VMST 2019: 9TH ANNUAL VALUES IN MEDICINE, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE 2019
PROGRAM FOR THURSDAY, MAY 23RD
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09:00-09:45Coffee & Registration
10:00-11:30 Session 2: Fertility and Pregnancy
10:00
Regulating scientific research under deep uncertainty: the case of ontologically ambiguous entities

ABSTRACT. Human embryos in the early stages of development are ontologically ambiguous entities. The same concerns, for example, induced pluripotent stem cells reprogrammed from human somatic cells, embryo-like products of parthenogenesis, human-nonhuman chimeras or human organoids. This ontological ambiguity (an example of deep uncertainty) which has been discussed extensively by philosophers and bioethicists in recent years is an underlying reason for the uncertainty of the moral and legal status of these beings. In my presentation – a part of a larger project aimed at analyzing decision theory as a model for reasoning in ethics – I want to discuss whether this uncertainty about status casts doubt upon the arguments claiming strong or even full protection of these beings. Or is it perhaps the other way around: does it give a reason for acting in a cautious way and treating these entities as if they had very high status (a higher-order precautionary principle). In recent years there have been a number of attempts to understand and find the relevant criteria for making decisions under deep uncertainty, but this topic is still unexplored in the case of ontologically ambiguous entities. Some scholars have proposed a decision theoretic approach modeled on cases of factual risk, according to which we ought (although the very nature of this ought may be contested) to represent any higher-order uncertainties in terms of those first-order (e.g. that we ought to evaluate the subjective probabilities of different doctrines about ontologically ambiguous entities and combine them with the disvalues attached by these doctrines to the creation/destruction of these entities and/or social benefits of this kind of research). I will show that this approach faces serious objections (e.g. the problem of inter-theoretical comparisons of values) and the decision theoretic approach should be understood in this case as a metaphor, rather than a model.

10:20
The Long Road to Revising the Pregnancy Labels: Fetal-centrism and a Feminist Success Story at the FDA

ABSTRACT. Societal values and institutional history shape the science at regulatory agencies, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. But, specifically how can feminist values improve regulatory science and women’s health? This paper focuses on how institutionally entrenched values have shaped the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) pregnancy labeling, i.e., the drug labeling made for physicians to counsel women on their use of medications during and after pregnancy according to 5 categories of fetal risk. The pregnancy section is the most popularly used section of the physician labels, but because of its inadequacies and its fetal-centric focus, regulators at the FDA spent over two decades creating a new labeling system (using narratives summaries of fetal and maternal risks) and promoting related research initiatives on neglected areas of maternal health (e.g., dosing). This talk analyses and evaluates the reasoning behind this revision process, particularly how regulators have responded to the fetal-centric values entrenched at the FDA to better promote pregnant women's health and wellbeing. To analyze the changes in labeling, I draw on in-depth interviews with current and former FDA staff, transcripts of advisory meetings, and documents for the rule proposal. I argue that women's health advocates improved drug labeling by extricating fetal-centric values from FDA regulations and facilitating feminist alternatives. Because of the improvements that came through the ethical-epistemic reforms, I contend that these changes in labeling constitute a feminist success story in regulatory science.

10:40
Numbers in Crisis: Gender and the Measurement of Fertility

ABSTRACT. Human fertility is in an apparent state of crisis. In July 2017, scientists reported that sperm counts among men from North America, Europe and Australia have decreased by 50 – 60% since 1973, with no sign of halting (Levine et al. 2017). For women, the story is bleak and familiar: women’s fertility decreases with age, yet women are waiting longer than ever to have children (Kincaid 2015). In this paper, I investigate this crisis by analyzing the seemingly mundane practice of measurement, i.e. the standards, methods and instruments by which the phenomenon of fertility is quantified. By comparing two widely-used measures – semen analysis in men, and ovarian reserve testing (ORT) in women – I argue that socio-cultural ideas about gender play a significant role in constructing fertility as a measurable phenomenon. Different temporal assumptions implicit in semen analysis and ORT reflect and enforce a view of women as more responsible for – and therefore more to blame for – infertility than men. I conclude by arguing that, in the case of semen analysis and ORT, it’s not just fertility that’s being measured, but degrees of adherence to entrenched norms of masculinity and femininity.

This paper has a methodological aim. Significant philosophical attention has been paid to measurement as a metaphysical and epistemological phenomenon (Tal (2017). Following philosophers like Ian Hacking (1999) and Anna Alexandrova (2017), this paper calls for greater attention to the socio-political dimensions of measurement. What role does measurement play in the creation and maintenance of social norms and, conversely, how are social norms reflected in and created through measurement practices? In this paper, I develop a framework – called ‘critical metrology’ – to address these questions, and apply it to the case of fertility measurement.

References

Alexandrova, Anna. 2017. A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hacking, Ian. 1999. “Making Up People.” In The Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario Biagioli, 161–71. New York: Routledge. Kincaid, Ellie. 2015. “American Women Are Waiting Longer than Ever to Become Mothers.” Business Insider. June 15, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/average-age-of-mother-having-first-child-going-up-2015-6. Levine, Hagai, Niels Jørgensen, Anderson Martino-Andrade, Jaime Mendiola, Dan Weksler-Derri, Irina Mindlis, Rachel Pinotti, and Shanna H Swan. 2017. “Temporal Trends in Sperm Count: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis.” Human Reproduction Update 23 (6):646–59. Tal, Eran. 2017. “Measurement in Science.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/measurement-science/.

11:30-12:00Break
12:00-13:00 Session 3: Lightning Talks 1
12:00
Finding Yourself: Epistemic Injustice & Medical Feedback in Adolescence

ABSTRACT. Sometimes, the truth hurts. When assessing medical feedback, a distinction between descriptive and normative claims is necessary to determine whether harm is warranted. Accounts of epistemic injustice focus on cases of harming someone by unfairly discrediting or diminishing their abilities as a knower. Given the way epistemic injustice affects one’s status as a knower, is there an even greater harm if that knowledge pertains to the self? In this paper, I explore the ethical norms of medical feedback when giving diagnoses to adolescents. While it’s important to give a patient feedback to make an informed decision, medical authorities are at risk for stigmatizing as seen in cases related to mental health and sexually transmitted infections. We must ensure a patient’s autonomy while allowing the doctor’s expertise to play the appropriate role. Cases of diagnosing adolescents raise a particular issue for epistemic injustice as they are learning to form a sense of identity. A positive outcome of diagnosing at an early age is that those patients can receive important care and support. For example, parents can give their children medication for a mental disorder or allow treatment like suppression of endogenous puberty for transgender teens. Yet controversy surrounds these medical interventions especially for younger patients due to the long-term nature of the technology against the fluid identities of the patients. Along with any stigma attached to the diagnosis, medical interventions can carry dangerous long-term effects that can harm adolescents in not only how they see themselves but also their future behavior. Therefore, an ethics of medical feedback between patients and medical professionals requires identifying who is most vulnerable to dangerous forms of feedback and what proper interventions should take place to protect those populations.

12:00
Communicating Risks and Harms in Clinical Guidelines: A Need for Values in Science

ABSTRACT. Clinical guidelines provide statements about diagnoses and evidence-based treatments, including the harms and risks associated with various treatments. Since the development of evidence-based medicine, these guidelines have been extensively used and have the ability to affect the health and wellbeing of millions of people, as well as the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. However, there is little, if any, transparent consideration made for the potential consequences stemming from the assertions made about harms in these guidelines. This concern is best illustrated through an example: current clinical guidelines in the United States, Canada, and the UK assert that antidepressants are not addictive. This is a categorical claim, expressed with no uncertainty. It is also epistemically questionable and morally problematic, given the language of ‘addiction’ being used, the widely reported phenomenon of ‘antidepressant discontinuation syndrome’, as well as the long-lasting and severe harm that has likely resulted from this guideline.

The question of what role values ought to play in policy-informing science has been debated in the philosophy of science, with scholars such as Stephen John and Gregor Betz arguing against the incorporation of non-epistemic values in scientific reasoning proposed by Heather Douglas. These debates have centred around environmental and toxicological sciences, but have not adequately addressed the medical science that informs clinical guidelines. My paper addresses this ethical issue and argues that non-epistemic values and inductive risk should be explicitly considered in the way harms and risks are portrayed in the medical research that is used as evidence for clinical guidelines. By examining the debate surrounding values in policy-informing science, the systematic underrepresentation of harms in medical research, and the ethics of autonomy in healthcare, I contend that researchers should weigh the costs and benefits of assertions about harms that will be made on basis of their research, in addition to the costs and benefits of the actual treatments being researched. The current clinical practice guidelines for antidepressants will serve as a case study.

I conclude with the acknowledgement that values may already be considered in the crafting of the guidelines, and how, through reverse engineering, we may be able to determine what they are and why they are not transparent. This project sheds new light on the rarely acknowledged need for values in the medical research that informs clinical guidelines.

12:00
Speed v Impact: values trade-offs in Life Cycle Analysis in the field of Solar Energy Technologies

ABSTRACT. There is often a trade-off of values between solutions that can be implemented quickly and the slower development of solutions that have other desirable attributes. Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs), a predominate method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a technology, often fail to capture this values trade-off. A central attribute to current environmental issues is the limited time that is available to address them. We argue that this time constraint is fundamental to environmental problems and cannot be separated from the analysis, even temporarily.

We will be focusing on LCAs of solar panels as a case study. When solar panels are assessed, the LCA tool is designed to focus on the economic and natural resources that go into production as well as the resulting greenhouse emissions. While this is useful, current LCAs do not account for the current rate of society’s fossil fuel consumption and the resultant climate change that is occurring. With solar panels specifically, there is a trade-off between the speed at which they can be implemented and having solar panels with more desirable attributes--first and second generation solar panels that are being installed at scale may use more natural resources than third generation solar panels, but this third generation is still too expensive to compete with fossil fuels. These important values are not captured by LCAs, even though LCAs remain important decision-making tools for policy makers. Decision makers are left with a spectrum of potential choices from implementing an imperfect solution as quickly and extensively as possible, to putting off action until a more desirable solution can be deployed. In what follows, we will discuss the current content of LCAs in the context of solar development, the way in which this metric covers-over important assumptions about values, and finally make some suggestions about possible ways to modify LCAs in light of these problems.

12:00
Ectogenesis, Abortion, and the Anti-Infanticide Intuition

ABSTRACT. Ectogenesis involves the gestation of a fetus in an ex utero environment. Such technology might seem like mere science fiction, but in the future this will change. The plausibility of ectogenesis raises several morally significant questions, one of which concerns the moral status of abortion. Does it follow from a woman’s right to end her pregnancy that she likewise possesses a right to the death of the fetus even when ectogenesis is possible? Recently, Eric Mathison and Jeremy Davis (2017), have argued that it does not, since ectogenesis allows for non-lethal abortions that do not violate a woman’s right to autonomy. However, Joona Räsänen (2017), has argued that while a woman does not possess the right to the death of the fetus, the genetic parents jointly do. In this paper I examine the arguments of Mathison and Davis, but unlike them, I assume the fetus is not a person. I defend their account against Räsänen’s criticisms by arguing that for the criticisms to be successful one cannot remain neutral regarding the nature of a right. As such, Räsänen’s criticisms of Mathison and Davis are missing a crucial step. Additionally, I argue that any plausible account of the nature of rights that Räsänen might offer should be rejected in light of what I will call the anti-infanticide intuition. Since by assumption neither the fetus nor the infant count as persons, if there exists a right to kill a fetus jointly possessed by the genetic parents, then there exists a right to kill the infant jointly possessed by the genetic parents too. Intuitively, this presumed right to kill the infant jointly possessed by the genetic parents does not exist. Therefore, a woman’s right to end her pregnancy does not entail a right to the death of the fetus.

12:00
Patient Values, the Pursuit of Health, and the Ethics of Non-Hindrance

ABSTRACT. Consider the following intuitive (but infrequently explicitly defended) moral principle:

Non-Hindrance Principle (NHP): All else being equal, it is morally wrong to intentionally or negligently make it unnecessarily harder for someone to fulfill their genuine moral, epistemic, or prudential obligations.

In this paper, I explore how healthcare providers (HCPs) violate NHP.

While I do not endorse any form of “healthism” — understood either as the claim that there is a moral imperative to pursue health or as a focus on individual responsibility for health outcomes that ignores social and institutional structures — it is plausible that there is a general (defeasible) prudential obligation to pursue one’s own health, broadly construed. Crucially, this obligation is variable; what counts as “health” will depend on patients’ values and will involve different ends for different people (and must not be conflated with body size, degree of cardiovascular fitness, neuro-typicality, lack of audiovisual impairments, etc.).

Most obviously, patients are prevented from satisfying the obligation to pursue health by structural barriers to accessing care, including high costs, low availability of services, and politically motivated legal restrictions on care. However, patients can also be hindered in pursuing health as they construe it by HCPs who erect barriers to receiving the kind of care patients request in light of their values.

This resistance sometimes involves an outright refusal to treat, but it can also involve subtler discouragement. Examples include pushing back against requests for voluntary sterilization (especially by young women), insisting that fat patients who are metabolically healthy lose weight even if they do not want to or are unable to, suggesting C-sections or episiotomies for pregnant patients who do not want or need them, and mis-gendering trans and gender-non-conforming patients in ways that deter them from seeking care. Such practices are often harmful to patients, and are wrong for that reason. But they are morally problematic even if they do not lead to harm because they violate NHP; it follows that HCPs must avoid such practices.

12:00
Values in Psychological Assessment for Custody Determinations for Parents with Disabilities

ABSTRACT. The reproductive rights of persons with disabilities have been recognized by both the UN and the WHO, yet systematic discrimination against parents with disabilities continues. These families often face poverty, a lack of social support, and lack of access to public spaces and services. Parents with disabilities face increased surveillance by child protective services and lose custody of their children at 3 times the national rate. Psychological assessments play a key role in custody decisions. Many widely used assessments have only questionable relevance to parenting ability, while those that are directly relevant are poorly validated, unreliable, and normed to limited populations. Assessments are performed by psychologists with no experience with the disability community, and no appropriate accommodations are made during assessment. Finally, the epistemological limitations of psychological assessments are seldom made known to the courts. Psychologists and legal scholars have complained that despite their objective and unbiased appearance (and thus their rhetorical appeal in the courtroom), these assessments are infused by the subjective values of the assessor. They are poorly grounded in theory or empirical evidence, and psychological experts interpreting these measures claim a degree of knowledge that they cannot possibly possess. We should be transparent about the values that inform our measures and our interpretations of outcomes. Are those values ableist or inclusive, and how do they accord with a commitment not only to child well-being but also to social justice? We should also think carefully about our attitude toward and conception of risk. Should psychologists interpret and present their findings in a risk averse manner if the legal standard in question is the best interests of the child? What does it mean to be risk averse in this setting, and are all risks being taken into account?

12:00
In Support of Moving Toward Investigating How to Embed Clinical Wisdom Within The Medical Practice

ABSTRACT. Perhaps one of the more troubling issues facing the field of medicine is the imbalance between factual knowledge and lived experience in medical teaching. So much of modern medical thinking is focused on teaching students the content of medicine that we can all too easily forget the importance of lived experience in medical training. While many faculty members are focusing their energies on reforming medical school curriculums to incorporate more time to learn the content students need in order to practice, and on parsing out the distinction between evidence-based medicine and science based medicine, I believe we ought to instead be targeting our energies on embedding more opportunities for lived experience. The reason for the aforesaid stems from the fact that our current focal point in the medical teaching system is not on clinical wisdom, but rather on learned knowledge. In this paper, we explore and define what clinical wisdom consists of in accordance with medical curricula guidelines set forth by the American Medical Association. From this foundation, I explain that there are different types of clinical wisdom that exist, and explicate the manner by which we can attain each type (as well as set forth much broader benefits that can stem from pursuing clinical wisdom in general.) The concept of learned knowledge is also explicated, and extensively juxtaposed with clinical wisdom. Common and uncommon counterarguments are explored, and argued against. On the whole, this paper will ideally serve to explain, argue in defense of, and support pursuing clinical wisdom and it’s embedment within our medical practice to a greater degree than has been done thus far.

13:00-14:00Lunch
14:00-15:00 Session 4: Psychology & Mental Health
14:00
Values and the Concept of Mental Disorder

ABSTRACT. Normative views of mental disorder are best defined negatively: what makes it the case that some mental phenomenon is disordered, rather than healthy or benign, is not a matter of natural fact. While normative theories differ greatly in their specifics, the unifying idea behind these views is that the concept of a mental disorder is a value-laden construct used to label disvalued or norms-transgressing behavior. There are three primary motivations for this view. The first is the claim, made by most normativist theories, that the concepts of mental health and disorder are ineluctably value-laden. The idea, here, is that designations of health and disorder are necessarily value claims because they reflect human interests about the relative values of certain ways of being. The second motivation for normativism is based on the presumed conceptual priority of values judgments over any presumably ‘objective’ metaphysical theorizing about health and disorder. The idea here is that individuals are first identified as being mentally disordered (i.e., as having something that has gone wrong with them), and only then is this disorder explained by appealing to some natural cause (i.e., a disease entity). The third primary motivating factor driving the normative position is the perceived failure of non-normative views to provide a plausible objective foundation for the concept of mental health. This is a the most nebulous of the three camps. The argument here is not that it is an ineluctable conceptual truth that the concepts of health and disease must be value-laden, but rather that non-normative theories of mental health have failed to be both internally coherent and to capture in their extension all the phenomena that the best theory of health should. This paper argues that only the third option offers a plausible defense of normativism about mental health, and offers reason to think that even this apparent plausibility is tenuous.

14:20
Positive psychology is value-laden—It’s time to embrace it

ABSTRACT. From its inception, the raison d'être of positive psychology has been “to understand and build the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish” and to “articulate a vision of the good life that is empirically sound… and attractive” (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 5). As this suggests, evaluative claims and assumptions are ubiquitous in positive psychology. Yet researchers are hesitant to accept this. Diener and Seligman—two of the biggest names in the field—claim that “social science should be descriptive and not prescriptive” (2004, p. 4). This paper debunks claims of value-freedom and calls upon researchers to embrace value-ladenness.

Some will consider the presence of values in the science a problem and hope to root it out. But this is a mistake. If positive psychology is to live up to its raison d'être—to be the scientific study of the psychological components of human well-being—it must make evaluative claims. Well-being consists in those things that are good for us, that make life go well. We cannot investigate this topic value-neutrally. Not only is positive psychology, as a matter of fact, rife with evaluative judgments—but this is how it should be!

After demonstrating that value judgments are indeed ubiquitous in positive psychology, and considering some (abortive) attempts to root them out, this paper reassures psychologists that embracing value-ladenness will not impugn their scientific credentials. One worry is that value-ladenness compromises scientific objectivity. I argue that objectivity does not require scientists (per impossibile) to abstain from evaluative judgments. Evaluative judgments pose a threat when they are concealed, made implicitly, or otherwise left unscrutinized. Another worry is that value-ladenness leads to or constitutes a paternalistic imposition on others. However, worries about imposition arise, not when values enter research, but when research is used by those with power over others. In other words, the issue is not directly about scientific research. It is about how social/political power is wielded. Positive psychologists should be sensitive to these issues. But, again, the solution is to state, clearly and explicitly, the evaluative claims being made. We must, in other words, embrace the fact that positive psychology is value-laden.

15:00-15:15Break
15:15-16:45 Session 5: Science & the Public
15:15
Covert Exercitives in Popular Discussions about Science

ABSTRACT. What sorts of harm occur when media organizations give airtime/columns to pundits who question, say, the scientific consensus on climate change or the motivations of climate scientists? Critics of this practice might focus on the fact pundits often don’t have expertise in the areas they opine on and fail to provide evidence for their claims.[1] Further, critics may continue, without proper fact-checking, the media makes it appear as if there were a debate about some scientific topic of public interest when in fact there is none, thereby causing some in their audience to have false beliefs.

I think these are important criticisms. However, in this paper, I draw upon Mary McGowan’s work on exercitives, conversational score, and common ground to make sense of how such practices harm public discourse about scientific practice and public understanding of science.[2]

On McGowan’s account, exercitives are speech acts which “enact facts about what is permissible in a certain realm” (2018, 188). Conversational score and common ground both provide “framework[s] for tracking conversational context” (191), e.g., by tracking facts salient to the conversation as well as tracking what conversational moves are and aren’t relevant. McGowan combines these two ideas together to show how “conversational contributions are covert exercitives; they enact permissibility facts for the very conversation in which they are a move” (196).

With this apparatus, I show how the harms of giving some nonexpert pundits airtime/columns go beyond causing their audience to have false beliefs about, say, scientific reports about specific climate change phenomena or the scientific consensus on climate change. Such practices also enact problematic norms about what is and isn’t acceptable in public discourse about scientific practice. I hope also to explore how such problematic norms interact with broader social structures in pernicious ways to decrease public understanding of scientific practices.[3]

[1]In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union, former senator and current CNN contributor, Rick Santorum did both in the course of a discussion on the National Climate Assessment.

[2]In continuing to provide airtime or column space to such pundits, the media might be operating under a misguided notion of objectivity. I may or may not get into this in the paper. Another potential topic: The inefficacy of fact-checking to combat the harms I focus on.

[3]Following McGowan’s own claims about, e.g., the way in which a microaggression “enacts racist parts of the racist social structure” (200).

15:35
Technology, Policy, and the Open Science Ideal

ABSTRACT. Scientists, other academics, and scholarly knowledge managers have pushed an Open Science agenda, bolstered in large part by techno-economic arguments, since the second half of the 20th century. Briefly, the argument is as follows. Technology (especially digital technology) has advanced so far that knowledge production costs – especially when it comes to the dissemination of results in scholarly publications – have plummeted. Nevertheless, scholarly publishers continue to insist on the value of traditional publications, as well as on the high cost of ‘quality’ publishing. This insistence amounts to nothing more than reluctance to kill the cash cow that is scholarly publishing. Since the public funds much scholarly research, scholarly research should be immediately freely available – open – to the public.

This argument has proven persuasive to science policy makers, and there has been a gradual increase in policies for Open Science, especially since the turn of the century. Most recently, European policy makers have formed cOAlition S – a partnership of 13 research funding agencies – and introduced Plan S, a statement of principles underlying a proposed policy to make all research funded by cOAlition S partners immediately freely available to read (known as gratis open access) and reuse (known as libre open access) upon publication by January 2020. If successfully implemented, Plan S would cause a huge disruption in scholarly communications.

Because it is both momentous and imminent, Plan S has generated a great deal of discussion in both the academic and policy-making communities. Most strikingly, it has become evident that the techno-economic argument for Open Science no longer dominates. Instead, an emerging ideal of Open Science undergirds most of the arguments in support of Plan S. This presentation attempts to make the values underlying the Open Science Ideal (OSI) explicit and articulate some issues with basing policy on the OSI.

15:55
Science in Times of Crisis: Precaution and Politics in Flint

ABSTRACT. When environmental contamination events occur, science is often enlisted to help illuminate the nature and extent of the problem, assess risks to the public, and develop remediation strategies. Deploying the scientific method under such circumstances is often complicated and difficult due to poor data, a multitude of uncontrolled variables, and intractable uncertainties embedded in the complex social, biological, and technical systems involved. Communicating science to affected populations is even more challenging, especially when breakdowns in trust and anxieties about potential harm generate popular demands for real-time, reliable information and total transparency from scientific researchers. Such demands have been prominent within the popular response to the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan. After the city's water supply was switched to the Flint River in April 2014 and residents began to complain of deteriorating water quality, they repeatedly felt deceived, condescended to, and kept in the dark by authorities speaking in the name of science. These experiences generated very strong popular expectations that any scientist hoping to gain residents' trust make special exertions to look deeply into potential health threats, communicate openly about ongoing research, and speak inconvenient truths even when they complicated official narratives. These expectations only became stronger as the State of Michigan endeavored to declare the crisis over and the water system restored, despite residents' lingering concerns and continued experiences of harm. Drawing from work with the Flint Area Community Health and Environment Partnership, this paper explores how one scientific team sought to respond to this fraught environment by adopting the precautionary principle in its communications with residents, particularly with respect to its work on bacterial contamination of the point-of-use filters deployed by the State to mitigate lead exposure. Even in the face of scientific uncertainties, the team sought to be proactive about communicating potential risks and mitigation strategies to residents, in the belief that such information was a matter of both entitlement and empowerment. This communication strategy was not without controversy, however, as some political and scientific authorities accused the team of generating unnecessary public fears and hampering the crisis recovery effort. The filter controversy in Flint, I argue, illustrates both the benefits and the challenges of employing precaution as a principle of science communication in crisis situations.

16:45-17:00Break