Kinds of Collective Responsibility

Contemporary science often includes groups as aspirant credit seekers. And in many domains, collaborative science is becoming the norm. This is partly because ofthe complexity ofaddressing scientific questions; and it is partly because of the increased likelihood of receiving funding for interdisciplinary projects.

Haixan Dang (submitted) draws on recent work in metaethics to suggest that there are three ways of construing questions about collective responsibility in such scientific communities. First, there are questions about the parties to which a scientific outcome is attributable. Some scientific results are the result of individual efforts. Others are the result of the coordinated efforts of individuals working together. But in some cases, there will be a group who is attributable-responsible for an outcome, because of the claims that they make as a group, or the scientific procedures that they carry out as a group. Second, there are questions about who is answerable for a particular scientific claim. A group that is attributable-responsible for a scientific outcome will also be answerable-responsible for that outcome if they are in a position to produce the reasons that would justify it. As we argue below, answerability for scientific claims often becomes highly diffuse, in ways that make it impossible to find anyone below the level of a whole research team who is answerable-responsible for a scientific claim; and in some cases, it may be impossible to find any individual or group who is in a position to be answerable responsible for a scientific claim. Finally, there are questions about who should be held accountable for problematic scientific claims, and who should be praised for scientific insights; questions about accountable-responsibility turn on the proper target of praise or blame for a scientific product; and questions about the proper targets of reward or punishment for making scientific claims that are true, erroneous, or fraudulent.

And in general, a group can only be held accountable for an outcome if they are attributable-responsible for it, and are in a position to adjust their behavior in light of the praise and blame that they receive.³

Our primary focus in this chapter is on collective responsibility for problematic scientific outcomes. However, numerous pressing questions about how to assign epistemic and moral responsibility to individuals and groups arise even in the context of good and neutral scientific outcomes (Heesen 2017a; Merton 1968; Strevens 2006). Specifically, there are questions about how credit should be divided among collaborators (Bruner and O’Connor 2017); and numerous scientific journals (e.g., Nature, Science, and The New England Journal of Medicine) have developed contributor policies that aim to make it clear who a scientific claim should be attributed to. In general, these policies are designed to clarify attributability, by recording the names of everyone who makes a relevant claim or carries out a relevant procedure. But by requiring all contributors to be listed as authors, they also help to make it clear who should be held accountable for problematic outcomes, and who should receive credit for the reported research. And they constitute attempts to guard against the intrusion of hidden influences and conflicts of interest, by making it clear who has made specific contributions to a scientific paper. Consequently, these policies embed collaborative research more firmly within the networks of norms that govern the scientific credit economy. Each researcher receives credit for their own contributions; and where all collaborators know who is responsible for which aspects of a scientific project, it is easier to track down the points where distortions have emerged.

Many contributor statements go beyond considerations of attributability, in an attempt to clarify these distributed structures of answerability and accountability. This shouldn’t be a surprise, especially where scientific research impacts the way that people conceptualize core values such as health, wellbeing, and treatment options. Such ethical considerations may help to explain why the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends that someone should be counted as an author if and only if they have: (1) made a substantial contribution to the research design, or played a significant role in the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; (2) drafted the manuscript or made substantial and intellectually significant revisions to it; (3) given their approval on the final version of the manuscript; and (4) agreed to vouch for the accuracy and integrity of all aspects of the research.

These robust constraints on authorship are designed “to ensure that contributors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors, but also that contributors credited as authors understand their role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published” (ICMJE 2013). As a result, they draw considerations of attributability, answerability, and accountability together by specifying who carried out the research and writing, who can justify claims, and who should be held accountable if a problematic outcome arises.

This is all quite reasonable, as many forms of collaborative research preserve the unity of Dang’s three proposed kinds of responsibility. Consider a small group of authors who toss a manuscript back-and-forth until they all agree that it is ready for submission (or who defer to statisticians and modelers when questions about their models arise). Such catch-and-toss collaborations preserve familiar forms of individual and shared responsibility, allowing each author to know who is able to address specific kinds of questions, and allowing collaborators to reconstruct justifications for their scientific claims where problems arise (Huebner et al. 2017). Perhaps more importantly, they preserve the ability of co-authors to trust one another to follow scientific norms, and to figure out where problems have emerged in the process of collecting, analyzing, or interpreting data (cf. Andersen 2013). So, each contributor can justify their own contributions and direct inquiries to collaborators where they lack relevant expertise: the scientists who are responsible for producing a scientific paper can be answerable for the claims that they make, and they can be treated as legitimate targets of praise or blame for the outcomes of their research.

In such contexts, scientific misconduct is typically performed by a single contributor—and while co-authors may be epistemically blameworthy for trusting a fraudster, they will rarely be morally culpable for the actions of that fraudster (Andersen 2014).

There may also be cases where co-authors refuse to intervene on forms of misconduct that they are aware of; and in such cases, an agency-based approach to complicity may be relevant to the assignment of responsibility (Bazargan-Forward 2017). Such cases are likely to be relatively rare in small-scale collaborations; and even where they arise, we will typically be able to figure out who is answerable for scientific misconduct, and who should be held accountable if problems arise. However, these patterns of trust and deference can be compromised, and this can have an enormous impact on the relationship between attributability, answerability, and accountability for research outcomes (here too, we follow Dang; however, our conclusions diverge from hers). Specifically, we contend that accountability for mistakes can dissipate in massively distributed research groups, even where it is clear who a claim is attributable to, and who carried out various scientific tasks; and we argue that external values can compromise answerability, in part by obscuring lines of attributability. We consider these possibilities in sections 25.3 and 25.4 respectively.

25.3

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Source: Bazargan-Forward Saba, Tollefsen Deborah (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility. Routledge,2020. — 538 p.. 2020

Kinds of Collective Responsibility

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