The ethics of expertise: in financial and medical advice, climate and everything

3) Tell the truth as you see it in your professional judgment, even if you have to tell your employers, clients, or those in power things they don’t want to hear.

4) Recognize the human propensity to rationalize: you will be tempted to believe what your employers or those in power want to hear you say.

5) Consider the effects of your statements on those who are not your employers or clients. Especially if they are likely to be put at risk by the application of your knowledge and most especially if they are likely to be put at risk without their knowledge or consent.

6) Know your own ethical limits. Try to avoid positions where you might not be able to obey the above principles because you are susceptible to the temptations of the position or too afraid of the possible costs of following them.

Hardwig says that The ethics of expertise is not a one-way street and that:

...we need to think much more about the ethics of the recipient of all kinds of professional services — about the ethics of the patient, the person retaining a lawyer … about the ethics of the company or government agency hiring an engineer or chemist, a firm to do an accounting audit or environmental impact statement. The ethics of the recipient of expert opinion is also an important part of a complete professional ethics. 

That last point struck home, for we who use experts have to be careful about our own motives. We need to recognise, Hardwig says, that:

...agreement with your values, desires, policies, plans, or hunches is not a qualification for an expert. Selecting an expert whom you think will likely support your position is an epistemic vice, a form of rationalization. Selecting an expert because you know she will support your position is a form of deliberate deception (or of self-deception) and hence an ethical vice.

I have to stop, though there’s so much more. But consider what we see in the world around us. How much of Hardwig’s proposed Ethics of Expertise do we encounter? My GP satisfies those maxims, and I have been his patient for 35 years. But in the world of financial advice? In that of ‘climate change’, I would argue, you do not find a great deal. I do not trust some of the experts there, because I find that on my experience with them so far that they do not deserve that trust.

And governments everywhere have failed to examine their own positions when they seek the opinion of experts. It is a truism of government that you do not appoint a commission of inquiry unless you know what its report will be. There has been no disinterested inquiry into ‘climate change’, only a weak resort to what the academies say, or the 97% of experts. Ethical it is not, on either side.

I came across this magnificent essay through Judith Curry, and you can read her excellent reflections on it here.