For the Coming Election, How Political Should Scientists Be?

There is an election coming up. Hopefully this is not a shocking revelation for most people. Frankly, it seems like everyone not in a medically-induced coma for the past three months has spent every waking moment bloviating about it.

The scientists too have come out in force. If you don't believe me, read the Policy and Politics section of this site. We certainly have opinions and have no hesitation in expressing them in the most forceful terms. (I do not exclude myself from that list either, and I plan on forcefully expressing a good bit in the run up to election day.)

However, every election that goes by I get to thinking about the process of political participation, particularly for scientists. More specifically, I am curious about the ethics that relate a scientist's personal and professional life, the relationship between their role as a citizen and their role as a professional. In short, every election gets me thinking about the question: how much should scientists participate in politics?

Uncomfortable participation

I have tried to avoid being too political on this blog, primarily because I think that the public perception of scientists as honest brokers and purveyors of fact untainted by personal opinion is something worth saving. My friends and colleagues remind me repeatedly that this point of view -- that scientists should not be political -- is hopelessly naive. Scientists are citizens of this country and possessing of the same rights as every other citizen. It is unrealistic and unfair to expect them to keep silent when everyone else around them shouts their views at the top of their lungs.

However, even If we accept that it is unreasonable to ethically prohibit scientists from participating in politics, surely there are still some things that scientists do politically that make us uncomfortable. I was somewhat uncomfortable when members of the American Physical Society initiated a petition in the New York Times that among other things criticized the Bush administration policy in Guantanamo (background to the story here). It is not that I disagree with their presenting their views as citizens -- or even that I disagreed with the specific views that they were presenting; what made me cringe was them presenting their views in their public capacity as physicists. Not to be glib, but it begs the question: "What are the physics-related issues involved in the US treatment of prisoners in Gitmo?"

Some of you may not consider what they did ethically wrong or even undesirable. However, I think we can agree that every time a scientists engages in political speech it represents a collision between a public perception of scientists as impartial mediators and the reality of our private lives -- that we are just as partial and partisan as everyone else.

This is not something that should cause us to lose hope, however. Surely there is some compromise that can be reached -- some way for scientists to behave ethically in both capacities. I have two suggestions in this regard, or perhaps it would be better to describe them as two distinctions between ethical and not ethical behavior. The first is to distinguish between public and private behavior. The second is to distinguish between political and partisan behavior. As we will see neither is entirely satisfactory, but they do help clarify the issue more fully.

The Distinction between Public and Private Behavior

We could draw the distinction between a scientist's public behavior and their private views saying that scientists should be impartial in public even if they are partisan in private. What makes me -- and I suspect many other people most uncomfortable -- is when I feel that scientists are exploiting the public perception of their competence and honesty for political gain or partisan ends. If we could prohibit that exploitation, then maybe we could feel more comfortable collectively about behaving ethically.

However, as I think people would be quick to point out, the distinction between public and private life is often a fictitious one. Private life and public life are never sharply divided. First, everyone who participates in science finds that the values we practice a work -- rigor, broadmindedness to alternative points of view, focus on the evidence, etc. -- begin to manifest in our private lives as well. For good or for ill, you begin to view problems in your personal life in the same way that you would in the lab. Second, people who know what you do for a living often fail to distinguish when you are as we say not on duty. If one of my family members asks me for advice about the health risks of transfats, they aren't asking for my personal opinion on the Bloomberg administration's policies. They want my best medical judgement from what I know about the evidence, and they don't particularly care whether what capacity -- public or private -- I am acting in.

Thus, as a solution to the problem of scientist's political participation we could try and distinguish between the public and the private, but this solution fails because the two are often rather difficult to distinguish.

The Distinction between Political and Partisan

Another alternative would be to draw the distinction between partisan and political behavior. Politics is the process of generating agreement in a diverse society through means other than violence. (Everytime I get down on politics I try and remember that the alternative is decidedly worse.) Political behavior is the process of reaching compromise; it is a process focused on details of reality -- the reality of people's different views and goals in all their nitty-gritty complexity.

