# Are scientists (and others) ever justified in lying for the greater good?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [March 17, 2018, 9:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722 "2018-03-17T09:41:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 9:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/1 "2018-03-17T09:41:11Z")
My google-fu is failing me but I seem to recall some controversy over the ‘nuclear winter’ warnings of the early to mid 1980’s. Namely that a famous scientist later admitted that he had fudged the figures in order to present a more appalling scenario than could actually be proven, and that he did this because he believed that the political leadership and population would not act unless he did so. Basically he believed the greater good _(prevention of global thermonuclear war)_ meant he was justified in presenting a not-entirely-accurate scenario.
What about scientists these days doing the same thing with global warning, or on a slightly different note _(and absolutely hypothetical before someone knee jerks)_ a researcher or researchers discovered hard evidence that IQ really did vary between races or another politically incorrect finding, would they be justified in hiding or covering up the research in the name of the greater good of harmony and equality?
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### Author:  [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 11:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/2 "2018-03-17T11:05:03Z")
It would help if you could come up with an actual case of this happening, to show that this is a problem worth debating.
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### Author:  [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 11:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/3 "2018-03-17T11:20:57Z")
Scientists (and others) falsifying data is absolutely never acceptable and should be a career-ender.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/4 "2018-03-17T11:44:52Z")
Well, the classic example of a morally-justified lie is lying to the SS about hiding Jews in your attic.
And there’s even a scientific example of this: Germany’s atomic bomb project was going nowhere fast, and after the war, Heisenberg (who was Germany’s lone big-name scientist by that point) claimed that it was because he was deliberately sabotaging the project from within. If so, then that would be an example of a scientist lying within his field, falsifying data to reach wrong conclusions, and yet one that almost everyone would consider morally acceptable.
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### Author:  [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/5 "2018-03-17T12:14:31Z")
Wartime is different, but in civilian science, falsification should be a career-ender.
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### Author:  [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/6 "2018-03-17T12:20:27Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#):
>
> It would help if you could come up with an actual case of this happening, to show that this is a problem worth debating.
This is a vague memory so do not hold me to it but IIRC in WWII German scientists miscalculated how much uranium would be needed to make an atomic bomb (they came up with something like 10x more than necessary) and so the search to make an atomic bomb was given a lower priority since getting that much would be problematic.
I think it was suggested that this was not a mistake but done on purpose.
Anyway, true or not I think it can serve as a good hypothetical for this question.
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### Author:  [@watchwolf49](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/watchwolf49)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/7 "2018-03-17T15:00:44Z")
The OP seems to be referring to Carl Sagan’s view on nuclear war:
> [@](#):
>
> The nuclear winter paper was accepted for publication in the journal Science, where it was destined to reach millions of scientists and influence decades of future research. Known colloquially by the acronym “TTAPS” after its authors’ last names, the academic article would be published on December 23, 1983. But in October, Sagan made the decision to announce his warning to the world using what amounted to a very unorthodox medium: the popular media.
>
> Sagan, like many at the time, believed nuclear war was the single greatest threat facing humanity. Others—including policymakers in the Reagan administration—believed a nuclear war was winnable, or at least survivable. Making the danger of nuclear winter real to them, Sagan believed, would take more than science. He would have to draw on both his public fame, media savvy and scientific authority to bring the what he saw as the true risk before the eyes of the public.
