As we met over the past several months to discuss the opportunity of establishing a Kavli Center for Ethics, Science and the Public at UC Berkeley, we discovered that many of us face the same challenges. In an era of social fragmentation and contested facts, science represents humanity’s best cooperative truth-seeking endeavor. On the other hand, the ethical assessment of developments in science and technology must be responsive to diverse values and ways of life and is therefore somewhat resistant to attempts to identify a moral ground truth. The mission Kavli Center for Ethics, Science and the Public that will provide an inclusive, democratic, and multidisciplinary framework for understanding the ethical implications of science and technology, guiding the development of policy concerning anticipated and actual scientific advances, and helping to ensure that they are answerable to fundamental human interests.
Why is a Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public so vitally important today? Founding faculty member and Nobel Laureate Dr. Jennifer Doudna, who has conducted highly innovative research on CRISPR gene editing, explains in her own words:
"After our 2012 paper revolutionized scientific research and CRISPR became global headline news, I had to quickly learn how to toggle between two responsibilities: academic teaching and research to further develop the technology, and a new role engaging with journalists, politicians, and lawmakers to publicly discuss how we as a society can safely apply breakthrough gene editing technology, including the risks of making heritable changes in the human germline. It would have been immensely helpful to have had a central resource to help me as a scientist — and as a concerned citizen — navigate the complex ethical implications of our work."
– Jennifer Doudna, October 2020
What are the key questions our Center is trying to address?
Housed at a public institution, the Kavli Center will be a beacon to the broader scientific community of the critical importance of transparency and accountability, helping to build and expand public trust in science. Three major research questions will inform the work of our Center:
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What are the most important human interests that might be affected by developments in science, technology, and policy, and what ethical responsibilities flow from these interests for individuals, scientists, and members of a democratic polity?
This first research question — determining the nature of human interests and the content of moral requirements — lies in the traditional domain of ethics, political theory, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy. More recently, there has been a much-needed recognition of the need for far greater levels of well-informed, deliberative public engagement to ensure inclusion of diverse publics and to surface their needs and values. For example, at the present moment, there is real uncertainty as to whether it is possible to deploy the technology of genetic modification without immediately widening health disparities, stigmatizing disabilities, and catalyzing a resurgence of the eugenics movement. These issues cannot be adequately addressed without scientist-leaders who understand the historical and current sociopolitical context and have the skills to meaningfully engage the public. How we address these issues has profound consequences for humanity’s future
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How can we better anticipate scientific and technological advances and their potential impact on human interests?
This second question — how to better anticipate scientific developments and their consequences — is critically important. Early anticipation generally increases our chances to head off negative consequences. It can occur within a technical discipline, as in physical climate change modeling or failure analysis for nuclear power plant designs. Residual uncertainty may be unavoidable, as in the area of GMOs, where divergent U.S. and European attitudes on risk led to opposite outcomes. The knottiest problems arise in anticipating the ways that scientific developments and their implementations interact with human society. For example, climate engineering may address the symptoms but not the causes of climate change, thus reducing the incentive for fundamental change in the social and institutional structures that created the problem in the first place. Or similarly, content selection algorithms on social media platforms may end up modifying rather than reflecting the preferences and behaviors of users and their societies. Thus, the approach cannot focus only on the technology per se but also on how it is embedded in a broader societal context. The Center’s work will address this wider framing by bringing together social scientists, philosophers, communities and stakeholders, and technical domain experts
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How can we better integrate moral goals and constraints into the conduct and application of science and technology and into public policy in these areas to ensure that the impact on human interests is positive?
