Abstract
Introduction
On the 31st of October 1517, an academic and activist released a manifesto proposing a long series of concrete changes with the aim of eradicating some of the (moral) corruption in the system of which he was himself a part. The proposed changes were based upon decades of preceding scholarship and were expanded over time, especially after 1517 when peers joined the debate to discuss their (lack of) merit. That academic and activist was Martin Luther, professor of theology and priest. His manifesto was the ‘Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’, better known as ‘The 95 Theses’. The system Luther sought to change was the Catholic Church.
In this paper, we compare some examples of moral reorientation in the Reformation with the reform movement in science. Through this playful comparison, we do not highlight empirical similarities but rather shed light on the plural moral programmes contained in the scientific reform movement: its various moral components and the moral diversity that is being conflated under the single banner of reform. To that end, we draw from multiple competing framings of the crisis and the proposed solutions—a multiplicity that reform and Reformation share. This comparison is neither exhaustive nor perfect. Its purpose is to enrich and diversify the political and moral conversations we have surrounding ambitions to change institutions, to expand the vocabulary and metaphors we can employ, and to provide context for sometimes predominantly technical exchanges. After sketching this complex moral landscape, we argue that not all moral programmes offer equal promise for the sustained support of credible, equitable and fair science.
Before we briefly visit selected histories of religion and science, we must first make an in-principle distinction between moral programmes of reform, which we discuss here, and epistemic programmes, which usually grab the spotlight. Epistemic programmes centre on examining and evaluating methodologies and their strengths and weaknesses, theories, robustness, various notions or manifestations of rigour, or procedures for sharing and protecting data and other components of science: all building blocks for what might become a better science. By contrast, moral programmes discuss the grounds upon which we ascribe value or worth to a modus operandi for science: not in terms of rigour or methodological correctness, but with respect to what is morally right. Metaphorically, these moral programmes form the soul of science. Moral programmes indicate how to handle relationships of power, develop research agendas, distinguish good and questionable collaborations, and decide what voices should be heard in science. Here, we ask how reform can offer multiple ways of caring for the soul of science and how different moral priorities relate to social and institutional settings.
A playful comparison
We first discuss the Protestant Reformation before highlighting a few of its parallels with scientific reform. This sets the stage for a playful comparison that serves to stimulate debate and discussion about the political, social and historical context of processes geared towards social change (and the change of powerful institutions). We then discuss four dimensions to explore differential moral understandings in Reform(ation). Finally, we reflect on our comparison.
While Luther's posting of his 95 theses on Wittemberg's Cathedral door is often seen as the beginning of the Reformation, his critique of practices of corruption and exploitation by church officials was, in fact, a continuation of existing reform attempts (Benedict, 2002). Renaissance Humanists such as Erasmus also critiqued Roman abuse of power through the practice of selling indulgences (which promise to shorten time spent in Purgatory). They formulated their critique working within the Catholic church and thought that power and policymaking should remain within an intellectual elite engaging in ‘controversia’ to identify the most probable truth with regard to matters of religion and politics (Howard, 2005). Luther, by contrast, was also critical of elites, the Renaissance culture of the arts and what he regarded as decadence, and he challenged the idea that the church clergy had privileged access to God.
This challenge to Roman power, along with the idea that only personal faith and the Bible can form a true source of authority, allowed everyone to seek access to God independently of Rome. These ideas were further disseminated by evangelical preachers who also argued that ordinary folk can understand the Bible without any need for—possibly corrupt and fraudulent—clergy. Moreover, preachers and printed pamphlets called for social change through Christian love and charity and measures against poverty, drunkenness and prostitution. In mass protests and actions, farmers and city people pushed for changes in worship and practices that were now seen as un-Christian. These bottom-up pressures for reform resonated with local rulers who were growing weary of Roman power. During this period, therefore, new moral and social reforms took place to address critiques about decadence, not only in protestant or ‘reformed’ churches but also within the Catholic Church.
The Reformation is often associated with figures like Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, who are seen as the great Reformers, criticizing traditions and authorities and taking Scripture as the basis of faith and social and moral reform. Calvinism is commonly associated with austerity, strict moral standards and disapproval of pleasure. Historians have, however, pointed out the diversity within different branches of Calvinism as well as commonalities between Reformed Churches and the Catholic Counter-Reformation in terms of moral reform (Benedict, 2002; Bruni and Milbank, 2019). The moral indignation about abuses of power and the search for renewed moral foundations and rigour resulted in the establishment of institutions of discipline and oversight in Calvinist, Lutheran and Catholic territories alike. Examples of famous institutions of moral surveillance that intensified during the (Counter) Reformation in the Catholic Church include the Inquisition and Confession.
