The U.K.’s science minister vowed to kick “woke ideology out of science”. While it might sound like a sensible policy to keep science and politics apart, in practice that’s impossible. Many key decisions in science require an appeal to moral and political values, argues Stephen John. But it shouldn’t be the government policing which values are acceptable.

Science minister Michelle Donelan’s speech to the Conservative party conference stated a bold aim of “kicking woke ideology out of science”. These remarks were in the context of a complex culture war around sex and gender, but they raise intriguing and important questions, relevant well beyond this case: can science be free of ideology? And should it be? 

Here’s one way of understanding Donelan’s remarks, suggested by her claims to want to “depoliticise science”: “woke” science is bad science because it’s influenced by a political or moral ideology, and science should be free of all of that, an unadulterated, unbiased pursuit of the truth. But a different way of understanding her eagle-eyed focus on one set of issues is that “woke” science is bad science because it’s influenced by bad values. On the first view, we should kick all values out of science; on the latter, we should kick out the wrong values. The first proposal is impossible, the second undesirable. 

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Given that science is done by humans, its research agenda inevitably reflects what humans care about.

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The idea that science isn’t or shouldn’t be influenced by social or political values at all is non-sensical. Consider Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s promise at the same conference to stop cigarette smoking in the UK. This policy stems from the scientific consensus that smoking is a major cause of a wide range of diseases, most notably lung cancer. That research was primarily motivated by non-scientific, humanitarian concerns: to stop people dying horrible deaths. Given that science is done by humans, its research agenda inevitably reflects what humans care about.

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Still, you might think that there’s a difference between ideology influencing what we research and a more pernicious form of influence, where ideology corrupts “good scientific practice”. That’s true. Obviously, scientists shouldn’t go around denying well-established empirical claims solely on the basis of political expediency. That’s more the speciality of certain politicians, as so painfully illustrated by refusals to admit our climate is changing.

But we should be careful not to move from common sense injunctions against wishful thinking and cognitive bias, to a broader claim that scientific justification can always be non-political. Many aspects of scientific research involve a degree of freedom. This is particularly true in the biological, human and social sciences, where we are dealing with complex systems. There is more than one way to operationalise a concept like “aggression” or “health” – consider, for example, heated debates over whether conditions like ADHD are a “disease”. Even more strikingly, given that scientific claims are rarely (perhaps never) known with 100% certainty, there’s always a question about how certain is “certain enough” to accept a scientific claim.