[“When Carl Sagan Warned the World About Nuclear Winter”](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-carl-sagan-warned-world-about-nuclear-winter-180967198/) – [Smithsonian.com](http://Smithsonian.com) – Nov 15th, 2017
First off, I don’t think Carl Sagan was lying … he honestly believed this and there’s no _scientific_ reason to say it was a complete and knowing falsehood in 1983 … so it wasn’t a lie …
So … is there a debate about prominent scientists being disallowed to enter the public advocacy arena? … that would run afoul of several of the First Amendment rights … therefore scientists can say whatever the hell they want to … it’s the gullible public that’s the problem …
Linus Pauling claimed Vitamin C could cure the common cold while he was heavily invested in the orange juice industry … did he lie, did he advance health … or was he just trying to get rich? …
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### Author:  [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/8 "2018-03-17T15:31:37Z")
> [@Atomic\_Alex](#):
>
> What about scientists these days doing the same thing with global warning,
Very bad example. In reality about one hundred years they figured out the mechanism and then about 60 years ago scientists figured out that it was a very flawed assumption to think that natural sinks of CO2 and other global warming gases were going to save us from treating out atmosphere as a sewer.
> **[The Discovery of Global Warming](https://history.aip.org/climate/summary.htm)**
>
> A hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change. An abridged web version of Spencer R. Weart's book presented by the American Institute of Physics.
Now the current state of misinformation out there shows that there are however scientists and powerful interests that did lie or are grossly deluded into thinking that they should continue to misled people into the idea that we should remain as complacent as in the good old days.
So, in general a bad example, but there are good examples from the ones denying the issue: As an example of misleading by omission, the history of fossil fuel scientists telling only their bosses that most scientists were correct, but the powerful interests “forgetting” their conclusions.
> **[Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/)**
>
> A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation
> [@](#):
>
> Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.
>
> Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.
>
> In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.
>
> But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all. “We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,” ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American. “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.”
>
> One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial. Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty. At that point, “a lot of things unraveled,” Oreskes says.
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### Author:  [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/9 "2018-03-17T16:56:07Z")
> [@watchwolf49](#):
>
> The OP seems to be referring to Carl Sagan’s view on nuclear war
Yes I believe it was Carl Sagan I was thinking of, I seemed to recall he had later admitted he had if not stretched the data to support his conclusions but perhaps chose to present the ‘worse case’ scenario on thinner evidence than present a more probable lesser impact. However it appears I may be conflating it with something else. Still it stands as a hypothetical example.
> [@GIGObuster](#):
>
> Very bad example.
I admit I put the OP together quickly this morning before leaving home, ‘global warming’ just struck me as an issue in the contemporary consciousness in the same way the threat of nuclear war had been in the 1980’s.
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### Author:  [@watchwolf49](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/watchwolf49)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/10 "2018-03-17T18:51:51Z")
> [@Atomic\_Alex](#):
>
> Yes I believe it was Carl Sagan I was thinking of, I seemed to recall he had later admitted he had if not stretched the data to support his conclusions but perhaps chose to present the ‘worse case’ scenario on thinner evidence than present a more probable lesser impact. However it appears I may be conflating it with something else. Still it stands as a hypothetical example.
I’m still giving him a pass on this one … stretching the data to present an extreme conclusion is still within the scientific realm … sometimes insight can be had by looking at the extremes … Exxon falsified data to deceive the public … Carl Sagan wasn’t trying to deceive, rather to educate … he got a few things wrong, corrected them, and the rest of everything he said still stands …
> [@Atomic\_Alex](#):
>
> I admit I put the OP together quickly this morning before leaving home, ‘global warming’ just struck me as an issue in the contemporary consciousness in the same way the threat of nuclear war had been in the 1980’s.
Carl Sagan touched upon climate change … again he gets a pass, nothing about climate change alarmism that is deceptive … it’s a proper scientific position to hold and doesn’t involve any lying …
Piltdown Man is how science lies … and science is a terrible liar …
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### Author:  [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/11 "2018-03-17T18:58:02Z")
In some situations, yes, especially if it’s a really big issue with major consequences. However, there will always be people who will too quickly latch on to that, and use that to justify lying for even relatively small or mundane purposes.
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### Author:  [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/12 "2018-03-17T19:16:48Z")
> [@Atomic\_Alex](#):
>
> I admit I put the OP together quickly this morning before leaving home, ‘global warming’ just struck me as an issue in the contemporary consciousness in the same way the threat of nuclear war had been in the 1980’s.
