Weiye Loh's Library tagged Authority →  View Popular, Search in Google

[T]hey miss a crucial point: the ingrained assumption that scientific evidence is the only authority that can justify policy action — scientism — is what renders both policy and its supporting science vulnerable to the dogmatic amplification of doubt.

The doubters' success lies in the way that policy questions are framed, with science placed at the centre. If a policy commitment is reduced only to a question of whether the science is right or wrong, then evidence can easily be made to unravel. Paradoxically, this happens when science attains its greatest political influence, when it goes beyond supplying the facts to defining the public meaning of problems. Public-policy issues always have dimensions beyond science, and require more than technical responses. When framing debates, policy-makers should prioritize discussion of social benefits as well as science: there are many good non-scientific reasons to reduce global environmental footprints and consumption frenzy, and to pursue greater justice, for instance. If the many factors that go into a policy commitment are recognized, science does not become the sole centre of authority and the sole target for opposition.

A more enlightened institutional culture around science and policy would foster wider debate about the implications of interventions, and of burdens of proof weighed against social benefits and the costs of erroneous outcomes. This might resemble the 'extended peer review' system of philosopher-sociologists of science Jerome Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz, in which specialists (including non-scientists) review policy-relevant scientific claims but a wider variety of stakeholders bring further knowledge to bear in interpreting them. Rather than assuming that disputes are solely scientific, opening up these decision-making processes would render their primary nature more honestly political and economic, while giving proper weight to scientific reason and evidence.

As critics repeatedly point out, 98 percent of sexually active American Catholic women practice birth control, and 78 percent of Catholics think a “good Catholic” can reject the bishops’ teaching on birth control.  The response from the church, however, has been that, regardless of what the majority of Catholics do and think, the church’s teaching is that birth control is morally wrong.  The church, in the inevitable phrase, “is not a democracy.”   What the church teaches is what the bishops (and, ultimately, the pope, as head of the bishops) say it does.

The bishops and the minority of Catholics who support their full authority have tried to marginalize Catholics who do not accept the bishops as absolute arbiters of doctrine.  They speak of “cafeteria Catholics” or merely “cultural Catholics,” and imply that the only “real Catholics” are those who accept their teachings entirely.  But this marginalization begs the question I’m raising about the proper source of the judgment that the bishops have divine authority.  Since, as I’ve argued, members of the church are themselves this source, it is not for the bishops but for the faithful to decide the nature and extent of episcopal authority.  The bishops truly are, as they so often say, “servants of the servants of the Lord.”