No, We Should Not “Follow The Science”
While science can give us information with which to color our policy, it cannot make moral, or ethical claims.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the phrase “Follow The Science” has become a mantra of institutions which seek to draft and enforce public health policy. Platforms including mainstream media, social media, and government institutions have all used “science” to give credibility to their rules and claims. Media outlets use this framework to discredit anyone skeptical of things like mask-wearing and new vaccines as conspiracy theorists or crazy people. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook censor, delete, or flag posts that go against “scientific consensus” on these issues. The CDC issues guidelines for States based on the freshest scientific discovery.
On the surface, these phenomena may seem rational. After all, science is the greatest tool the human race has for discovering what is true about our universe. Science has in large part created the modern world, and the contributions made by science to human flourishing cannot be overstated.
Since science is a powerful tool, it should be used to buttress good policy. The problem with the “Follow The Science” movement then, is the fundamental misunderstanding of what science is and how it operates. The misunderstanding is made in two places:
First, science is not a static enterprise. There is no established scientific truth which we ought to blindly follow without question. In science every idea is up for debate. It is in the nature of scientific questions to be falsifiable. The scientific method is a method of criticism and scrutiny, through which only the best ideas survive. To obstruct this process by rebuking the skeptic to “Follow The Science” is not a protection of science, but is actually a corruption of the scientific process. If an idea is truly sacrosanct, it should be able to withstand criticism without the aid of social media censors and warning pins.
Second, while science can give us information with which to color our policy, it cannot make moral, or ethical claims. Science cannot make value claims, or proclaim political truths. All of these types of truth belong solely to the faculty of human reasoning. There is no scientific reason why murder is wrong. There is no test to discover whether or not human rights exist. These are abstract notions developed via the human psyche, and it is hard to imagine any physical evidence we could discover which would falsify either of these claims or many other ethical, political, or value claims.
To make this train of thought more contemporary, I will explore the mandate of mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are a few things science can tell us about mask wearing. It can tell us whether or not it will prevent the spread of COVID. It can tell us what kind of effects mask-wearing has on our psychology etc. However, science cannot tell us whether or not we should wear masks. The decision to mandate masks is a question of balancing values against one another, which science cannot do. In this case, policy makers are to balance many factors, only one of which is the spread of COVID-19. Policy makers must also consider the effect on social cohesion, the risk to personal liberty, psychological effects, make ethical considerations, and consider whether or not the state has the right to mandate mask wearing in the first place. Science can provide us with data to fill in our thought process, but it cannot balance our values for us.
This is the ultimate danger of intimating “Follow The Science”. It is, at its worst, a call to shut down one’s critical thinking skills. It is a way for powerful institutions to enforce compliance, whereby propping up their ideas on the scaffold of science gives their policy the appearance of incontrovertibility. One should not blindly follow the “consensus” that comes from on high. Instead, the rational mind should interrogate the evidence for itself, and balance that evidence against other human considerations.