Reformation thus resulted in a big family of reformed churches that shared (but also varied in) certain morals and surveillance instruments. Understandings about Puritanism, sobriety, good works and good citizenship varied from place to place. For instance, the development of different moral programmes in Luther's Wittenberg and Zwingli's Zürich is only meaningful when understood in the context of different sociopolitical settings (Benedict, 2002). Situated in the empire of Charles V, the initial rapid reforms in Wittenberg were moderated when neighbouring princes sought opportunities and the emperors’ blessing to expand their powers. To avoid these political interventions, moral progress in Wittenberg became less socially visible, happening only between individual believers, the Bible and God. Contrastingly, in Zürich, a city in the newly formed Swiss confederation that was independent of Rome, moral progress was a matter of community and good governance rather than an individual affair. Here, Zwingli and other theologians, inspired by Renaissance Humanists, sought new ways of governing the city. There was no boundary between religious and civil morality: Christ's presence was located in the community, and seeking truth was a matter of public deliberation and the consideration of diverse perspectives.
Scientific reform also has prominent spokespersons and proponents of a specific approach to doing science. More importantly, concerns about moral deterioration in science are far from new. For centuries, scientists have considered and written about behaviours, structures, pressures and dominant values in science. In 1830, Babbage (1830) was already writing about the decline of science in England, signalling that many practitioners did not uphold the rules of science and that the institution as a whole was at risk as a result. In the decades that followed, various incarnations of this concern reappeared. Sociologists and critical scholars of science articulated ideal institutional forms for science and invited more attention to scientific norms and ethics (Merton, 1973; Ziman, 1998). Altman (1994) wrote about the poor state of medical research in particular, and Ioannidis (2005) provided evidence that a significant amount of published work was wrong. They and many others signalled that increasingly, the quality of science was not supported by its structures (incentives). This resulted in a very long series of calls to action and requests to care for science and its processes and communities. These concerns and expressions of care had diverse priorities. For example, Babbage (1830), Merton (1968) and Ziman (1996) primarily (but not exclusively) prioritized the internal structures of science and the values that underpin its internal operations. Others pointed out that the boundaries of science are far from clear; their concern was not only about how science made knowledge but also how that affects the world in terms of risks, pollution, inequalities and even war (Krohn and Weyer, 1990; Latour, 1988).
Both scientific reform movements, focusing on care for the internal structure and operations of science and care for its (external) impact, responsibility and alliances, are activist even though the former at face value seems less so (Rip, 1999). Both movements sought to change how science works, but prioritized different value systems and valuation regimes or imposed different orders of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006), contributing to what we now call the scientific reform movement. However, the elements each contributed differed in line with their priorities. The reform proposals that followed, which we now group under the labels of ‘open science’ or ‘scientific reform’, thus have a long history and are rooted in moral programmes that are far from new or uniform. The exact form that reform has taken, the political and public attention it has managed to attract, and the tools it has built to pursue its goals are relatively new; however, the concerns of scientists—science's
Reform(ation), virtue and equity
Science's moral panic cannot be traced to one person. Retracing the Reformation to Luther's moral panic is similarly a historical fiction. The moral programmes of the Reformation and scientific reform can only be understood in the context of their specific sociopolitical settings. Moral programmes during the Reformation were oriented around discussions about predestination and (un)mediated access to truths in Scripture and Nature, but were also influenced by the powers of Rome, aristocracy and popular revolt. How can we understand and situate the moral reorientation in scientific reform? Drawing on Thévenot et al.'s (2000) work on orders of worth, we identify two valuation regimes in the literature on scientific reform: the virtue and equity regimes. 1
The virtue regime cares about practicing high-quality science through the promotion of individual virtues. Reform is tasked—or tasks itself—with raising awareness or by bureaucratically enforcing these virtues. ‘Good’ science is the responsibility of virtuous individuals, and responsible research practices on a collective level are the consequence of the behaviours and intentions of individuals. Key notions in this regime include conduct and behaviour, integrity and method (Banks, 2018; Horbach and Halffman, 2017; Macfarlane et al., 2014), often under the heading of ‘open science’.
Alongside this, there exists an equity regime for reform in science, one that also has a long history of signalling the underrepresentation of specific voices, the structural inaccessibility of scientific culture to some and the active dismissal of others. Under the headings of ‘gatekeeping’ (Fini et al., 2022), ‘epistemic justice’ (Fricker, 2007) or ‘diversity and inclusivity’ (Uriarte et al., 2007), the equity programme also uses the label of ‘open science and scholarship’ to help expand existing emancipatory programmes that support equity.
These moral orders have no clear-cut boundaries; however, the virtue regime seems to be connected to the understanding of science as part of a globalized competitive market supported by new communication infrastructures, whereas the equity regime sees science as a vehicle for recognizing localities and promoting a global community. These valuation regimes are a product of our time and its institutions. During the Reformation, feudalism, local communities, the Roman Catholic Church, the empire of Charles V, European intellectual elites, local markets and international trade were tied together in ways that produced moral orders with different valuation regimes and distinctions. We do not attempt to identify moral programmes of virtue and equity of the Reformation; however, some comparisons that focus on how to be a good Christian and how to do charitable works or respond to poverty are helpful for reflecting on the oppositions of our time.
