Abstract
While the debate on values in science focuses on normative questions on the level of the individual (e.g. should researchers try to make their work as value free as possible?), comparatively little attention has been paid to the institutional and professional norms that researchers are expected to follow. To address this knowledge gap, we conduct a content analysis of leading national codes of conduct for research integrity of European countries, and structure our analysis around the question: do these documents allow for researchers to be influenced by “non-epistemic” (moral, cultural, commercial, political, etc.) values or do they prohibit such influence in compliance with the value-free ideal (VFI) of science? Our results return a complex picture. On the one hand, codes of conduct consider many non-epistemic values to be a legitimate influence on the decision-making of researchers. On the other, most of these documents include what we call VFI-like positions: passages claiming that researchers should be free and independent from any external influence. This shows that while many research integrity documents do not fully endorse the VFI, they do not reject it and continue to be implicitly influenced by it. This results in internal tensions and underdetermined guidance on non-epistemic values that may limit some of the uses of research integrity codes, especially for purposes of ethical self-regulation. While codes of conduct cannot be expected to decide how researchers should act in every instance, we do suggest that they acknowledge the challenges of how to integrate non-epistemic values in research in a more explicit fashion.
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Notes
See Douglas (2009), Chapter 3 for a historical and conceptual reconstruction of this definition of the VFI.
An anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out that authors like Douglas, Elliott, Betz and John have discussed the norms guiding risk assessment (Douglas, 2000, 2009), wetland banking (Elliott & McKaughan, 2014), chemical regulation (Elliott, 2011), and the various IPCC assessments (Betz, 2013; John, 2015). However, these norms concern the role of researchers as experts aiding policymakers in the application of scientific knowledge. They do not necessarily represent consensus stances on the proper role for values in scientific research.
As noted by an anonymous reviewer, the analyzed documents vary in terms of their legal status. In particular, some may be more directly connected to their country’s legal system than others. In turn, this can influence how they are employed as legal documents. The different status and intended use of these documents have already been discussed in the study we built on (Desmond & Dierickx, 2021a). Therefore, we refer the readers who want to know more about these aspects of RI to that article.
JA’s translation from Italian: “Non configura viceversa sabotaggio mettere in atto azioni che ostacolino o rallentino l’attività di colleghi qualora tali azioni siano finalizzate alla difesa di propri legittimi interessi”.
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This research is part of a project funded by the FWO, Research Foundation—Flanders (Grant no. G0D6920N).
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JA first performed data identification, characterization, and analysis. HD and KD independently reviewed each step of these passages. All authors contributed to the definition of the research question and the design of the research, and approved the final version of the article.
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Ambrosj, J., Desmond, H. & Dierickx, K. The value-free ideal in codes of conduct for research integrity. Synthese 202, 133 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04377-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04377-y