Faced with the climate emergency, the research community prefers to act rather than limit itself to publishing its discoveries in specialized journals. An update on these advances with Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, philosopher of science, professor emerita at the University Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, member of the ethics committees of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the National Research Institute of Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) and the National Radioactive Waste Management Agency (Andra).
Why has the scientist’s position evolved so much?
The functioning of scientific research has been questioned as a reaction to its alignment with the neoliberal model, starting in 2000. That year, the adoption of the Lisbon agenda, aimed at making Europe a knowledge-based society, has endorsed the concept of a science oriented towards the goals of economic competition and political sovereignty. The change we observe is therefore particularly pronounced in Europe, especially in Germany and France, as well as in the United Kingdom, but the reflection is no less general, in a world where scientific positions are becoming standardized in global competition.
Is the researcher becoming an activist?
Many researchers want to give up everything or take militant action. In my opinion, the current movement does not belong to the register of activism, but to that of action. In universities many people want to change the system from within. At INRAE a petition was circulated so that management would no longer be entrusted to an X-Ponts engineer but to an internal collective, based on the self-management model. Among young graduates, many reject that their future research works serve an agriculture subject to industrial interests and not an agriculture that is developed in accordance with ecological issues. We are touching on the values that underlie scientific research and there is profound disagreement with what has been said and decided over the last twenty years.
Does science have values?
The scientific community is becoming aware that science is not neutral, but is subordinated to the systems that guide research programs. We can therefore ask ourselves why, in rich countries, so much money is invested in artificial intelligence, arguing that it would be able to solve all our problems, instead of in the fight against poverty or in developing answers to climate change. Artificial intelligence consumes energy and develops a type of research that has no contact with the real world. These are, indeed, the values that are at stake.
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