Trade-offs and the precautionary principle: A lexicographic utility approach.

The precautionary principle is often argued to be irrational because it cannot adequately explain how resources should be distributed across multiple possible catastrophes or between catastrophic and noncatastrophic risks. We address this problem of trade-offs by extending a recently proposed formal interpretation of the precautionary principle (PP) within a lexical utility framework and using it to prove results about which distribution of resources maximizes lexical utility when several catastrophic risks exist, given different assumptions. We also explain how our lexical utility interpretation of PP can recommend balanced distributions of resources between disaster prevention and other concerns.

Evidence-based Medicine and Mechanistic Evidence: The Case of the Failed Rollout of Efavirenz in Zimbabwe.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has long deemphasized mechanistic reasoning and pathophysiological rationale in assessing the effectiveness of interventions. The EBM+ movement has challenged this stance, arguing that evidence of mechanisms and comparative studies should both be seen as necessary and complementary. Advocates of EBM+ provide a combination of theoretical arguments and examples of mechanistic reasoning in medical research. However, EBM+ proponents have not provided recent examples of how downplaying mechanistic reasoning resulted in worse medical results than would have occurred otherwise. Such examples are necessary to make the case that EBM+ responds to a problem in clinical practice that urgently demands a solution. In light of this, we examine the failed rollout of efavirenz as a first-line HIV treatment in Zimbabwe as evidence of the importance of mechanistic reasoning in improving clinical practice and public health policy decisions. We suggest that this case is analogous to examples commonly given to support EBM.

Pro-Diversity Beliefs and the Diverse Person's Burden.

Pro-diversity beliefs hold that greater diversity leads to better results in academia, business, politics and a variety of other contexts. This paper explores the possibility that pro-diversity beliefs can generate unfair expectations that marginalized people produce distinctive bonuses, a phenomenon we refer to as the "diverse person's burden". We suggest that a normic conception of diversity, according to which non-diversity entails social privilege, together with empirical research on psychological entitlement suggests an explanation of how the diverse person's burden can arise in many social settings. We also suggest structural and institutional remedies to address the diverse person's burden, as well as an individual virtue we label positional awareness.

Exploring Scientists' Values by Analyzing How They Frame Nature and Uncertainty.

Several scholars have proposed that values embedded in science are a central reason why more research does not necessarily resolve scientific controversies around complex environmental issues. In the Capital Regional District, British Columbia, Canada, scientists have positioned themselves for and against the construction of a wastewater treatment plant in a debate framed as purely technical. This study explores the link between the scientists' positions in the debate and the way they, in their scientific publications, portray nature and environmental risks. We performed a qualitative content analysis of peer-reviewed publications by scientists who have publicly taken opposing positions in the controversy. We found that scientists against treatment predominantly frame nature as tolerant, up to a limit, to disturbances and potential risks, and they seem to embrace a view of science as capable of reducing uncertainties. In contrast, scientists in favor of treatment predominantly portray nature as fragile, particularly toward human-mobilized environmental risks and they commonly present scientific uncertainty as worrisome based on potentially harmful consequences. Our study suggests that value-laden perspectives impact scientists' positions even in a seemingly technical controversy.

Information elaboration and epistemic effects of diversity.

We suggest that philosophical accounts of epistemic effects of diversity have given insufficient attention to the relationship between demographic diversity and information elaboration (IE), the process whereby knowledge dispersed in a group is elicited and examined. We propose an analysis of IE that clarifies hypotheses proposed in the empirical literature and their relationship to philosophical accounts of diversity effects. Philosophical accounts have largely overlooked the possibility that demographic diversity may improve group performance by enhancing IE, and sometimes fail to explore the relationship between diversity and IE altogether. We claim these omissions are significant from both a practical and theoretical perspective. Moreover, we explain how the overlooked explanations suggest that epistemic benefits of diversity can depend on epistemically unjust social dynamics.

If the Facts Were Not Untruths, Their Implications Were: Sponsorship Bias and Misleading Communication.

Sponsorship bias occurs when the financial interests of funders of scientific research influence claims made by scientists, especially in peer-reviewed publications. This article examines the relationship between sponsorship bias and misleading claims, understood as claims that are not necessarily false but which encourage those exposed to them to infer false conclusions. Misleading claims are relevant to how the term "bias" should be understood and thereby to evaluating a recent dispute about whether there is evidence of sponsorship bias in clinical research on statins. The concept of inferential asymmetry is introduced as an aid for understanding the relationship between misleading claims and sponsorship bias.

Our Life Depends on This Drug: Competence, Inequity, and Voluntary Consent in Clinical Trials on Supervised Injectable Opioid Assisted Treatment.

Supervised injectable opioid assisted treament (siOAT) prescribes injectable opioids to individuals for whom other forms of addiction treatment have been ineffective. In this article, we examine arguments that opioid-dependent people should be assumed incompetent to voluntarily consent to clinical research on siOAT unless proven otherwise. We agree that concerns about competence and voluntary consent deserve careful attention in this context. But we oppose framing the issue solely as a matter of the competence of opioid-dependent people and emphasize that it should be considered in the context of inequities in access to siOAT as a medical treatment. Consequently, we suggest that bioethics literature on nonexploitation, which focuses on clinical research in low-income countries, is helpful due to locating ethical issues within systemic social conditions. Finally, we consider the implications of our argument for the ethics of clinical research on siOAT.

Scientists' attitudes on science and values: Case studies and survey methods in philosophy of science.

