23 found
Order:
  1. Democratic Values: A Better Foundation for Public Trust in Science.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (2):545-562.
    There is a growing consensus among philosophers of science that core parts of the scientific process involve non-epistemic values. This undermines the traditional foundation for public trust in science. In this article I consider two proposals for justifying public trust in value-laden science. According to the first, scientists can promote trust by being transparent about their value choices. On the second, trust requires that the values of a scientist align with the values of an individual member of the public. I (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  2. Thinking about Values in Science: Ethical versus Political Approaches.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (3):246-255.
    Philosophers of science now broadly agree that doing good science involves making non-epistemic value judgments. I call attention to two very different normative standards which can be used to evaluate such judgments: standards grounded in ethics and standards grounded in political philosophy. Though this distinction has not previously been highlighted, I show that the values in science literature contain arguments of each type. I conclude by explaining why this distinction is important. Seeking to determine whether some value-laden determination meets substantive (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  3. An Ethical Framework for Presenting Scientific Results to Policy-Makers.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2022 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 32 (1):33-67.
    Scientists have the ability to influence policy in important ways through how they present their results. Surprisingly, existing codes of scientific ethics have little to say about such choices. I propose that we can arrive at a set of ethical guidelines to govern scientists’ presentation of information to policymakers by looking to bioethics: roughly, just as a clinician should aim to promote informed decision-making by patients, a scientist should aim to promote informed decision-making by policymakers. Though this may sound like (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  4. Public Trust in Science: Exploring the Idiosyncrasy-Free Ideal.Marion Boulicault & S. Andrew Schroeder - 2021 - In Kevin Vallier & Michael Weber (eds.), Social Trust: Foundational and Philosophical Issues. Routledge.
    What makes science trustworthy to the public? This chapter examines one proposed answer: the trustworthiness of science is based at least in part on its independence from the idiosyncratic values, interests, and ideas of individual scientists. That is, science is trustworthy to the extent that following the scientific process would result in the same conclusions, regardless of the particular scientists involved. We analyze this "idiosyncrasy-free ideal" for science by looking at philosophical debates about inductive risk, focusing on two recent proposals (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  5. Rethinking Health: Healthy or Healthier than?S. Andrew Schroeder - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (1):131-159.
    Theorists of health have, to this point, focused exclusively on trying to define a state—health—that an organism might be in. I argue that they have overlooked the possibility of a comparativist theory of health, which would begin by defining a relation—healthier than—that holds between two organisms or two possible states of the same organism. I show that a comparativist approach to health has a number of attractive features, and has important implications for philosophers of medicine, bioethicists, health economists, and policy (...)
    Direct download (9 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  6. The Limits of Democratizing Science: When Scientists Should Ignore the Public.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):1034-1043.
    Scientists are frequently called upon to “democratize” science, by bringing the public into scientific research. One appealing point for public involvement concerns the nonepistemic values involved in science. Suppose, though, a scientist invites the public to participate in making such value-laden determinations but finds that the public holds values the scientist considers morally unacceptable. Does the argument for democratizing science commit the scientist to accepting the public’s objectionable values, or may she veto them? I argue that there are a limited (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  7. Which values should be built into economic measures?S. Andrew Schroeder - 2019 - Economics and Philosophy 35 (3):521-536.
    Many economic measures are structured to reflect ethical values. I describe three attitudes towards this: maximalism, according to which we should aim to build all relevant values into measures; minimalism, according to which we should aim to keep values out of measures; and an intermediate view. I argue the intermediate view is likely correct, but existing versions are inadequate. In particular, economists have strong reason to structure measures to reflect fixed, as opposed to user-assessable, values. This implies that, despite disagreement (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  8. Value Choices in Summary Measures of Population Health.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2017 - Public Health Ethics 10 (2):176-187.
    Summary measures of health, such as the quality-adjusted life year and disability-adjusted life year, have long been known to incorporate a number of value choices. In this paper, though, I show that the value choices in the construction of such measures extend far beyond what is generally recognized. In showing this, I hope both to improve the understanding of those measures by epidemiologists, health economists and policy-makers, and also to contribute to the general debate about the extent to which such (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  9. Consequentializing and its consequences.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (6):1475-1497.
    Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that we can and should “consequentialize” non-consequentialist moral theories, putting them into a consequentialist framework. I argue that these philosophers, usually treated as a group, in fact offer three separate arguments, two of which are incompatible. I show that none represent significant threats to a committed non-consequentialist, and that the literature has suffered due to a failure to distinguish these arguments. I conclude by showing that the failure of the consequentializers’ arguments has implications (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  10. Imperfect Duties, Group Obligations, and Beneficence.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (5):557-584.
    There is virtually no philosophical consensus on what, exactly, imperfect duties are. In this paper, I lay out three criteria which I argue any adequate account of imperfect duties should satisfy. Using beneficence as a leading example, I suggest that existing accounts of imperfect duties will have trouble meeting those criteria. I then propose a new approach: thinking of imperfect duties as duties held by groups, rather than individuals. I show, again using the example of beneficence, that this proposal can (...)
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  11. Health, Disability, and Well-Being.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2015 - In Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. New York,: Routledge.
    Much academic work (in philosophy, economics, law, etc.), as well as common sense, assumes that ill health reduces well-being. It is bad for a person to become sick, injured, disabled, etc. Empirical research, however, shows that people living with health problems report surprisingly high levels of well-being - in some cases as high as the self-reported well-being of healthy people. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between health and well-being. I argue that although we have good reason to believe (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  12.  47
    How to Interpret Covid-19 Predictions: Reassessing the IHME’s Model.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2021 - Philosophy of Medicine 1 (2).
    The IHME Covid-19 prediction model has been one of the most influential Covid models in the United States. Early on, it received heavy criticism for understating the extent of the epidemic. I argue that this criticism was based on a misunderstanding of the model. The model was best interpreted not as attempting to forecast the actual course of the epidemic. Rather, it was attempting to make a conditional projection: telling us how the epidemic would unfold, given certain assumptions. This misunderstanding (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  13.  63
    Lockdowns, Bioethics, and the Public: Policy‐Making in a Liberal Democracy.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2023 - Hastings Center Report 53 (6):11-17.
    [OPEN ACCESS] Commentaries on the ethics of Covid lockdowns nearly all focus on offering substantive guidance to policy‐makers. Lockdowns, however, raise many ethical questions that admit of a range of reasonable answers. In such cases, policy‐making in a liberal democracy ought to be sensitive to which reasonable views the public actually holds—a topic existing bioethical work on lockdowns has not explored in detail. In this essay, I identify several important questions connected to the kind of influence the public ought to (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  14. Diversifying science: comparing the benefits of citizen science with the benefits of bringing more women into science.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-20.
    I compare two different arguments for the importance of bringing new voices into science: arguments for increasing the representation of women, and arguments for the inclusion of the public, or for “citizen science”. I suggest that in each case, diversifying science can improve the quality of scientific results in three distinct ways: epistemically, ethically, and politically. In the first two respects, the mechanisms are essentially the same. In the third respect, the mechanisms are importantly different. Though this might appear to (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  15. The Influence of Values on Medical Research.S. Andrew Schroeder - forthcoming - In Alex Broadbent (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine. Oxford University Press.
    Mainstream views of medical research tell us it should be a fact-based, value-free endeavor: what a scientist (or her funding source) wants or cares about should not influence her findings. At the same time, we also sometimes criticize medical research for failing to embody certain values, e.g. when we criticize pharmaceutical companies for largely ignoring the diseases that affect the global poor. This chapter seeks to reconcile these perspectives by distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate influences of values on medical research. It (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16.  76
    How Many Have Died?S. Andrew Schroeder - 2020 - Issues in Science and Technology.
