The aim of this blog post is to illustrate the ways value freedom is weaponized in defense of race science by Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025).
Following the definitions in Hicks and Lobato (2024), I understand scientific racism as the social practice of purporting to justify racial inequality and colonialism by appealing to the epistemic authority of science. And race science refers to scientific and/or pseudoscientific research, including research products (journal articles, etc.), that can be utilized for scientific racism.
Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) is one of a pair of articles replying to Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024). Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) offer a critique of racial hereditarianism research (RHR), which they characterize as research products that
claim that folk racial classifications are biologically meaningful categories and that racial differences in intelligence test scores, educational attainment, income, and crime partly or even primarily originate from genetic differences between races. (497)
I understand RHR as a specific line of race science.
A real paper would give more context to the exchange of papers between these two groups of authors here.
I argue that Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) weaponize value-freedom in a number of ways (to be discussed below), claiming that Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) violate value-freedom and therefore their critique of RHR/race science can be dismissed.
I first make some preliminary remarks on value-freedom, as I use the term here. Next I assess Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025)’s appeal to Robert Merton’s norms of science. I discuss the importance of implicature in the relationship between race science and scientific racism, and conclude by reflecting on the way a “value freedom tu quoque” are used to deflect charges of violating value freedom.
Value freedom
In this post, I use the term “value freedom,” rather than the more common term in philosophy of science, “the value-free ideal” or VFI. Philosophers’ understanding of VFI has a narrow scope: it prohibits only the influence of non-epistemic values in a particular “core,” “epistemic” “stage” of scientific inquiry. Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) do not appear to use such a narrowly-scoped idea; instead they appeal to a conceptual separation between research and its application and the political motivations of their interlocutors independent of “stages” of inquiry.
These ideas — VFI, the research/application distinction, and motivations in general — are related, but logically distinct. Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) do not appeal to VFI, in the strict sense; but they do appeal to a cluster of related ideas, that can be usefully grouped under the general heading of “value freedom.”
The research/application distinction can be seen in the way Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) respond to the argument that the Buffalo mass shooter’s cited race science research in his manifesto. They argue that this critique is “somewhat like demanding that chemistry be outlawed and its practitioners smeared as having blood on their hands, just because some terrorists use chemistry to make poisons or explosives that kill people” (2).1 Later, they provide quotations from earlier papers that recognize “that more must be done to avoid politicized misuse of socially salient research” because “a tendency for some of our ideas to be misappropriated by highly politically motivated individuals online,” and so “we have failed to make sufficient efforts to clearly disconnect our work from political ideologies” (4). In the immediately following paragraph, they complain that “despite this apparent candor and restraint, such researchers somehow still are cast as shouldering responsibility whenever some disturbed individual misappropriates some of their ideas” (4).
In these passages, Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) separate race science research from its (harmful) downstream application. The chemical weapons analogy and the final quotation from page 4 claim that race scientists are not responsible for these applications. The “failed to make sufficient efforts” quotation accepts responsibility — but apparently only for insufficient value freedom within their research. Their responsibility does not extend to the distinct act of “misappropriat[ion].”2
Near the end of §3, Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) claim that “BJ&W’s real motivation is their political ideology … rather than any balanced appraisal of the costs and benefits to society of” race science (3). From here, they assert that race science is opposed because it “contradict[s] the sacred values of political groups,” evoke the Lysenko affair, claim that “the radical left” does not distinguish between “RHR, genetics, evolutionary psychology, eugenics, systemic racism and sexism, IQ testing, and, indeed, Mertonian norms of science themselves,” and conclude that Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024)’s policy proposals would lead down a slippery slope to broad censorship (4-5). This line of thought alleges that Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) are violating value freedom, but not (merely) in the “core” stage of gathering evidence and evaluating hypotheses, i.e., within the scope of VFI. The violation appears to be either holding left-wing values itself or — to be charitable to Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) — perhaps using left-wing values as premises in policy arguments.
Mertonian and Anti-Mertonian Norms
The title and §1 claim that Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) are proposing to replace the “Mertonian norms” — the “ethos of science” described by sociologist Robert Merton — with a set of “anti-Mertonian norms.”
If this were a real paper, I would summarize the “anti-Mertonian norms” here. I would also note that Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) misquote Robert K. Merton (1942) (121), renaming the norm of communism as “communality.”
The appeal to Merton to defend value freedom is ironic, because Merton presented the “ethos of science” as an explicitly ideological argument against fascism — especially in Germany, and especially race science — and for liberal democracy (Robert K. Merton 1938; Robert K. Merton 1942).3
Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) cite Mitroff (1974) as a reference for the concept of “anti-norms” (Mitroff’s term is “counter-norms”) but miss the significance of not only Mitroff’s paper but also Merton’s later work on norms of science as summarized on the first few pages of Mitroff’s paper. In Merton’s later work, in any complex social practice such as science, the “dominant [norms] alone would not be flexible enough to provide for the endlessly varying contingencies of social relations” (Merton and Barber as quoted by Mitroff 1974, 579). Contrasting, “subsidiary counter-norms” develop to enable this necessary flexibility. For example, sociologists and philosophers — including Merton himself — have long recognized that, along with and in contrast to communism, scientists are often motivated by self-interest, chasing credit and prestige, under the “priority rule” that the first to publish a significant new discovery receives all the credit for it (Strevens and Journal of Philosophy, Inc. 2003).
In this light, even as characterized by Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025), the “counter-norms” proposed by Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) can be seen as giving useful flexibility to an excessively narrow reading of Merton’s norms:
- secrecy recognizes that some scientific evidence or even findings are too sensitive and potentially dangerous to publish (locations of endangered species that might be targeted by poachers; Indigenous sacred sites that also carry Traditional Ecological Knowledge; instructions for producing weapons of mass destruction)
- particularism recognizes that the work of scientific bad actors should receive, at a minimum, heightened scrutiny (individuals who have committed serious research misconduct; cranks who refuse to respect the uptake norm requiring response to criticism)
- interested recognizes that, when scientific research carries elevated risk for harmful downstream social consequences, it is appropriate to require a more demanding standard of evidence (Kitcher 1997; Havstad 2021; Meyer et al. 2023)
- organized dogmatism designates certain questions as so thoroughly studied and rival research programs so degenerate (Lakatos 2004) that there is no expected value in continuing to regard those questions as open and those rival research programs as pursuitworthy (anthropogenic climate change)
In other words, taking the Mertonian norms as the exclusive norms for a scientific community would be corrosive, as it would leave the community vulnerable to cranks, fraudsters, and merchants of doubt.
Both Merton’s norms and the “Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) counter-norms” require the exercise of judgment. When exactly does a norm apply, what exactly does it require or prohibit, and how should it be balanced against other, conflicting norms? Scientists are likely to disagree about such questions, and scientific communities must necessarily engage in internal politics to establish the bounds of reasonable disagreement over the answers. Both Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) and Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) should be read as salvos in a political conflict unfolding within contemporary psychology.
Implicature and the Denial of Responsibility
The concept of implicature was developed by the philosopher of language Paul Grice to characterize the way in which language often communicates meaning beyond its explicit content and strict deductive entailments. An example comes from §1 of Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) itself. At no point do Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) say explicitly that the “anti-Mertonian norms” they attribute to Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) will be corrosive, destructive, or otherwise bad. Instead, they argue that the Mertonian norms “embody centuries of research experience, and reflect a long-established consensus among academic scientists about ways of doing research that tend to promote the highest rate of scientific progress” (2). Taken literally, this argument does not entail anything whatsoever about the “anti-Mertonian norms”; strictly speaking, it is logically irrelevant to the latter norms. But the implicature is that the latter norms will tradition, reject consensus, and will frustrate rather than promote scientific progress.4
Implicature is crucial to the phenomenon of racial dogwhistles. Phrases like “wolf pack” and “welfare mothers” do not explicitly refer or deductively entail anything about African Americans, and thus allow their users to deflect charges of racism. But in the US political context these phrases readily communicate pernicious stereotypes that young Black men are dangerous, subhuman criminals and Black women are lazy abusers of the social safety net.
Implicature is context-dependent. These particular racial dogwhistles are likely to be less effective outside the US.
Implicature can also be independent of the speaker’s communicative intent. Someone can invoke racial stereotypes without realizing they are doing so, and indeed even when they would explicitly reject these stereotypes.
I propose that implicature is often what connects race science to scientific racism. A piece of research can be taken up and used to purportedly justify racial inequality not because of the researcher’s own racist intentions (indeed, they might explicitly denounce such intentions) or its explicit conclusions (indeed, the research might not say anything explicit about race at all) but because in a certain context it is amenable to being interpreted as providing such a justification. (For analysis of an example from human genomics, see Wills 2017.)
The idea of “misuse” or “misappropriation” is crucial to the way Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) deny responsibility for scientific racist use of race science research, as in their responses to the Buffalo shooter manifesto. “Misuse” appears six times in the five-page paper, and “misappropriation” three times (all on page 4).
But implicature significantly complicates the idea of “misuse” or “misappropriation” of scientific research. Because implicature extends beyond the speaker’s intention, a simplistic conception of misuse — in terms of how a researcher intended their research to be used — is inapt, and provides the same rhetorical cover that dogwhistles provide race-baiting politicians and “just asking questions” provides conspiracy theorists.5 A more robust approach might come from the law of torts, and the notion of “reasonable foresight,” that is, whether a “reasonable scientist” could have foreseen this application of their research and its consequences (Douglas 2009 ch. 4). As with norms and counter-norms, the bounds of what counts as a “reasonable scientist” and what they can foresee are necessarily a political issue.
