Virtue Metascience

What good is science anyway?

Editor’s note: Macroscience publishes a range of ideas: hot takes, warm takes, and evidence-informed pieces that aren’t takes at all. This one is a delightful hot take. While I don’t agree with everything here, I do think that the virtue ethics and consequentialist lenses are useful for evaluating both individual and institutional behavior in science.

I want individual scientists to be inspired by virtue ethics, but the NIH should focus on actual cancer research outcomes. And I might want firefighters to be brave and self sacrificing, but I judge whether they’re a good use of tax dollars by whether they put out fires. It’s a matter of how we apply different lenses. I hope this piece increases both your measurable wellbeing and your virtue.

Thomas Aquinas, virtue and science enjoyer. Source.

What good is science anyway?

In metascience, the reflexive answer to this question relies on the by-now standard Progress Studies playbook. We flip open the history books and review the annals of innovations that lifted societies out of poverty, eliminated sources of illness and decay, and made previously fantastical feats ordinary and accessible to all. For Progress Studies, science is good because it is the fuel of progress, because it provides for the “relief of man’s estate,” to quote Francis Bacon.

These are doubtless powerful and persuasive narratives, but ones rooted fundamentally in material outcomes. The message is this: science seems to provide overwhelming benefits relative to the resources invested in it, so we should seek to reverse the decline in the speed of scientific progress.

But the utilitarian calculus is not the only way to justify the importance of science. What if we were not quite so pragmatic about what science has to offer society? What if we instead rooted our desire to promote science in the inherent good of science itself?

Call it “virtue metascience.” From this perspective, it is of course valuable that scientists and scientific institutions deliver breakthrough innovations that expand our health and wealth. But more important is the critical moral value of science itself. As a well-functioning and healthy practice, science will foster a dedication to the truth and a methodical, long-term commitment to resolving hard problems that grounds a virtuous society. In other words, the cultivation of good character that occurs in a healthy practice of science should be a core motivation for supporting, reforming, accelerating, and expanding scientific discovery.

The divergence between today’s metascience and this alternative position roughly parallels the distinction between consequentialist and virtue ethics. The consequentialist roots their choices in an analysis of what produces the best outcomes, limiting the costs while maximizing the benefits. The virtue ethicist instead proceeds from asking what a virtuous person who embodies higher values — courage, justice, wisdom — would engage in regardless of the outcomes. They ground decisions in these virtues, pursuing action that encourages their moral development and flourishing.

In such a view, science is desirable because a society which pursues it is a good society. End of story. It is worth noting that this view is in many ways the historical conception of science: Aristotle defended contemplation of the truth and first principles — theoria — as the highest virtue. Thomas Aquinas proposed that diligent study — studiositas — was a moral good. The more consequentialist vision of science we are familiar with in the modern era descends from Francis Bacon and was more recently institutionalized through the postwar thought of Vannevar Bush. After all, Endless Frontier explicitly treats science as a necessary tool in the “war against disease,” and for the development of “new and improved weapons” and “new and better and cheaper products,” rather than for the cultivation of the person.

Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, one of the origins of scientific instrumentalism. Source.

We suspect that “virtue metascience” thinking would be hard for a metascientist — so rooted in economic rationalization — to accept. There cannot be a “virtue surplus” created by science that would accrue to the public or to certain stakeholders. The virtuous benefits of science would be hard to measure, and perhaps impossible to run randomized controlled trials on. For a field that calls itself a “science of science,” reorienting science policy to virtuous objectives might seem to undermine the careful, methodical, and quantitative approach that has shaped the field and its government strategy.

But with the architecture of American science undergoing its most volatile period in decades, the established epistemological approach of metascience may itself be under threat. Technological change, dramatic funding shifts, and organizational convulsion may make it practically harder to conduct the kinds of careful, long-term studies that metascience has enshrined as the gold standard of its work. As public trust in scientists and scientific institutions continues to decline, science’s political defense may need to rely on more than empirical studies of its value, especially if results become increasingly difficult to acquire.

Locating the value of science in the cultivation of virtue offers an alternative framing for many of the existing issues in metascience. The consequentialist sees the endemic problems of reproducibility in the sciences and fears that these systemic issues will introduce frictions that slow progress. The virtue metascientist sees the reproducibility crisis as a moral problem, a product of the corrosion of the very virtues necessary to the practice of science. Both want to make progress on the issue for fundamentally different reasons and by radically divergent, and perhaps even opposing, means.

Similarly, the consequentialist is excited about focused research organizations (FROs) because they promise more efficient scientific discoveries than the bureaucracy-choked world of the conventional research university allows. The virtue metascientist is interested in FROs precisely because they cultivate virtues of the scientific endeavor which have been eroded by the institutional dynamics that turn modern scientists into managerial grant-writing machines. Both are excited about the prospect of more experimentation in science’s organizational forms.

Virtue metascience would have distinct advantages and makes the case for supporting certain kinds of science more readily apparent. Under a consequentialist regime, exploratory, open-ended “basic science” often requires a great deal of justification. Pure curiosity does not guarantee practical results, and the link to real world applications can be diffuse — or even taken as an article of faith. In contrast, virtue metascience backs basic science by default: the pure inquiry and the virtues of its practitioners are valuable in themselves, regardless of the ultimate outcome. Katalin Karikó’s dogged pursuit of the opportunities in mRNA, heedless of the professional consequences, is in this sense a virtue scientist par excellence.

But virtue metascience would not be a mere shift in rhetoric. It would require substantive changes to the policy priorities and research agendas.

For one, virtue metascience may envision a significantly different role for the state in science. For the consequentialist, the state serves simply to fill the gaps of the market, helping to address the systematic failures of the private innovation system. For virtue metascience, the state might be tasked with affirming deeper societal commitments to objectivity and truth-seeking, and developing institutions to inculcate those character traits. Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the NIH and current Acting Director of the CDC, has proposals in this vein, advocating for NIH to play a role in creating a “set of metrics that track good scientific behavior,” rewarding prosocial behaviors, like investing in reproducibility work. The consequentialist can find such emphases on character concerning, as they are distractions from the “bigger picture” focus of whether or not state interventions are unlocking more investments, more discoveries, and more companies.

The privatization of science is another point of contention. The consequentialist is agnostic: if for-profit enterprises and private investors are able to produce the same innovations faster and cheaper, then we should obviously use them. Virtue metascience is less ecumenical: it may be that a cost-benefit, market-driven form of exploration does not similarly cultivate the character of its researcher-participants due to pervasive commercialization incentives. The virtue metascientist might also have qualms with automating science and building “self-driving labs”; does a fully automated lab provide a virtuous model for society? Which virtues does the cloud lab develop in the scientist? If all that is left is prompting, what does the practice of science mean?

One final divergence: taking virtue metascience seriously may mean more tightly restricting the title of “scientist.” The commitment to be a scientist should be a sacred one. The privilege of a life of intellectual inquiry demands strict adherence to standards of thought, speech, and deed, a path that only a few may be able to commit to. While fewer “scientists” may mean changing publication patterns, those committed to a virtue metascience may be willing to sacrifice the number of participants for the sake of a stricter and higher standard for joining the scientific ranks. For the consequentialists, it may be that such a narrowly drawn community of science might produce better results as well.

Navigating these philosophical tensions may challenge the values of those who have rallied around metascience. But as American science appears poised to exit the coming decade radically different from how it entered it, policymakers and the broader public will ask to what ends are science — and government involvement in it — ultimately directed. If metascience wants to shape the future, it will have to offer its own answers.