I haven’t been posting as much here this week as I’d like because I’ve been grading papers. You academic types know how much fun that is. But, the batch of papers I just finished with was reasonably enjoyable — clear, persuasive, and containing some impressive insights.
The question on the table was whether, by dint of society’s investment in the training of scientists, people so trained might have an obligation to do scientific research. This is an especially relevant question for my students: many of them are, as we speak, being educated as scientists with public monies, and all of them are paying taxes.
So of course, knowing a bit about my life-story, the students were pretty attentive to the possibility that not everyone who goes through a scientific education will then embrace a career in science; if there’s really a social contract where the scientifically trained need to pay society back — in specialized scientific knowledge obtained through original research — this complicates things significantly. Can society demand what it’s owed, the happiness of the scientists be damned? It’s not like this is the U.S.S.R. The papers did a nice job exploring the limits of the social contract, thinking through which approaches to such an implied contract are best for society (and each of its members), and suggesting other ways the scientifically trained could “give back”.
But there were some other insights in the papers that struck me as dead-on:

• People don’t (or shouldn’t) go into science because they feel it’s their duty to do science. People go into science because they have a burning curiosity that can’t be satisfied any other way (or because it’s their “destiny” or “calling”, or because they love it). Sure, we can have duties — even duties we haven’t figured out are binding on us — but that’s hardly ever what motivates us to do things like science that are worth doing. (These students, I think, are not so sympathetic to Kant’s way of seeing the moral landscape …)
• Those who are the keepers of scientific knowledge, and who have the ability to produce more scientific knowledge, have no greater obligations to society than those in other knowledge-keeping-and-making fields. That is to say, they all have responsibilities to society that flow primarily from the knowledge — not whether or not the public helped pay for a significant portion of their training.
• Even if the public puts up a lots of the money for one’s scientific training, that doesn’t mean the trainee isn’t paying for it, too — not just in terms of tuition and fees, but more importantly in hard work devoted to learning.
• Speaking of the hard work involved in learning to be a scientist: you can’t really argue that scientists have an unfair monopoly on scientific knowledge and the know-how to make more of it. Other members of society had all kinds of opportunities to crack a book and learn the same science. To some extent, choosing to do other things (whether because you enjoy those other things or you don’t want seventh graders to think you’re a dork) but then demanding that those who actually availed themselves of scientific training must, for the good of society, devote themselves to scientific research — well, it’s being a free-rider, isn’t it?

Very smart, these ones. It’s going to be a good semester!