Paper 6: Ethics and Politics of Science, Technology and Medicine
Also Paper HPS6 in HPT3 Human, Social and Political Sciences Tripos Part IIB
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, so no more than 6,000
words for the whole paper.
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. Is it helpful to say that science is always political?
2. What, if anything, should we trust scientists to do?
3. “If you saw a sausage being made, you would never eat one again.” Does
understanding how scientific knowledge is made undermine its credibility?
SECTION B
4. Should sociologists of science offer the same kind of explanations of true and
of false beliefs?
5. “Events are discoveries not in virtue of how they appear in the mind, but how
they are defined in and by a cultural criterion” (Brannigan). Do you agree?
6. What role did science play in Maoist thought?
7. Does Communism require a distinctive approach to science policy? Discuss
with reference to historical examples.
8. What form of value, if any, attaches to human embryos?
9. Is there anything wrong, morally speaking, with intervening in the human germ
line?
10. What is the therapeutic misconception and does it pose problems for the ethics
of consent?
11. Does it matter when the Anthropocene began?
12. Can social interactions guarantee objectivity?
13. Can scientific justification be “value-free”? Does this matter?
14. Paul Bloom argues that “if you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor
guide”. Martin Hoffman argues that empathy is the “bedrock of morality”. Can
the science of empathy resolve their dispute?
15. Are brain images epistemically privileged in any way?