The Fall of Nature

Imagine for a moment that this editorial were written, not by political progressives, but by conservative Catholics, who announced that any research promoting (even inadvertently ) promiscuous sex, the breakdown of the nuclear family, agnosticism and atheism, or the decline of the nation state would be suppressed or rejected lest it inflict unspecified harm on vaguely defined groups or individuals. Many of those presently nodding along with Nature s editors would have no difficulty identifying the subordination of science to a political agenda. One need not argue that opposing racism or promoting the nuclear family are dubious goals in order to also worry about elevating them over free inquiry and the dispassionate pursuit of understanding.

Suppose someone discovers that men are more likely than women to be represented at the tail end of the mathematical ability distribution and therefore more likely to be engineers or physics professors. Does such a finding constitute sexism, if only by implication? Does it stigmatize or help to negatively stereotype women? Are the authors of the editorial contending that journals should not publish an article that contains these data or makes such an argument? The very vagueness of these new guidelines allows or rather requires the political biases of editors and reviewers to intrude into the publishing process.

As the editorial proceeds, it becomes steadily more alarming and more explicitly political. Advancing knowledge and understanding, the authors declare, is also a fundamental public good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication. Such as? Any material that undermines the dignity or rights of specific groups or assumes that a human group is superior or inferior over another simply because of a social characteristic will be sufficient to raise ethics concerns that may require revisions or supersede the value of publication.

via quillette.com

We’re seeing more and more of this sort of thing. Truth must be subordinated to whatever the “ethics” is.