However, a lesson should not be lost here, one should not wonder any more why many are being misled by dubious sources of information on that issue. There are powerful interests that even today do want most people to think like that.
> **[Review: ‘Merchants of Doubt,’ Separating Science From Spin (Published 2015)](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/movies/review-merchants-of-doubt-separating-science-from-spin.html)**
>
> Robert Kenner’s documentary examines the history of corporate-financed public relations efforts to sow confusion and skepticism about scientific research.
So, yes, it is very important, for the OP issue at hand; to notice that scientists with very flawed reasoning or way past their time (engineers seem to fall more into this) that think that they do understand an issue, are influencing very bad choices of people in positions of power. They are not the proper experts.
> **[Willie Soon](https://www.desmog.com/willie-soon/)**
>
> Profile image screenshot from YouTube video, Willie Soon at Heartland Institute’s 12th International Conference on Climate Change. Willie Wei-Hock Soon Credentials Background Willie Wei-Hock Soon is an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian...
> [@](#):
>
> Willie Wei-Hock Soon is an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Since 1992, Dr. Soon has been an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory. Soon is also a receiving editor with the journal New Astronomy. [2]
>
> Soon is a prominent climate change skeptic who has received much of his research funding from the oil and gas industry.
>
> According to David Suzuki:
>
> “U.S. oil and coal companies, including ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries, and the world’s largest coal-burning utility, Southern Company, have contributed more than $1 million over the past decade to his research. According to Greenpeace, every grant Dr. Soon has received since 2002 has been from oil or coal interests.” [3]
One has to realize that very few skeptical scientists get a lot of attention regardless if they are wrong because powerful interests (in the media too) like what they say.
> **[Dr Frederick Seitz – This is Not Cool](https://thinc.blog/tag/dr-frederick-seitz/)**
>
> Posts about Dr Frederick Seitz written by greenman3610
(The sad tale of scientist Dr Seitz, and his almost criminal defence of the tobacco industry and then against climate science)
One important thing to keep in mind is that indeed scientists like Dr Seitz also told themselves that they were doing something “for the common good” but they did not notice (and do not notice now) that it was really their common political biases talking.
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### Author:  [@Sam\_Lowry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Lowry)
#### Post date: [March 17, 2018, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/13 "2018-03-17T19:41:18Z")
Ignoring the morals, it’s a bad idea because scientists try to duplicate others results. If a scientist publishes the terrible findings that they’ve found regarding hazard X, then other scientists will likely try to duplicate the experiment and see if they’ve found the same results. If they do find the same or similar results, then the position is strengthened. But if they find much lesser results, that show that the original scientist was exaggerating or even lying, then everyone might dismiss the hazard altogether.
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### Author:  [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2018, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/14 "2018-03-18T06:09:47Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#):
>
> … One has to realize that very few “skeptical” scientists get a lot of attention regardless if they are wrong because powerful interests (in the media too) like what they say.
>
> [Dr Frederick Seitz – This is Not Cool](https://climatecrocks.com/tag/dr-frederick-seitz/)
> (The sad tale of scientist Dr Seitz, and his almost criminal defence of the tobacco industry and then against climate science)
>
> One important thing to keep in mind is that indeed scientists like Dr Seitz also told themselves that they were doing something “for the common good” but they did not notice (and do not notice now) that it was really their common political biases talking.
I need to point out (without unfortunately adding anything else useful to this interesting discussion) that the word “skeptical” in this post requires scare quotes around it for the post to make sense - the people being described are the opposite of skeptical.
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### Author:  [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2018, 6:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/15 "2018-03-18T06:41:43Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#):
>
> This is a vague memory so do not hold me to it but IIRC in WWII German scientists miscalculated how much uranium would be needed to make an atomic bomb (they came up with something like 10x more than necessary) and so the search to make an atomic bomb was given a lower priority since getting that much would be problematic.
