Have you ever heard anyone make the argument that we must take a certain course of action because the experts tell us we must? The issue might be the threat of another country or an environmental risk, but increasingly we see appeals to authority used as the basis for arguing for this or that action.
In a new book, David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith take the appeal to experts somewhat further and argue that in order to deal with climate change we need to replace liberal democracy with an authoritarianism of scientific expertise. They write in a recent op-ed:
<more from Roger Pielke Jr.>
That’s scary. This is why I’m so suspicious of the invocation of scientific “consensus” in the context of the discussion of what, if anything, to do about global warming (or any other policy discussion for that matter).
I like to remind people that only decades ago, and in the memory of people alive today, “eugenics” was a part of the mainstream Western scientific consensus. And in 1930’s Germany, then arguably the best-educated nation on earth, mainstream “scientific” consensus held that Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others were racially “inferior.” And we all know what the Nazis decided to “do” about that.
Will, thanks heaps for those examples of the “appeal to authority” argument. I had forgotten about the eugenics case. A current example of the “consensus” argument is the public summary of the NIE.