This article examines the relevance of survey data of scientists' attitudes about science and values to case studies in philosophy of science. We describe two methodological challenges confronting such case studies: 1) small samples, and 2) potential for bias in selection, emphasis, and interpretation. Examples are given to illustrate that these challenges can arise for case studies in the science and values literature. We propose that these challenges can be mitigated through an approach in which case studies and survey methods are viewed as complementary, and use data from the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative to illustrate this claim.

Acceptance, values, and probability.

This essay makes a case for regarding personal probabilities used in Bayesian analyses of confirmation as objects of acceptance and rejection. That in turn entails that personal probabilities are subject to the argument from inductive risk, which aims to show non-epistemic values can legitimately influence scientific decisions about which hypotheses to accept. In a Bayesian context, the argument from inductive risk suggests that value judgments can influence decisions about which probability models to accept for likelihoods and priors. As a consequence, if the argument from inductive risk is sound, then non-epistemic values can affect not only the level of evidence deemed necessary to accept a hypothesis but also degrees of confirmation themselves.

Collapse, social tipping dynamics, and framing climate change.

In this article, we claim that recent developments in climate science and renewable energy should prompt a reframing of debates surrounding climate change mitigation. Taken together, we argue that these developments suggest (1) global climate collapse in this century is a non-negligible risk, (2) mitigation offers substantial benefits to current generations, and (3) mitigation by some can generate social tipping dynamics that could ultimately make renewables cheaper than fossil fuels. We explain how these claims undermine familiar framings of climate change, wherein mitigation is understood as self-sacrifice that individuals and governments must be morally persuaded or incentivized to undertake.

Environmental justice, values, and scientific expertise.

This essay compares two philosophical proposals concerning the relation between values and science, both of which reject the value-free ideal but nevertheless place restrictions on how values and science should interact. The first of these proposals relies on a distinction between the direct and indirect roles of values, while the second emphasizes instead a distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic values. We consider these two proposals in connection with a case study of disputed research on the topic of environmental justice and argue that the second proposal has several advantages over the first.

Can Treatment for Substance Use Disorder Prescribe the same Substance as that Used? The Case of Injectable Opioid Agonist Treatment.

This article examines injectable Opioid Agonist Treatment (iOAT), in which patients suffering from long-term, treatment refractory opioid use disorder (OUD) are prescribed injectable diacetylmorphine, the active ingredient of heroin. While iOAT is part of the continuum of care for OUD in some European countries and in some parts of Canada, it is not an available treatment in the United States. We suggest that one reason for this situation is the belief that a genuine treatment for substance use disorder cannot prescribe the same substance as that used. We examine possible rationales for this belief by considering four combinations of views on the constitutive causal basis of substance use disorders and the definition of effective treatment. We show that all but one combination counts iOAT as a genuine treatment and that there are good reasons to reject the one that does not. Specifically, we claim that medical interventions, such as iOAT, that significantly reduce the severity of a disorder deserve to be categorized as effective treatments and regarded as such in practice.

Evaluating the quality of medical evidence in real-world contexts.

How should the quality of medical evidence be evaluated? Proponents of evidence-based medicine advocate the use evidence hierarchies to rank the quality of evidence on the basis that certain methods produce more reliable evidence. Some criticisms of this approach focus on whether certain methods deserve their place in the hierarchy, while others claim that evidence hierarchies should be abandoned in favour of other evidence assessment techniques. We claim that this debate pays insufficient attention to the real-world contexts in which medical decisions are made. To address this limitation, we explore the value of using evidence hierarchies and other evidence assessment techniques in differing contexts of medical decision making and argue that the way in which the quality of medical evidence should be evaluated depends on context. Focusing the discussion of the evaluation of medical evidence on real-world contexts has implications for the viability of the principle of total evidence.

Multiple diversity concepts and their ethical-epistemic implications.

A concept of diversity is an understanding of what makes a group diverse that may be applicable in a variety of contexts. We distinguish three diversity concepts, show that each can be found in discussions of diversity in science, and explain how they tend to be associated with distinct epistemic and ethical rationales. Yet philosophical literature on diversity among scientists has given little attention to distinct concepts of diversity. This is significant because the unappreciated existence of multiple diversity concepts can generate unclarity about the meaning of "diversity," lead to problematic inferences from empirical research, and obscure complex ethical-epistemic questions about how to define diversity in specific cases. We illustrate some ethical-epistemic implications of our proposal by reference to an example of deliberative mini-publics on human tissue biobanking.

AIC and the challenge of complexity: A case study from ecology.

Philosophers and scientists alike have suggested Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), and other similar model selection methods, show predictive accuracy justifies a preference for simplicity in model selection. This epistemic justification of simplicity is limited by an assumption of AIC which requires that the same probability distribution must generate the data used to fit the model and the data about which predictions are made. This limitation has been previously noted but appears to often go unnoticed by philosophers and scientists and has not been analyzed in relation to complexity. If predictions are about future observations, we argue that this assumption is unlikely to hold for models of complex phenomena. That in turn creates a practical limitation for simplicity's AIC-based justification because scientists modeling such phenomena are often interested in predicting the future. We support our argument with an ecological case study concerning the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, U.S.A. We suggest that AIC might still lend epistemic support for simplicity by leading to better explanations of complex phenomena.

Extrapolation, uncertainty factors, and the precautionary principle.

This essay examines the relationship between the precautionary principle and uncertainty factors used by toxicologists to estimate acceptable exposure levels for toxic chemicals from animal experiments. It shows that the adoption of uncertainty factors in the United States in the 1950s can be understood by reference to the precautionary principle, but not by cost-benefit analysis because of a lack of relevant quantitative data at that time. In addition, it argues that uncertainty factors continue to be relevant to efforts to implement the precautionary principle and that the precautionary principle should not be restricted to cases involving unquantifiable hazards.