The Rightful Place of Science: Science, Values, and Democracy: The 2016 Descartes Lectures

Starting from an embrace of both science and democracy, Heather Douglas argues in a series of vital lectures that science requires social and ethical values for both the direction of research and for sound scientific inference. Her forceful conclusion is that the “value-free ideal” is an inappropriate ideal for science. In developing the implications of rejecting this ideal for science in society, Douglas discusses how we should think about the norms for 1) values in science, 2) science advice and science funding in a democracy, and 3) science communication and science education.

With two thought-provoking commentaries on each lecture, Science, Values, and Democracy provides a rich discussion of one of the most complex and pressing challenges of the twenty-first century.