientists are widely regarded as having some responsibilities for the impact of their work, even if pursuing science solely for curiosity reasons. However, it has not been clear what the nature of these responsibilities are, what norms should shape that responsibility, whether such responsibility should limit scientific freedom, and what accountability structures should accompany such responsibility. In this talk, I will discuss this terrain, and provide some answers to these questions, answers that will be central to any new social contract for science.
Speaker:
Dr. Heather Douglas, Professor of Philosophy, Michigan State University
Dr. Heather Douglas’s work has been pivotal to current debate about the implications of recognizing that ‘value free’ ideals of objectivity are untenable; scientists and their institutions cannot exclude social, contextual values from inquiry and its results. In Science, Policy and the Value-Free Ideal (2009) she focused on questions about the roles values can (and should) legitimately play in science, a line of argument she has since developed in terms of a number of controversial policy issues, including research ethics, scientific freedom and regulation, science funding, and science-informed risk governance.
In her current work Dr. Douglas addresses questions about the role of scientific expertise in the context of democratic policy and decision making. She gave the 2016 Descartes Lectures, The Rightful Place of Science, and she recently published an article on “The Social Contract for Science and the Value-free Ideal” with T. Y. Branch (2024). Dr. Douglas has also edited several collections on science, policy and values, and authored reports on industry funding guidelines and on local decarbonization strategies, including one for the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy.
A Science and Technology Studies Colloquium, funded by the Public Humanities Hub-supported Research Cluster, Reasonable Trust: Fostering Humanities Methods in Public Engagement with Science and Technology.