>
> I think it was suggested that this was not a mistake but done on purpose.
>
> Anyway, true or not I think it can serve as a good hypothetical for this question.
Actually a fascinating story. The two scientists who made critical discovery were Jewish emigres in Britain, force out of German by the Nazis. When they discovered that with enriched uranium the quantities required go down by order of magnitude (from tons to grams) they kept the fact secret and only shared with the powers that be via a [memo](https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/frisch-peierls-memorandum) that kick started both the US and British nuclear bomb programs.
The Nazis never made that logical leap, know they didn’t as by the time Hiroshima almost all the Nazi nuclear scientists were all in Allied custody and being wiretapped. So we have recordings of they private conversations where they clearly still though tons of fissile material must have somehow been delivered to Japan.
More relevant to the OP is what happened at the start of the war. The idea of an atomic bomb was on everyone’s mind. And Neils Bohr actually tried to convince Heisenberg that there should be world wide “Physicists strike” top stop it from happening. Obviously a doomed concept but he took it seriously.
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### Author:  [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2018, 11:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/16 "2018-03-18T11:32:06Z")
> [@Atomic\_Alex](#):
>
> My google-fu is failing me but I seem to recall some controversy over the ‘nuclear winter’ warnings of the early to mid 1980’s. Namely that a famous scientist later admitted that he had fudged the figures in order to present a more appalling scenario than could actually be proven, and that he did this because he believed that the political leadership and population would not act unless he did so. Basically he believed the greater good _(prevention of global thermonuclear war)_ meant he was justified in presenting a not-entirely-accurate scenario.
Science is a house of cards. People build on the research and results of those who went before - ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ - but if one card is shown to be false, then the whole edifice collapses.
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### Author:  [@pdhenry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pdhenry)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2018, 11:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/17 "2018-03-18T11:46:09Z")
[quote=“Chronos, post:4, topic:810722”]
Well, the classic example of a morally-justified lie is lying to the SS about hiding Jews in your attic.
[/quote but that’s not science.
> [@](#):
>
> And there’s even a scientific example of this: Germany’s atomic bomb project was going nowhere fast, and after the war, Heisenberg (who was Germany’s lone big-name scientist by that point) claimed that it was because he was deliberately sabotaging the project from within. If so, then that would be an example of a scientist lying within his field, falsifying data to reach wrong conclusions, and yet one that almost everyone would consider morally acceptable.
I’d argue that that isn’t science either, but technology - the application of science.
How was he sabotaging the effort? By creating false data, or by deliberately ignoring approaches (uranium enrichment, for all I know) that he knew could work better than the current approach?
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### Author:  [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2018, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/18 "2018-03-18T15:38:43Z")
There’s a difference between deliberately sabotaging research promulgated by an evil government with potential horrific consequences (i.e. nuclear weapons research by a totalitarian regime), and lying/fudging to prop up work that’s perceived to have a great humanitarian benefit.
I’d still argue that the latter is totally unacceptable, even if it’s “for our own good”. It becomes a great temptation in instances where the opposition habitually promulgates falsehoods and distortions (climate change deniers and antivaxers come to mind), but once you get caught telling whoppers, you lose public trust and the job of convincing people to support you gets a lot harder.
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### Author:  [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)
#### Post date: [March 19, 2018, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/19 "2018-03-19T05:43:47Z")
Historians report that what Heisenberg thought was… well, uncertain… 🙂
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### Author:  [@Ambivalid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ambivalid)
#### Post date: [March 19, 2018, 9:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-scientists-and-others-ever-justified-in-lying-for-the-greater-good/810722/20 "2018-03-19T09:41:03Z")
> [@DavidwithanR](#):
>
> I need to point out (without unfortunately adding anything else useful to this interesting discussion) that the word “skeptical” in this post requires scare quotes around it for the post to make sense - the people being described are the opposite of skeptical.
Am I tripping or are those scare quotes already right there in the post?
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