Toeller Annette Elisabeth, Blum Sonja, Boecher Michael, Loer Kathrin
Chair for Policy Research & Environmental Politics, FernUniversitaet in Hagen, Universitaetsstr. 33, 58084 Hagen, Germany.
Chair for Political Science and Sustainable Development, Otto-Von-Guericke-Universitaet Magdeburg, Universitaetsplatz 2, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany.
J Environ Stud Sci. 2022;12(2):284-290. doi: 10.1007/s13412-021-00737-7. Epub 2021 Nov 27.
This is a response to the commentary by Robert C. Schmidt in this journal, in which the author suggests that for specific problems such as climate change or the current pandemic, decisions on policies should be made by scientific experts rather than by politicians. We argue that such ideas, which were brought up in the late 1960s and reconsidered more recently, do not take sufficient account of the nature of science politics, and their interaction. Furthermore, problem structures and resulting challenges for science and politics are not similar, but essentially different between climate change and the pandemic. Therefore, different solutions to the problems are required. There is a need to improve politics' reliable recourse to scientific evidence in many cases. Yet, giving scientific experts such a strong position in decision-making ignores that most decisions, even if based on the state of scientific evidence (if there such an uncontroversial state of evidence), ultimately require genuinely political choices about trade-offs of interests and normative issues that neither can nor should be made by scientists. Therefore, putting Schmidt's proposal into practice would not solve the existing problems but instead create new problems.
这是对罗伯特·C·施密特在本期刊发表的评论的回应。作者在评论中提出，对于气候变化或当前疫情等特定问题，政策决策应由科学专家而非政治家做出。我们认为，这些在20世纪60年代末提出且最近又被重新审视的观点，没有充分考虑科学与政治的本质及其相互作用。此外，气候变化和疫情的问题结构以及给科学和政治带来的挑战并非相似，而是本质上不同。因此，需要针对这些问题采取不同的解决方案。在许多情况下，有必要改进政治对科学证据的可靠利用。然而，赋予科学专家如此强大的决策地位忽视了这样一个事实，即大多数决策，即使是基于科学证据的现状（如果存在这样一种毫无争议的证据状态），最终也需要在利益权衡和规范性问题上做出真正的政治选择，而这些既不能也不应该由科学家来做出。因此，将施密特的提议付诸实践不仅无法解决现有问题，反而会产生新的问题。
