Abstract
In the last two decades, the ordinary life of democratic politics in Western countries has been shaken by the rise of crises that are believed to challenge the nature and dynamics of Western liberal democracies. These are unexpected circumstances that force a temporary redistribution of the traditional powers as the executive power, vis-à-vis the other branches of the government, is claimed to possess the information, decisiveness, and speed to make decisions. In the last couple of years, the two types of crises that have dominated the political scenario have brought up the issue of the relation between politics and science. For, the most striking feature of today’s political emergencies is the need for courses of action that involve massive scientific expertise. In the management of the recent pandemics, and with respect to the current energy crisis, sciences have played an increasingly crucial role in the definition of the governmental response as well as in the analysis of the hazards that they involve when a decision is to be made under the urgency and pressure of an emergency. While this difficult interplay puts in jeopardy both the neutrality of scientific evidence and the legitimacy of democratic procedures, four main issues come to the foreground. On the part of democratic politics, the accountability of decisions that are believed to be informed by scientific evidence and the legitimacy of decisions that avoid the conventional procedures of democratic decision-making. On the part of hard sciences, the efficacy of a theoretical knowledge that is called on to provide mandatory guide for conducts and the transformation of scientific knowledge when it is involved in the policy agenda of the government. This comes down to the pressing question: What are the institutional sites in which the interchange between science expertise and policymaking should take place to be fully accountable, debatable, and contestable – even in times of crisis? This interdisciplinary project combines the methods of political philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and philosophy of medicine to address four research questions (RQs): RQ1. What are the virtuous and the vicious intersections between scientific knowledge and policy-making? RQ2. What is a policy-oriented scientific method? RQ3. Can a policy-oriented scientific method be politically and ethically neutral? RQ4. Does, and if so to what extent, the involvement of scientific knowledge and science experts impinge on the legitimacy of the decisional process? The main objective of the research project will be to determine to what extent scientific expertise can be involved in decision-making for the former to remain independent of the contingency of the licy agenda and the latter to preserve its legitimacy vis-à-vis the risk of the self-justifying use (and misuse) of scientific evidence. It is worth noting that the two cases have been selected not only because of their obvious topicality, but especially because they display somewhat opposite characteristics. On the one hand, the nuclear energy field is strictly regulated by clear, international safety standards, management protocols, and guidelines for emergency response. Yet, their implementation is far from easy because of extra-scientific, mainly political and ethical issues. In short, the almost unanimous view of nuclear experts about nuclear power meets with widespread scepticism on the part of the public and thus strives to be translated into actual policies – this concerns Italy in particular. On the other hand, and quite the opposite, in the case of the Covid-19 the political and institutional response was much more rapid although views on the nature and dynamics of the pandemics were not unanimous and evidence was still very scarce, especially at the very first moments. In this case, the majority view among scientists did not meet with significant social scept
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Raffaella Campaner
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Filosofia
Coordinator:
"Sapienza" Universita' Di Roma(Italy)
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 58.265,00
Project Duration in months: 27
Start Date:
30/11/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
