Rethinking Conflicts of Interest

This study argues from the literature on values for the existence of intellectual conflicts of interest, and proposes ideological transparency as the beginning of a policy solution. The first part shows that objectivity is a scientific virtue insofar as being objective results in better science, and that it is this scientific interest in objectivity that researchers’ ideological interests can clash with. The nature of this clash is examined and it is shown that there is no connexion between the size of an ideology and how much of a threat it poses to scientific objectivity. The second part of this study argues that conflicts of interest, especially intellectual ones, ought to be mitigated rather than eliminated, and that ideological transparency is the beginning of a mitigatory solution insofar as open science is safer from ideological bias. It is recognized that ideological transparency is imperfect, but that most of its imperfections apply to existing policies on the disclosure of financial conflicts of interest, and thus it is argued that ideological disclosure is at least as necessary as financial disclosure because researchers’ ideological interests can bias science in the same way as their financial ones can. These problems are, therefore, mostly dismissed, but one particular problem with open science that this study does seek to answer is in the production of a transparency paradox, whereby transparency both increases and decreases trust in science. The solution to the transparency paradox advanced here is that science educators and communicators need to educate the public about conflicts of interests – in particular, that all researchers have intellectual interests and that science is still trustworthy despite them. Conflicts of interest need to be rethought not only by metascientists and policymakers, but by everyone that interacts with science. The study concludes with some open questions to be investigated by policymakers and scientists of science policy about how ideological transparency might be operationalized in the future as a scientific policy.