This aptly named volume collects fourteen essays unified by their use of virtue as a conceptual tool for understanding science and technology. As the editors highlight in their introduction, an increased interest in virtue theoretical notions is a distinctive trend within twenty-first-century science and technology studies. However, as much of this scholarship has taken place in isolation, it has received relatively little systematic attention. The volume aims to remedy this deficit.
How virtue is used more specifically differs considerably among the essays. These differences include the object of study (science, technology, or, in some cases, technoscience); whether the focus is on ethics or epistemology (or both); and whether the relevant virtues are ascribed to practitioners (individual scientists or technologists), the practice itself (science, engineering), the products of those practices (e.g., scientific theories, pieces of technology), or the consumers of those products (e.g., technology users). For instance, while Jon Alan Schmidt defends an account of the virtuous engineer, Dana Tulodziecki’s essay concerns classical debates about theory choice and the virtues of scientific theories. In addition, there are differences in the theoretical content that different contributors associate with the concept of virtue. Some essays use the term in a thin or broadly commonsense way, roughly speaking to mean “character trait” or “excellence,” without committing to any deeper analysis. Others draw extensively on specific virtue theoretical traditions or frameworks. In the latter case, by far the most common source of theoretical insight is the works of Aristotle, as well as Alasdair MacIntyre’s modern articulation of virtue ethics. Notable exceptions include the essays by Shannon Vallor, who additionally draws on the Confucian concept of “moral style”; Mike Martin, who extensively discusses concepts of mindfulness deriving from Buddhism and modern psychology; and Emanuele Ratti, who explores connections between analytic virtue epistemology and the debate over Pierre Duhem’s notion of “good sense.”
This breadth is a natural consequence of the editors’ aim, namely, to bring together perspectives from a wide range of previously isolated research programs that have converged on virtue as a useful lens for thinking about science and technology. In this sense, the volume succeeds. For anyone wishing to apply virtue theoretical ideas to the study of science and technology, it provides an invaluable overview of potentially relevant existing research. However, because they represent such a broad range of research programs, the kinds of normative and descriptive questions that motivate the essays also vary a great deal. These include questions about the ethics of technology, the nature of (good) scientific practice, how to teach ethics to scientists and engineers, the epistemic status of scientific theories, and so on. While there are many crisscrossing ways that these questions are relevant to each other, they don’t quite come together as a single conversation. Thus readers should not expect this volume to introduce them to a single, already well-developed field of research; rather, it reads more like a collection of shorter introductions to many different—though adjacent—topics.
That said, several common themes and ideas run through many of the essays. Here I highlight three that are likely to be of particular interest to philosophers of science, namely, (1) there is a tight connection between epistemic and ethical virtues, (2) empirical studies of science provide important insights for philosophical theorizing about these virtues, and (3) virtue theory can in turn help improve scientific and technological practice. In the rest of this review, I’ll highlight a few examples.
Two of the essays in this volume highlight novel perspectives that a focus on virtue can provide on the connection between epistemic and ethical values in science.
The first is Laura Ruetsche’s “Virtue and Contingent History: Engineering Science.” Ruetsche argues that scientists’ character traits (or “second natures,” as she also calls them) play an important role in producing both epistemic and moral excellence within science. Thus we should wonder whether the same set of character traits is conducive to both. We might hope that the epistemic aims of science are best achieved by a scientific community that embodies virtues that are simultaneously morally desirable—Ruetsche’s exemplar is Helen Longino’s ideal of a “scientific community designed to represent and enfranchise heterogenous second natures” (174) through virtues like “humility, patience, and trust” (175). However, Ruetsche also entertains the possibility (following Peter Railton) that the current, morally less attractive constitution of science—“commodified, intent on prediction, intensely competitive” (175)—might in fact be highly conducive to producing true belief. Whether that’s the case, Ruetsche suggests, is a contingent empirical question, dependent on wider social conditions.
