Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: I INTRODUCTION Science and secrecy do not sit comfortably together. In technologically advanced democracies, it is almost an article of faith that openness is essential both for the advancement of science and for its beneficial interaction with society. Internally, scientific communities consider the free exchange of ideas through peer criticism and publication indispensable for progress. (1) Externally, too, the demands for openness have grown as science's relations with society have become more complex and pervasive. (2) Scientific knowledge underwrites an ever greater cross-section of the decisions that governments make about their citizens' health, safety, security, and welfare. (3) Democratic control over public decisions therefore demands some ability on the part of a polity to evaluate the knowledge claims that justify actions taken on its behalf. Otherwise, the door would be opened to arbitrary and irrational decisions in the name of government. With the passage of the federal Administrative Procedure Act in 1946, (4) the U.S. government recognized the right of citizens to participate in agency rulemaking and an associated right to receive information, including scientific and technical information, in order to effectuate the goal of informed participation. Later U.S. statutes have consistently expanded the public's right to know and to assess the information underlying governmental decisions, even when that information is highly technical. (5) Some of these laws aim to increase the transparency of governmental decisionmaking in general; (6) others are tailored to specific policy frameworks, such as health, safety, and environmental regulation. Consequently, U.S. citizens, more perhaps than in any other democratic nation, can count on having access to official information, including the evidence and reasoning relied upon by the government's extensive network of expert advisers. (7) To be sure, normative considerations work against total transparency in government and may legitimately bar access to some stages or aspects of scientific knowledge production. These norms flow, in the first instance, from the nature of scientific research itself. Science, as a process, depends on a certain amount of unrestricted trial and error, as well as on competitiveness among peers. (8) Excessive or premature demands for public disclosure may therefore hamper creativity or produce disincentives for high-risk research. Additional constraints on disclosure derive from considerations largely external to science: for example, the need to protect the privacy of research subjects, the confidentiality of proprietary business information, the discretionary spaces of governmental decision-making, or national security interests. Openness and transparency in science, then, cannot be treated as absolute goods. Rather, the degree of openness is context-specific and needs to be traded off against other important social values. The problem for contemporary law and policy is to develop principled approaches to maintaining the desired balance. That problem has grown in salience throughout the last half-century, assuming today an urgency that is, arguably, greater than at any time since the beginnings of the scientific revolution. (9) The reasons have to do with wide-ranging changes in the practice of science, as well as in its dynamic relationship with society. Robert Merton, America's first great sociologist of science, noted the early stirrings of discontent in his well-known 1942 essay on the norms of science. (10) At that time, science was under attack from totalitarian regimes in war-torn Europe. Threatened by powerful political forces, science, in Merton's view, needed to defend its autonomy as it had not been required to do in 300 years of unmitigated success. (11) At stake was science's right to govern itself and to maintain the culture of openness that antidemocratic governments of all stripes wished to suppress. …
Author: Sheila Jasonoff
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3125935901