Freedom of speach and freedom of research are important, and as long as someone doesn’t call to intentionally harm or discriminate against another, it’s important that we don’t condition funding on agreement with the funders’ views.
This seems a very strange view. Surely an animal rights grantmaking organisation can discriminate in favour of applicants who also care about animals? Surely a Christian grantmaking organisation can condition its funding on agreement with the Bible? Surely a civil rights grantmaking organisation can decide to only donate to people who agree about civil rights?
I am not sure that there is actually a disagreement between you and Guy. If I understand correctly, Guy says that in so far as the funder wants research to be conducted to deepen our understanding of a specific topic, the funders should not judge researchers based on their conclusions about the topic, but based on the quality and rigor of their work in the field and their contributions to the relevant research community. This does not seem to conflict what you said, as the focus is still on work on that specific topic.
When you say “surely”, what do you mean? It would certainly be legal and moral. Would a body of research generated only by people who agree with a specific assumption be better in terms of truth-seeking than that of researchers receiving unconditional funding? Of that I’m not sure.
And now suppose it’s hard to measure whether a researcher conforms with the initial assumption, and in practice it is done by continual qualitative evaluation by the funder—is it now really only that initial assumption (e.g. animals deserve moral consideration) that’s the condition for funding, or is it now a measure of how much the research conforms with the funder’s specific conclusions from that assumption (e.g. that welfarism is good)? In this case I have a serious doubt about whether the research produces valuable results (cf. publication bias).
This seems a very strange view. Surely an animal rights grantmaking organisation can discriminate in favour of applicants who also care about animals? Surely a Christian grantmaking organisation can condition its funding on agreement with the Bible? Surely a civil rights grantmaking organisation can decide to only donate to people who agree about civil rights?
I am not sure that there is actually a disagreement between you and Guy.
If I understand correctly, Guy says that in so far as the funder wants research to be conducted to deepen our understanding of a specific topic, the funders should not judge researchers based on their conclusions about the topic, but based on the quality and rigor of their work in the field and their contributions to the relevant research community.
This does not seem to conflict what you said, as the focus is still on work on that specific topic.
When you say “surely”, what do you mean? It would certainly be legal and moral. Would a body of research generated only by people who agree with a specific assumption be better in terms of truth-seeking than that of researchers receiving unconditional funding? Of that I’m not sure.
And now suppose it’s hard to measure whether a researcher conforms with the initial assumption, and in practice it is done by continual qualitative evaluation by the funder—is it now really only that initial assumption (e.g. animals deserve moral consideration) that’s the condition for funding, or is it now a measure of how much the research conforms with the funder’s specific conclusions from that assumption (e.g. that welfarism is good)? In this case I have a serious doubt about whether the research produces valuable results (cf. publication bias).