The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

ethical striving 323since the 1960s—had to be summarized in a sentence, it would be “Scientistsare human beings.” Scientists are not parts of a machine, or functionariesin a house of intellect. They are socialized, moral agents, more orless conscientious, equipped more or less with prudence, temperance, justice,courage, love, faith, and hope.It is still conventional among scientists themselves to cling to the ideathat, say, the referee system mechanically assures good outcomes throughPrudence Only—even while complaining under their breaths about theidiocy or the moral turpitude of their editors and referees. In his popularbook about how he used mitochondrial DNA to trace the ancestry of Europeans,Bryan Sykes claims that “it is only during the review process prior topublication that the assumptions and interpretations are thoroughlychecked.” Uh-huh. Any scientist who has participated in such a “process”knows that it is okay, all right, on-the-whole-desirable, coming close to thestandards of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery—but quite far from the Baconianantirhetorical fantasy of “thoroughly checking the assumptions andinterpretations.”Sykes’s piety does not fit his own experience, at least as he recounts it. Hedescribes in detail how one Erika Hagelburg challenged his technique. Hecalls her, by the way, “Erika” throughout. One is uneasily reminded of JamesWatson’s calling Rosalind Franklin “Rosy,” which nobody but Watson in TheDouble Helix ever called her. It was a rhetorical technique for downplayingthe standing of a woman scientist with claims to rival Watson’s. Watsondoesn’t call any male enemy “Chuck” or “Bob.” 9Still, judging only from Sykes’s account, it would seem that Dr. Hagelburgwas perfidious. Sykes had hired her and trained her. Yet she turned onhim, he claims, and then, he claims, would not show him the data she usedto attack his technique. “I am sad to report”—more in sorrow than in anger,you see—“that my requests for [her] samples to verify . . . did not produceresults.” 10 But wait: isn’t the referee process supposed to prevent all this,automatically, by Prudence Only? Isn’t it a “process” without human andethical intervention other than Max U? Erika Hagelburg’s coauthored 1999paper attacking mitochondrial methods after all was published in “the prestigious”Proceedings of the Royal Society. Wouldn’t that automatically activatethe scientific method?The so-called scientific method—I speak as an economic scientist and asa partisan of the science-studies view—does not work. Good science like