The dual nature of scientific neutrality: A response to “scientists must become activists”

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A recent article titled “Scientists must become activists” published in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-024-00171-9) has sparked a crucial debate about the role of scientists in addressing global challenges, particularly the climate crisis. The authors argue that in the face of unprecedented civilizational threats, scientists can no longer remain passive observers but must actively engage in advocacy and activism to facilitate an adequate societal response. This perspective challenges the traditional notion of scientific neutrality and raises important questions about the responsibilities of researchers and science communicators in the modern world. To avoid confusion in the debate going forward, it is important to clearly distinguish between two different types of “neutrality” in the scientific context:

1. Neutrality as Freedom from Bias: The first type of neutrality refers to freedom from particular personal, or group-specific interests and biases. Indeed, proper science should be “neutral” in the sense of being reality-based and self-correcting when it comes to well-known common fallacies, such as confirmation bias. Science must remain an end in itself, it is not to be instrumentalized for private ends or subordinated to unscientific ideologies. When science loses its independence, it risks compromising its effectiveness and credibility, blurring the line between proper science and pseudoscience. This is what we could observe happened with contracted pseudoscientific “research”, conducted by biased and personally interested non-experts, who were first trying to create doubt about smoking-related health risks and have successfully contaminated a large segment of public discourse with an anti-intellectual climate science skepticism.
2. Neutrality in Relation to Human Progress: The second type of neutrality pertains to the idea of genuine human progress. In a positive sense, human progress means the promotion of civilization‘s overall quality of life, freedom, justice, aesthetics, and ethics, enabling the full realization of human potential. The reverse is true for the opposite of human progress, civilizational decline and regression, where the full realization of human potential is diminished.While it might be argued that a universal definition of human progress is illusory and that the definition of human progress is subject to constant negotiation between different subjective value preferences distributed within a society, the same cannot be said of the opposite of human progress. In the face of an existential threat of a disastrous societal decline — even likely collapse — associated with immense humanitarian sufffering and ecosystem destruction, there is simply no place for “neutrality” in the sense of being uninterested. For as long as the threat of civilizational catastrophe exists, preventing it temporarily becomes an overarching imperative for every affected social sub-system.

When faced with an existential civilizational emergency, or crisis, the purpose of science extends beyond an unbiased search for truth. Science is not supposed to be “neutral” in the sense of being free from foundational values such as progress and collective survival. Science, like “technology” and “markets”, are societal concepts that serve a higher purpose which is to advance civilizational progress and serve the common good, and/or at least it is to help prevent civilizational catastrophe. This is what makes these concepts legitimate and useful. They are supposed to help humanity protect and increase — not destroy — societal prosperity, welfare, and future opportunity spaces for continued progress, in whatever form. The role of science is to inform human societies on how to best regulate technology and markets so that they promote societal welfare rather than destroy it. Advanced societies take advantage of scientific information in order to make well-informed decisions. In a well-functioning advanced society, scientists typically do not need to become activists. When they discover that their society is on an unsustainable, self-destructive development path, they would normally convey this critical insight to policymakers, civil society and advisors/influencers. It would then be the governing body’s responsibility to respond adequately to this information by adjusting the societal development trajectory so that it becomes less self-destructive and more sustainable.

Instead, in our current social reality, political decisions of critical importance, with long-term consequences well beyond this century, are either poorly informed or utterly misinformed. Reasons for this include fossil fuel industry capture and massive (algorithmically amplified) disinformation campaigns combined with a lack of trust in scientific and political institutions and a general lack of epistemic training and science literacy resulting in widespread collective delusion, pseudoscientific denial. As a result, many decisions that were made — or not made — during the past decades were counterproductive: In a hysteric, self-destuctive frenzy, a large share of voters and policy makers has been doubling down on measures that accelerate and amplify the existential threat. When society fails to adequately respond to an emergency scientists find themselves in a terrible predicament. They are among the few with a reality-based situational awareness, who can see the existential danger and humanity’s insufficient response for what they truly are. It is only because of society’s refusal to take science-based warnings seriously, that scientists are forced to become activists for scientific truth. And there is nothing wrong with that.