Partisanship, on the other hand, is the process of consolidating power for a group. It differs from politics in that it requires abstraction from reality and ignorance of subtle distinction. To generate a party platform from a horde of disparate individuals requires a willful ignorance of the points on which those individuals disagree. Advocating the platform of that party on a public stage requires -- rather than a focus on the individual candidate -- a focus on the general beneficence of that party in contrast to the general malfeisance of the other side.

Thus one could argue that scientists should involve themselves in politics but not partisanship. Politics, by the definition above, is concerned with deriving sound policy from fact -- the reality of the situation and the different position of the groups involved. It is in some ways analogous to the scientific process in that it requires attention to detail. Partisanship, by the definition above, is concerned with creating power from bullshit. It is profoundly unscientific in that it requires the willful ignorance of the distinctions between individuals candidates for the good of the party.

I think that many people would feel comfortable with scientists being political as long as they didn't feel they were being partisan.

But again the distinction between the two is an illusion. How would we validate that someone is being partisan rather than simply political? Are they arguing because of sincere opinions based on the facts, or because they would like one party to win? It is difficult or impossible to know the difference; the argument for a policy by its very nature is a gesture of support for the party that advocates it.

Just to summarize what I said thus far

• 1) Many, myself included, do not feel comfortable with scientists fully engaging in politics, but scientists like everyone else have opinions and want to express them. How can these two positions be resolved?
• 2) One compromise on this view is to distinguish between the scientist's public behavior as a representative of the profession and their private life as a citizen. Political behavior would be unacceptable when the scientist is acting as a public representative but acceptable when they are acting as a private citizen. However, this is unsatisfying because public and private life are entangled and ultimately indistinguishable.
• 3) Another compromise is to distinguish between political behavior and partisan behavior. Scientists could engage in political behavior because it is concerned with argument over the facts -- something scientists are pretty good at anyway -- but outright partisan behavior would still be prohibited. However, this too is unsatisfying because it is ultimately impossible to distinguish political from partisan motives.

What's a man to do?

Well, first I would say that each of us often has to come up with a compromise with ourselves related to this issue. For some -- although I think this is a cynical view -- it is best to abandon the charade of impartiality and come out for partisan causes as they see fit. I do not agree with this view; I think it damages their and science as a whole's credibility over the long run. But it remains an option.

Another option is to attempt to apply the impartiality that one practices in public to one's private life -- attempting to be genuinely apolitical and impartial in both public and private. Let me tell you having tried this that it is a lot more difficult than you would think. You are pretty regularly accused of either hiding your true opinions or having none. People think you are some sort of strange hypocrite who indulges in the posturing of impartiality to hide the fact that you are, deep inside, truly partisan. And inside you have to subject your own views to a constant scrutiny that is generally exhausting: are my motives here derived from my values or from the facts?

Most of us reach some kind of middle ground that where we feel ethically comfortable. In spite of my impression that public and private life are entangled, I tend to maintain an air of impartiality in my role as a scientist that I don't worry about in my private life. I will have conversations where I will say, "This is what the evidence shows, and here is what I really think..." Likewise, I may have opinions and express them vocally about policy, but I try to avoid partisan behavior or siding too strenuously with one party. I believe that in the end when scientists publicly side with one party, it will come back to bite them personally and professionally.

As we approach the upcoming election, scientists just like everyone else will have to decide whether to vote and, if so, who to vote for. Scientists who have a public voice will also have to decide to what degree they will employ this voice for personal political ends. In this context, I think this issue of political participation is an important subject to broach with ourselves and to broach repeatedly, because at it's core it is a debate over the very scientific virtue of impartiality and whether we choose to embrace it. As we approach the election I encourage everyone, in addition to participating in our political process, to consider where we should fit in that process.