The second is Thomas Stapleford and Daniel Hicks’s “Seeing Science as a Communal Practice: MacIntyre, Virtue Ethics and the Study of Science.” As the title suggests, they draw on MacIntyre’s work to propose an interpretation of science as a “communal practice.” They define a communal practice as a complex set of collaborative activities that are interpreted as directed toward certain “goods of excellence,” that is, things that are “perceived as having value in themselves and that are integrated into a broader vision of the good life” (53). These goals in turn provide a standard for specifying and evaluating the virtues of that practice: the qualities that characterize an excellent practitioner and “allow her to routinely realize the goods of the practice” (45). This framework, among other things, allows them to interpret debates about epistemic scientific virtues as grounded in underlying ethical disagreement about the goods a given discipline should aim to realize. For instance, one aspect of debates over the virtue of rigor involves trade-offs between internal validity and external validity. Stapleford and Hicks interpret these debates as reflecting ethical disagreements about whether a discipline like development economics should aim primarily at knowledge-for-understanding or knowledge-for-action (49).
The connection between epistemic and ethical values also comes through in many of the more empirically focused contributions to the volume.
For instance, Richard Bellon’s historical essay “Sacrifice in Service to Truth: The Epistemic Virtues of Victorian British Science” looks at the rhetorical role virtue played in justifying the authority of scientists in nineteenth-century Britain. He argues that, despite diverging and changing conceptions of religious, scientific, and metaphysical truth, British scientists were able unite around a set of shared virtues, including “patience, humility, diligence, self-control” (32). Not only did they regard these virtues as conducive to truth-seeking inquiry but they were also widely perceived as morally admirable. Thus emphasizing scientists’ adherence to these virtues lent both epistemic and moral authority to science in Victorian Britain.
In addition to historical case studies, several of the essays draw on insights from the social scientific study of contemporary science. For instance, Louise Bezuidenhout and Dori Beeler, in their “Dynamic Boundaries: Using Boundary Work to Rethink Scientific Virtues,” draw on the sociologist Thomas Gieryn to argue that the boundary between science and other cultural activities is “drawn and redrawn by dynamically engaged knowledge makers and users” (274), rather than defined by any static, essential criteria. On this basis, they propose that scientific virtue should be understood in terms of the ability to “flexibly deal with the fluctuating spaces created by boundaries without losing moral integrity” (281).
Some contributors also discuss results from their own empirical research. For instance, Jutta Schickore’s essay “Is ‘Failing Well’ a Sign of Scientific Virtue?” discusses results from interviews with scientists concerning their views on failure and success. Contrary to some popular presentations of science, few of her interviewees think of scientific virtue in terms of “failing well”; rather, failure and error are widely seen as stigmatized, perceived as the product of sloppy or even unethical scientific practices. Again, ethical and epistemic virtues seem to be closely related, at least in scientists’ own thinking.
Finally, the idea that virtues are cultivated and shaped by contingent social factors—a common theme in virtue ethics, especially within the Aristotelean tradition—motivates many of the contributors to consider what kinds of virtues we should aim to cultivate in future practitioners and consumers of science and technology. It is worth highlighting here the essays by Jiin-Yu Chen (“Integrating Virtue Ethics into Responsible-Conduct-of-Research Programs: Challenges and Opportunities”) and Mark Bourgeois (“Virtue Ethics and the Social Responsibilities of Scientists”), both of whom describe their experience of teaching responsible research modules to science and engineering students. As they argue, virtue ethics provides a particularly fruitful framework for science students and practitioners to think through the ethical implications of their own work. In particular, it helps overcome the perception of responsible research as either an externally imposed mandate that merely has to be complied with (or, worse, circumvented) or “optional, supererogatory activities that can just as easily be neglected” (252). Chen and Bourgeois highlight that virtue ethics can help frame responsible research as an integral part of good science, in ways that help students connect it to their own research practice.
These are just a few highlights to illustrate the kinds of ideas that are developed within this volume. Readers interested in empirically informed ethics and epistemology of science and technology will find lots more to dig into, both within the essays highlighted herein and elsewhere in this broad-ranging collection.
