Democracy, Consensus, and the Value-Free Ideal

We describe a novel version of the value-free ideal (VFI), which holds that scientists should strive to eliminate the influence of values on their inferences. This VFI is an action-guiding principle for scientists rather than a description of an ideal state of science, and it is warranted by the social context of science, particularly when science is meant to inform policy in a democracy. We argue, based on the requirement for public justification of science-based policy, that consensus is a constitutive aim of science. When values influence the core features of scientific reasoning, consensus is threatened, and thus, scientists should strive to eliminate such value influence. Readers may be interested in these Handbook chapters as well: Matthew J. Brown, “Recent Arguments for the Ideal of Value-Free Science”; Yiftach Fehige, “Science and Religion in a Democratic Society”; Bennett Holman and T. Y. Branch, “Reflecting on Responses to the New Demarcation Problem.”