Paper 6: Ethics and Politics of Science, Technology and Medicine
You should answer four questions in total. Answer one question from Section A and
three questions from Section B. All questions carry equal weighting.
You should spend no more than three hours on answering all the questions, and a
word limit is set of no more than 1,500 words per answer.
All your answers for this paper should be submitted in one DOC, DOCX or PDF
document. Each answer should be clearly headed with the question number and the
question.
Put your Blind Grade Number (BGN) at the start of the document. Do not put your
name anywhere in the document.
SECTION A
1. Can bad people do good science?
2. What role can (or should) history and philosophy of science play in
controversial sciences?
3. Can science, technology and medicine answer social problems?
SECTION B
4. Must a sociology of scientific knowledge be relativist?
5. How and why did the relationship between science and activism change
between the 1920s and the 2020s?
6. In China under Mao, how, if at all, did science “serve the people”?
7. What is the black box problem in artificial intelligence? Can it be solved?
8. “Although the perception of the personal and social relationships created by
egg or embryo reconstruction would be essentially a matter for the individuals
concerned, it is the view of the Working Group that mitochondrial donation does
not indicate, either biologically or legally, any notion of the child having either a
‘third parent’, or ‘second mother’.” (Nuffield Council on Bioethics) Is the Working
Group’s view a sensible one?
9. “If you consent to being screened for cancer, then you can’t complain if you are
overtreated for cancer.” Does that make sense?
10. Does the argument from inductive risk show that science cannot be objective?
11. How have the colonial origins of much climate data shaped the development of
the climate sciences?
12. Why does anyone trust the results of scientific experiments?