UC San Diego

Here I discuss three different problems in science which can be advanced using philosophical tools. In each case I engage heavily with the science, drawing on the current state of play for the field, with the goal of providing helpful guidance to scientists and policy-makers.

The first chapter looks at the risks associated with a newly developing invasive species control method - gene-drives, arguing that we can warrant certain harms by weighing up the damages against the potential benefits we might see on a global scale. Here I use techniques and ideas from applied ethics and policy to show that certain highly-damaging species, including European rabbits and ship rats, are viable targets for the technique despite the risk of their global extermination.

The second dives into political theory, intervening on a long and complicated debate surrounding the mechanisms behind the theory of the democratic peace. Here I use concepts like conceptual engineering, over-determination, and a newly proposed argument for the reliability of science called ‘the tangle’, developed by myself, Cartwright, Hardie, Montuschi and Soleiman, to argue that there is no single mechanism, but instead many which work together to secure the reliability of the democratic peace.

The third and final chapter points out a worrying trend of scientists and policy-makers thinking that the potential harms of science arise almost exclusively out of the application of research, rather than the research itself. Using tools fromanalytic philosophy I dive into the harms research can cause, proposing a new categorisation of these harms for use when creating moratoriums and bans. This categorisation system is then use on a real world case - research into the ‘gay gene’ - to show how it can help determine the most effective ways to mitigate harms via controlling what science can study.