Feminist Challenges to the Value-Free Ideal of Science

This chapter examines how feminist scholars contributed to challenging the value-free ideal (VFI) of science. Feminists had a distinct set of aims for engaging with science that ultimately led to several arguments that political values could play important roles in science. While these arguments undermined the most widely held version of the VFI, the main target of their criticism was a set of conceptions of scientific objectivity that motivated the VFI. Indeed, this chapter argues that a central contribution of feminists has been to provide alternative accounts of objectivity that do not require value-freedom. Some of these accounts of objectivity might be compatible with some alternative version of the VFI, though whether these would be helpful ideals may depend on what they are supposed to protect or regulate. Readers may be interested in these Handbook chapters as well: Robyn Bluhm, “‘Every Cell has a Sex’: Sex Essentialism in Biomedical Research”; Kevin C. Elliott, “Arguments Against the Value-Free Ideal”; Inkeri Koskinen, “Values and Objectivity”; Kristina Rolin, “Standpoint Theory.”