Finally, the third question — how to better integrate moral goals and constraints into the conduct and application of science and technology — also requires the collaboration of ethicists, social scientists, and domain experts, as well as experts in impact, implementation, and public engagement, including faculty in law, business, public policy, and journalism. Research on how science and engineering may create new moral and social problems is particularly important. For example, research in biology and chemistry has been applied to develop weapons of mass destruction; false narratives on vaccines have proliferated widely through social media; and runaway climate change and nuclear power station meltdowns have occurred. We need to better understand why these moral catastrophes occur, who is impacted, and how to transmit the force of ethical conclusions and anticipated harm into laws, governance mechanisms, public attitudes, technical education, and on-the-ground operations. Berkeley has world-renowned faculty in political science, behavioral economics, public policy, psychology, journalism, and related fields developing cutting-edge approaches for countering ignorance, injustice, disinformation, emotional manipulation, regulatory capture, and many other sources of governance failure. Success in this endeavor will contribute to freedom of scientific inquiry because it reduces the chance that a given scientific discovery will be used in ways that harm humanity. We anticipate that the progress we make will also feed back into the formative culture of the relevant technical disciplines, ensuring that what is considered “good science” by scientists is genuinely good from the point of view of humanity.
The Hub-Spoke-Axel Model
We envision a Kavli Center for Ethics, Science and the Public comprising three elements: a “hub”, representing the core activities of the Center, where all who are affiliated with it come together to address fundamental ethical questions across disciplinary boundaries; “spokes” linking these activities to various scientific disciplines; and an “axle” connecting the Center with the larger society in a two-way process of outreach and engagement. The Center will be both a physical and an intellectual community, with cohorts of faculty and students exposed to and participating in all three elements.
The “Hub” --
The hub will be grounded in the humanities (moral philosophy, political theory, and jurisprudence) and social sciences. It will focus on elevating key ethical and philosophical questions and pioneering new approaches for addressing them, and understanding how scientific developments arise from and affect the society in which they are embedded. Berkeley is already home to some of the most distinguished and influential humanistic scholars working today in the areas of ethics and value theory, broadly construed; it is also a major center for educating undergraduate and graduate students in these areas. The Kavli Center will bring these scholars and students into sustained and collaborative discussions with scientists and engineers who are grappling with ethical challenges at the cutting edges of their research. Faculty working on issues in moral and political theory and jurisprudence will be affiliated with the Center, and graduate students and postdocs in the humanities will be a significant part of each cohort of Kavli Ethics and Science Fellows. The hub will be a place where these humanistic scholars and students work with scientists, engineers, and the general public to advance our understanding of the ethical dimensions of science and technology; to integrate ethical reflection comprehensively into the training and practice of scientists and engineers; and to fashion innovative and effective solutions to the profound moral issues of the day.
The “Spokes” --
The spokes that feed into the hub correspond to disciplines in which significant ethical issues have arisen or are likely to occur in the future. As we launch the Center, the initial spokes will include gene editing, AI, and neuroscience, areas where critical ethical issues are already being addressed by Berkeley faculty. These three spokes are described in more detail below. Future focus areas might include synthetic biology, nanoscience, climate engineering, particle physics, SETI, and so on. The selection of new spokes will depend on ethical issues that surface through regular discussions with potential spoke areas and horizon scanning in partnership with other institutions such as Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.
The “Axle” --
The axle will help integrate the work of the Center in a deep and sustained engagement with a variety of publics, in partnership with our professional schools. In some domain areas, the focus might be on legislative approaches, working with faculty in UC Berkeley Law and the Goldman School of Public Policy; if broad industry standards are needed, we work faculty at the Haas School of Business; and areas that demand a clearer understanding of public attitudes and preferences might enlist specific audiences and stakeholders (particularly among the groups most likely to be affected) using the methods of in-depth, community-based participatory research pioneered by our School of Public Health. Since engagements with the broader public are important across the board, closely with our Graduate School of Journalism and our public science center.
Why UC Berkeley?
UC Berkeley is in a powerful position as the world’s leading public research institution. We have enormous strength and depth in science, engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences, and a longstanding mission to engage with and serve the public interest.
In 2008, looking back on the 1975 Asilomar Workshop that initiated modern governance of genetic engineering, Nobel laureate Paul Berg wrote,
“There is a lesson in Asilomar for all of science: the best way to respond to concerns created by emerging knowledge or early-stage technologies is for scientists from publicly funded institutions to find common cause with the wider public about the best way to regulate — as early as possible.”
We agree.