What a shambles. The Brown government employs a scientific advisory council to provide them with supposedly objective information on the dangers of various illegal drugs, then refuses to listen to their advice. When the head of the council, David Nutt, points out that the government is ignoring their advice, they sack him. Other scientists resign in protest. The government’s attempt to present Nutt’s sacking as an issue of authority rather than scientific probity falls flat.
As much as I disagree with their decision on this, the Brown administration is not actually failing in this situation because they decided to pander to Daily Mail readers. Their failure lay in first stating that they would follow the scientific analysis, then ignoring the science when it didn't say what they wanted it to.
There’s no reason why social policies have to be solely driven by scientists. I thought it was ridiculous and absurd that when we decided as a society to ban smoking in public places, we did so almost entirely on the recommendations of health experts. Health experts have no absolute right to control my freedom because they operate within a scientific milieu, as much as they presume to. Nor is public health a value that takes precedence over all others. If it was, we’d ban driving tomorrow. Smoking is not just a health issue, and it is not logical to say that just because something is harmful it should be banned. Such decisions also speak to the kind of society we want to live in, and thus have strong social, civic and civil liberties components to them as well.
In the same way that we don’t only want policemen’s views when it comes to deciding how long we should incarcerate people without trial, we don’t just want to hear from scientists when it comes to the prohibition and legalisation of dangerous substances. Actually, I agree with the scientists on the particular questions of classification here. But even so I don’t see any reason why the government couldn’t simply have said in the first place that they would consult with scientists as well as the public generally, and a selection of civic and moral leaders about their views, and form a policy accordingly. The idiocy is in trying to pretend you’re being somehow objective when you’re clearly not.
Underpinning this is a bigger question about the role of expertise in modern society. Ever since Walter Lippmann wrote about it in the 1920s, the expert or specialist has come to take on an increasingly vital role in virtually every walk of life. We want clinical experts to make the best decisions about the right kinds of treatments we can afford; civic planners to understand how best to maintain our infrastructure; specialist economists to understand how our financial system should be regulated; and so on. We should listen to scientists if they say that the levies in New Orleans need repairing.
But the problem is that such classes of expert often tend to develop particular biases of their own that inevitably compromise their expertise and undermine their claims to objectivity. In particular, the need for self-perpetuation tends to create many distorting pressures.
In this particular case, it seems clear that medical experts have a significantly lower aversion threshold to medication than much of the rest of the population: hence the decision by GPs to hand out antidepressants like sweeties. Such aversions can’t be wholly dealt with based on formal assessments of harm, since it is a question of social values as much as medicinal effectiveness. And my gut feeling is that scientists have a tendency to overstate their degree of certainty when it comes to engaging in public debate, anyway.
Moreover, they're scientists nor PR experts, and tend to misunderstand how their messages will be interpreted by the media. Hence the classic phenomenon when scientists are asked to predict how many people might die from a particular epidemic. They go off and built a model that, due to the massive uncertainty in such efforts, says that between 35 and 35 million people will die. They give it to the press. The press headines the next day say "35 MILLION PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM FLU OUTBREAK."
So the question is how to balance the need for expertise in the modern world, when the man on the street often simply isn’t qualified to provide a policy judgement, with the democratic need to hold policies accountable to the general will of the people and to reflect broader views about the kind of society we want than just a reductivist scientific assessment of a virtuous life. If we can’t say that whatever everybody wants is necessarily right; and neither can we say that the expert view is true; on what basis do we form our public policies?
Think Of the Children
1 hour ago
