Abstract

It's a trope of highbrow political commentary that people ought to trust and defer to experts more than they do. However, a lot of expert testimony from scientists does not merely report on the empirical matters about which these scientists have special expertise, but also either tacitly or explicitly encodes normative judgments about which they do not have special expertise. Indeed, this is almost inevitable when scientists are called on to offer advice or recommendations. This talk will have two parts. The first, purely philosophical, part will argue that laypeople rationally ought to be much more hesitant to defer to experts when their testimony encodes such normative assumptions, illustrating the point with some case studies including the COVID-19 pandemic. The second, empirical, part will address the question of whether laypeople in fact are more hesitant to defer to experts when their testimony encodes such normative assumptions, presenting the findings of a study that I recently conducted with some psychologist colleagues. The headline result is that laypeople are remarkably insensitive to the empirical-normative distinction when responding to expert testimony, across a range of topics and situations - with one important and interesting exception, namely the topic of abortion. I'll conclude by briefly considering the public policy implications of this startling gap between normative ideality and empirical reality.