    I look at the two main approaches used to count COVID-19 deaths and show how each of those approaches can appear to both overcount COVID deaths (including deaths it should exclude) and undercount COVID deaths (excluding deaths it should include). I trace this to the fact - well-known to philosophers - that causal attribution is interest-relative. Which deaths we should attribute to COVID (as opposed to other causes) will depend on our particular interests and values. Contrary to what many journalists (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  17.  50
    Ethical Dimensions of the Global Burden of Disease.Christopher J. L. Murray & S. Andrew Schroeder - 2020 - In Nir Eyal, Samia A. Hurst, Christopher J. L. Murray, S. Andrew Schroeder & Daniel Wikler (eds.), Measuring the Global Burden of Disease: Philosophical Dimensions. New York, USA: Oup Usa. pp. 24-47.
    This chapter suggests that descriptive epidemiological studies like the Global Burden of Disease Study can usefully be divided into four tasks: describing individuals’ health states over time, assessing their health states under a range of counterfactual scenarios, summarizing the information collected, and then packaging it for presentation. The authors show that each of these tasks raises important and challenging ethical questions. They comment on some of the philosophical issues involved in measuring health states, attributing causes to health outcomes, choosing the (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  18.  72
    Is consistency overrated?S. Andrew Schroeder - 2018 - Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (3):199-200.
    In their insightful article, ‘The Disvalue of Death in the Global Burden of Disease’, Solberg et al argue that there is a potential incoherence in the way disability-adjusted life years are calculated. Morbidity is measured in years lived with disability in a way quite unlike the way mortality is measured in years of life lost. This potentially renders them incommensurable, like apples and oranges, and makes their aggregate—DALYs—conceptually unsound. The authors say that it is ‘vital’ to address this problem, that (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  19. Measuring the Global Burden of Disease: Philosophical Dimensions.Nir Eyal, Samia A. Hurst, Christopher J. L. Murray, S. Andrew Schroeder & Daniel Wikler (eds.) - 2020 - New York, USA: Oup Usa.
    The Global Burden of Disease Study is one of the largest-scale research collaborations in global health, producing critical data for researchers, policy-makers, and health workers about more than 350 diseases, injuries, and risk factors. Such an undertaking is, of course, extremely complex from an empirical perspective. But it also raises complex ethical and philosophical questions. In this volume, a group of leading philosophers, economists, epidemiologists, and policy scholars identify and discuss these philosophical questions. Better appreciating the philosophical dimensions of a (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  20. You Don't Have to Do What's Best! (A problem for consequentialists and other teleologists).S. Andrew Schroeder - 2011 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Define teleology as the view that requirements hold in virtue of facts about value or goodness. Teleological views are quite popular, and in fact some philosophers (e.g. Dreier, Smith) argue that all (plausible) moral theories can be understood teleologically. I argue, however, that certain well-known cases show that the teleologist must at minimum assume that there are certain facts that an agent ought to know, and that this means that requirements can't, in general, hold in virtue of facts about value (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  21. Incidence, Prevalence, and Hybrid Approaches to Calculating DALYs.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2012 - Population Health Metrics 10 (19).
    When disability-adjusted life years are used to measure the burden of disease on a population in a time interval, they can be calculated in several different ways: from an incidence, pure prevalence, or hybrid perspective. I show that these calculation methods are not equivalent and discuss some of the formal difficulties each method faces. I show that if we don’t discount the value of future health, there is a sense in which the choice of calculation method is a mere question (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  22.  81
    What is inductive risk?: Kevin C. Elliott and Ted Richards : Exploring inductive risk: case studies of values in science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 312pp, $39.95 PB. [REVIEW]S. Andrew Schroeder - 2018 - Metascience 28 (1):29-32.
  23.  38
    The public vs. private value of health, and their relationship. [REVIEW]S. Andrew Schroeder - 2017 - Journal of Economic Methodology 24 (3):349-355.
    We sometimes wonder how health is distributed in our society. We may also want to know about the efficiency of different health programmes. Which public measures promise the greatest overall improvements in health? It can be hard to know how to go about answering questions like these, in large part because the varieties of ill health are heterogeneous, as are their consequences. The solution that health economists have long adopted is to appeal to summary or generic measures of health, such (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark