A Simple Argument for Why Science Should Be for the Oppressed

Co-Editor’s Note: I composed the following short essay for an asynchronous online summer course in Philosophy of Science. The course is centered around presenting students with a series of philosophical questions about science and then, for each question, three possible answers paired with brief philosophical explanations and/or defenses of those answers. Students are asked to compare the three answers and provide reasoning to support favoring one answer over the others.

For this unit, the question posed was: “Who Should Science Be For?” Competing answers were “Science Should Be for Everyone,” “Science Should Belong to the Highest Bidder,” and the one reproduced below, “Science Should Be for the Oppressed.” The short essay in support of each position is written in the voice of a Kierkegaardian alter ego; in this case, as an homage to Paolo Freire, “Fraolo Peyre.” In the course, only one student elected to defend the superiority of “Science Should Belong to the Highest Bidder,” and roughly two thirds of the remaining students defended “Science Should Be for Everyone,” many of them vociferously decrying the views presented below.

I submit what follows to the reader for four primary reasons. 

First, because some readers may find the pedagogical approach of interest and want a glimpse of how I pursued its execution, which I consider neither to have been an outright success nor outright failure. 

Second, because the exercise pushed me to do something that, by vocation, I am apt to desire but prone to resist: define a complex and foundational phenomenon, such as oppression, concisely and authoritatively. Many readers may find the effort to define oppression in a single paragraph illuminating, whether for its merits, for its function as stimulus for other ideas, or, perhaps, for its possible use as an example of a flawed definition that ought to be surpassed. 

Third, it is my professional experience that a great many of the scientists I know have pursued their vocations for reasons aligned with many of those articulated below. Nonetheless, the presumption of science’s value neutrality often results in such commitments remaining implicit and informally communicated—a dynamic which, as many readers well know, often prompts crises later on about whom one really serves. Though I am far from the first to advance arguments of this nature, laying these matters out plainly and simply may conceivably contribute to realistic dialogues on science and how scientists and prospective scientists see the value of careers within it. 

Fourth, as this is Black Issues in Philosophy, there is the parallel question of whether philosophy ought to be for the oppressed—and, more broadly, whether other forms of study not generally deemed science, as in the humanities, ought to be for the oppressed. Among communities of Africana philosophers, it is often (though by no means always) taken for granted that this vocation is a product of commitments to produce knowledge on behalf of the oppressed. In principle, though, such commitments may be at odds with the logic of both public and private institutions, for whom such ideas perhaps ought to be dismissed or sublimated; on such logics, serving the oppressed is perhaps proximally desirable but only on the basis of serving an ultimate end of the public (everyone) or, at times, the private (the highest bidder). 

What follows was my effort to present the kernel of these issue to my non-specialist students plainly and non-coercively. I share it in the hopes that it may stimulate reflection among other scholars about how to convey these matters to students, to the public, and perhaps to ourselves. 
––TM  

Science Should Be for the Oppressed

By Fraolo Peyre

Who should science be for? Those who are oppressed.

Oppression is a byproduct of efforts to dominate people. A person dominates another person when he, she, or they have the ability to arbitrarily interfere in the choices that the second person might otherwise make. Sometimes this takes the form of coercion, where the dominator uses violence or the threat thereof to interfere in the choices of the dominated. Other times, it takes the form of exploitation, where the dominated person’s ability to find other options is so severely impaired that, due to their vulnerability, they must work for the paltry incentives offered by the dominator.

Those who seek to dominate someone will work very hard to make their domination appear legitimate to others. To legitimate domination, dominators claim, in short, that the dominated deserve this treatment. However, these efforts at legitimation typically have effects beyond making it legal or socially acceptable for the original dominator to coerce and exploit the dominated. Once the broader community comes to widely accept that the dominated should be made vulnerable in this way, the broader community is likely to accept other forms of domination imposed upon those people, whether in addition to or in place of the original form of dominance. The community accepts the view that such people lie at the bottom of a hierarchy that some significant portion of the community rises above. This is the condition out of which oppression emerges.

A community that wishes to see a certain people vulnerable to various forms of domination invests in that people’s oppression. The upshot of this investment is that oppressed people are not only vulnerable to being coerced and exploited, they are also put in a position of questioning themselves. An oppressive community seeks to produce oppressed people, who either accept the legitimacy of their domination or who face such extraordinary opposition to overcoming it that their existence is riddled with doubt, anxiety, and dread.

Given this, let’s ask: Who has science been for?

The simple answer is that science to date has largely been for the benefit of oppressive communities. Communities who invest in there being oppressed communities generally invest in scientific research as well for the purpose of having the sciences benefit the oppressors. Two features are commonplace in this schema.

First, those who oppress generally coerce or exploit the oppressed into contributing to science. Medical research, for instance, has long been built on the back of coercing human subjects into participating, or exploiting vulnerable populations to participate for nominal compensation. The wealth that such science produces runs up the hierarchy, while its costs are generally shared by those at the bottom of the hierarchy, often in much larger measure.

Second, the sciences are typically re-invested in making it easier to oppress. The wealthy often point to slightly higher standards of living among the oppressed during times of technological advancement as “proof” that the oppressed aren’t really oppressed. “How can someone who has access to TikTok really be oppressed?” This, of course, is a lie. To be oppressed doesn’t mean to be dead, nor does it mean to be starving and utterly penniless. Of course, oppression often causes these things to happen—and, indeed, in the United States, thousands die each day because of it. But oppression doesn’t mean being at such a low level that one has absolutely nothing. It means living in a world that by and large acts as if you deserve to have nothing so that you should be grateful for whatever you have, no matter how much others have.

The reality, then, is that the sciences are often used and distributed in such a way to deny that a society is oppressive, all the while that society’s oppressive forces are using science and technology to manipulate people into accepting their oppression and repressing those who rise up against it. In short, in an oppressive society, science is integrated back into the basic fabric of how oppression works.

In simple terms, then, we may note that much of science is for oppressors. There are, though, many scientists who seek to fight against this. One product of that fight can be found in efforts to make science available to the public. However, there’s an obvious limitation of that approach. Suppose that A, B, and C each have $10,000 and X, Y, and Z each have $10. Now suppose that scientific research shows you how you can invest your wealth so that it will grow exponentially. At first, you might think such research being publicly available would rise all boats. However, an initial problem is that $10,000 growing exponentially means, at any given point in the future, an exponentially greater amount of wealth than $10 growing at the same exponential rate. The gap between the haves and the have-nots grows. A second problem is even more fundamental. Someone with $10,000 might be able to invest a large portion of it. But someone with $10 almost certainly will not be able to do so. They probably need that money in case of a rainy day and can’t have it tied up in long-term investments. Indeed, today might be that rainy day, which renders investment altogether moot.

Science for the public is well-intentioned, but it doesn’t address the reality of an oppressive society. Simply put, it benefits oppressors considerably while offering no guarantee of benefits to the oppressed. One can admire scientists who devote their lives to doing research that will be available to the public. But the simple fact of the matter is that oppression should not exist, and because of that, one should go into science not to serve the public but to serve the oppressed. I say this with a heavy heart because I know the many roadblocks to doing science that benefits the oppressed. One might reasonably conclude that such science has a much lower return on investment than science done for the public (let alone science done for private interest) since oppressive forces work to minimize the impact that one’s research can have to benefit oppressed communities. But the quantity of benefit is not relevant when the quality of such contexts is taken into account: either one serves the oppressed or one fails to serve them, and failure to serve them ultimately serves their oppressors.

Thus, while the bulk of science is, at least arguably, primarily to the benefit of those who oppress, science should be for the benefit of those who are oppressed.

Thomas Meagher

Thomas Meagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.