de Melo-Martín Inmaculada, Intemann Kristen
Division of Medical Ethics, Department of Public Health, Weill Cornell Medical College, NewYork, NY 10065, USA.
Perspect Biol Med. 2012 Winter;55(1):59-70. doi: 10.1353/pbm.2012.0007.
Despite increasing awareness of the ways in which non-epistemic values play roles in science, many scientists remain reluctant to acknowledge values at stake in their own work. Even when research clearly relates to risk assessment and establishing public policy, contexts in which the presence of values is less likely to be contentious, scientists tend to present such research as merely involving empirical questions about what the evidence is. As a result, debates over policy-related science tend to be framed as purely epistemic debates over the state of the evidence. We argue that this neglects the important ways that ethical and social values play legitimate roles in judgments about what we take to be evidence for a particular policy. Using the case of recent disputes about the relative safety of home birth, we argue that although the debate has been framed as a purely scientific one about the empirical evidence for home birth, it actually involves disagreements about underlying value assumptions. If our claims are correct, then in order to move the debate forward, scientists will need to engage in a critical discussion about the values at stake.
尽管人们越来越意识到非认知价值在科学中发挥作用的方式，但许多科学家仍然不愿承认自己工作中存在利害攸关的价值。即使研究明显涉及风险评估和制定公共政策，而在这些情况下价值的存在不太可能引起争议，科学家们往往仍将此类研究仅仅呈现为只涉及关于证据是什么的实证问题。结果，围绕与政策相关的科学的辩论往往被框定为关于证据状况的纯粹认知辩论。我们认为，这忽视了伦理和社会价值在判断我们视为特定政策证据的过程中发挥合法作用的重要方式。以最近关于家庭分娩相对安全性的争议为例，我们认为，尽管这场辩论被框定为关于家庭分娩实证证据的纯粹科学辩论，但它实际上涉及对潜在价值假设的分歧。如果我们的主张正确，那么为了推动辩论向前发展，科学家们将需要就利害攸关的价值展开批判性讨论。