Again, implicatures are context-dependent, and Kitcher (1997) identified some key features of contemporary Anglophone societies that support scientific racist implicatures. Briefly, these features are asymmetries in the uptake of racial differences research: research that supports scientific racism will be taken up and the degree of support exaggerated, while research that challenges scientific racism will be rejected (not taken up) and its degree of challenge downplayed.
Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) claim that Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024)’s proposals would “backfire” with three kinds of “unintended consequences” (3): blocking research that uncovers evidence supporting “racial environmentalist hypotheses”; blocking research that challenges views that circulate among white nationalists,6 and third, these proposals “would also apply very broadly to all of ‘mainstream human genetics’” (4).
The first two unintended consequences founder on Kitcher’s asymmetries. Insofar as they obtain, both kinds of research would tend to be rejected and their degree of challenge to scientific racism downplayed.
In addition, both kinds of research carry scientific racist implicatures, namely, that it is an open and scientifically legitimate possibility that there is a “natural” racial hierarchy based on differences in “innate” ability. Even research that is intended to undermine racial hierarchy, is expected to produce evidence challenging scientific racism, and actually does produce such evidence, assumes that the question of “natural” racial hierarchy remains unanswered.
Weaponizing value freedom to deflect charges of violating value freedom
A core element of Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024)’s critique is that race science promotes the pernicious and morally noxious worldview of scientific racism. This critique does not need to assume value freedom: one can regard scientific racism as pernicious and morally noxious without assume that science should be, in some general sense or another, value free. But it can be read through the lens of value freedom: race science promotes non-neutral values and therefore race science should be avoided. Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) occasionally use something like this framing: “we dispute claims of ‘value neutrality’ for this research” (498); “These conclusions are not value-free or ideologically neutral” (499).
A major thread of Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025)’s reply is a tu quoque that Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) have violated value freedom, in the ways discussed above. This argument strategy has a long history in responses to critiques that science promotes racism, sexism, or other forms of injustice. In the “science wars” of the 1990s it was used against feminist critiques of sexist science (E. A. Lloyd 1995; E. Lloyd 1997). It is deployed today in rants that claim DEI initiatives undermine “merit in science.”
Such arguments are often logically irrelevant, in two ways. First, they do not provide any reason or evidence to think that race scientists have not violated value freedom. Even if we accept that Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston (2024) violated value freedom, this does not give us a reason to think that, say, Richard Lynn did not violate value freedom. Second, these arguments are often made against interlocutors who do not accept value freedom, do think that science should necessarily be value free. (The difference between rejecting race science on the basis of value freedom and rejecting it on the basis of antiracist values.) So the tu quoque does not show that the interlocutor is being inconsistent or hypocritical, endorsing a principle while also violating it.
These arguments often have other problems, like the ones I’ve identified here: based on a superficial misreading of source material, applied inconsistently or without thinking through the logical implications of a position, and so on.
Nonetheless, these arguments can be rhetorically effective, insofar as they shift the focus of debate from race science to its critics, DARVO-style, and insofar as the audience does accept value freedom and consequently regards the critics as discredited and not worth engaging. And many scientists and members of the general public do think that science should be value free.
In this sense, these arguments weaponize value freedom to deflect charges of violations of value freedom.
References
Footnotes
Notably, the American Chemical Society has a page on chemical weapons research that explicitly calls for national and international regulation on such research and the manufacture and circulation of potentially dangerous materials: https://www.acs.org/policy/publicpolicies/science-policy/preventing-chemical-weapons.html.↩︎
This distinction — and the consequent denial of responsibility for application — is applied inconsistently. Shortly after the chemical weapons analogy, Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) offer a second, tu quoque reply: “BJ&W do not discuss cases in which left-wing scholarship, beliefs, and research may have influenced violent criminals” (2).↩︎
It’s an interesting question whether Merton ever said anything about the Lysenko affair, which peaked starting in 1948.↩︎
Note the irony that Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025) are attempting to challenge “organized dogmatism” by appeal to tradition and consensus, and defend universalism by appeal to the judgment of the select group of “academic scientists.”↩︎
“RHR proponents often assert that no racial inferiority is implied by claims of evolved smaller brains, lower intelligence, and greater propensity for violence in people of African descent, and therefore such claims are not ‘racist’ (see Carl, 2019, p. 271; Gottfredson, 2013)” (Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston 2024, 505).↩︎
The example given is evidence that Ashkenazi Jews have a greater average IQ than non-Jewish individuals of European descent and that this purportedly explains the “disproportionate Jewish influence in politics, finance, science, and media” (3).↩︎