The world has become a lot more dangerous and uncertain. We have not seen a pandemic the likes of COVID-19 for a century. Within three short months over 250,000 people have been confirmed to have the virus, while hundreds of thousands more are infected and undiagnosed. Naturally people are looking to scientists to provide answers for how we can and should respond to this pandemic.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson has capitalised on this by seeking to dress his political decisions in the veneer of science. He has consistently referred to his ‘scientific’ and ‘evidence-based’ approach to justify his political decisions. He has enlisted the chief medical and scientific advisers to accompany him in speeches and interviews to reinforce this framing.
Yet, despite this, many people have cogently criticised the UK for lagging behind our European neighbours and for essentially getting the science wrong. And it is true that the behavioural psychologists who have played a role in shaping the government’s strategy are on shaky ground with their claims that people will simply get bored of quarantines and ignore them if they are enacted too early. Just look at the way that many of us have, encouragingly, been only too keen to pursue safety, by going way ahead of the Government – and so keeping ahead of the virus.
When you take risks with other people’s lives by depending on assumptions that you cannot know are true, you act unethically.
The government’s partially retracted ‘herd immunity’ strategy has also rightly come in for the devastating criticism that it makes a series of unverified assumptions about the behaviour of this new virus. We are right to highlight these deficiencies. When you take risks with other people’s lives by depending on assumptions that you cannot know are true, you act unethically. This is what the UK Government has done.
Nevertheless, it is an overly narrow approach only to pick up on specific issues in Boris’s ‘evidence-based’ approach. Rather, I think we need to instead interrogate whether ‘evidence-based’ is really a high enough standard to be applying to a massive global humanitarian disaster in-the-making, even if it were applied as well as possible. Is an evidence-based approach really such a self-evidently good way of dealing with a pandemic?
You might wonder how an evidence-based approach could possibly steer us wrong. After all, we want to be informed by evidence to make the best decisions possible, right? For me, this is undeniable. The problem is when science becomes ‘scientism’. This is the term used to describe the ideology that science can provide us with value-neutral answers in domains such as ethics, politics and economics. If one sees problems through the lens of scientism, then evidence-based judgments come to mean supposedly value-neutral judgments.
Taking this approach fundamentally obscures the value judgments that are at play in political decisions. The truth is that UK Government has constantly made political decisions in the last few weeks – to try to keep the economy ‘moving’ a little bit longer. It has hidden its politics behind the veneer of ‘evidence-based’ science. This obscures the extent to which the way that we respond to the inherent uncertainties in the world involves value judgments. We need to approach problems like global pandemics by being as informed by evidence as possible, but also in the knowledge that evidence itself won’t give us political and ethical answers. We want to be informed by science, but not blindsided by scientism.
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