Below, we identify four dimensions in which parallels offer valuable lessons with respect to the content and direction of both moral programmes. The four dimensions are also key topics of contestation and can, therefore, be identified in both the literature and in practice. These four dimensions are (1) excellence, (2) communality, (3) trustworthiness and (4) participation.
Excellence
In the virtue programme of scientific reform, key players pursue excellence—and institutional policies and practices reward such excellence—rooted in a firm belief in a (near-) meritocracy. Equity-based programmes do not accept the existence of this meritocracy and articulate moral excellence as involving inclusivity and participation, which we discuss below.
In the 1960s, the word
In the first decades of the Reformation, preachers and theologians were considered excellent when they managed to convince a broad public, including magistrates, scholars, and laypeople, that they were addressing their concerns while speaking from the Bible. In later generations, after new moral and social orders had solidified, excellence was shown by living and preaching in accordance with the principles and rules of accepted doctrines. Finally, reaching salvation can be seen as a form of excellence in the Reformation. The widespread doctrine of predestination meant that God determined who will find salvation and who will find eternal damnation; this was not something humans could influence by their good works. Salvation, as a form of excellence, was thus a matter of divine grace, not individual achievement; however, Christians could try to ‘read’ their own behaviour and charitable actions to identify the workings of divine grace in their own lives (Gurney, 2018). While the scientific ‘horse who can sing’ may resemble, to some extent, this divine grace, excellence in scientific reform has, by contrast, become part of a story of control through policies and incentives.
Communality
In the virtue-based moral programmes of reform, the quality of scientific methods and procedures are rooted in individual moral character. Echoing Margaret Thatcher's ‘there is no such thing as society’, virtue-based reforms across science place responsibility primarily with individuals (and frequently under the banner of scientific integrity), even to the point that they often understand scientific institutions and cultures as little more than a set of individuals (Valkenburg et al., 2021). Thus, scientific reformers propose that we can do away with many of those institutions. Cries to end the journal as a vector for scientific dissemination (Brembs et al., 2021; Stern and O'Shea, 2019) are accompanied by boycotts of publishers and calls to eradicate them from the scientific process. Researchers are invited to actively resist evaluation bodies and structures, whether that is the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK or equivalents elsewhere (Derrick, 2021), to the point of disobedience (Penders and Shaw, 2020). Radical voices in scientific reform propose that we don’t need communities and can instead rely on the moral character of individuals along with some basic infrastructure (Flis, 2019). We can learn what such a character looks like from Babbage's diagnoses of misbehaviours and decades of discussions on the moral character of individual researchers under the banner of research integrity (Aubert Bonn, 2020; Aubert Bonn et al., 2017).
However, we also see alternative, more communitarian conceptualizations of virtue in individuals and collectives in scientific reform at work. For instance, Tunç et al. (2023: 31) write that ‘[w]hat we need are much more nuanced accounts, which recognize the major differences between various strands of the movement’.
2
Tunç and Pritchard (2022) distinguish between
In reform movements, equity refers to the idea that, in a global community, all individuals should have equal access to resources and opportunities, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, disciplinary background or geographic situatedness in the world. This principle is often central to movements that aim to address social, economic or epistemic forms of injustice, such as those focused on gender equality or workers’ rights. The priority of this work, to dismantle systems of oppression and structural inequalities, lies with changing institutions to create more equitable and inclusive institutions, organizations and societies.
A recent initiative that is representative of the equity programme in science is the
During the Reformation, charity can be seen as a form of community care that took different shapes in different sociopolitical settings. Calvin provided guidance on individual acts of charity as people are obliged to do good works and help those in need. He also indicated that this should be done without pride and in a way that avoids humiliating receivers (Ardashkin and Bykov, 2016). So, acts of charity also required individual virtue. By contrast, in Zwingli's Zürich and many other cities in Europe, charity was institutionalized in poor houses and inns for the poor, while begging was forbidden in many cities. In this process, charity became part of complex sociopolitical and religious polemics about relations between God, community and individual believers. A study about charity in England revealed that charity during this period involved not only feeding the poor but also ‘using a whip’ to correct sinners and protect the community, and ‘fraternal correction’ to further reform institutions and power structures (Gurney, 2018). Such institutional reform through fraternal correction also required examining one's own charitable will. These examples show that during the Reformation, in many places, institutions and community were prioritized over individuals.
Trustworthiness
The moral character of individual scientists that the virtue programme relies on is also what it is pessimistic about. That moral character requires a guiding hand and sufficient rules and control. Open science can be, in many ways, the manifestation of that control in the absence of clear institutional supervision. Ideally, each individual scientist can check and even repeat the work of every other scientist. Most work will never be checked or repeated, but the mere possibility implies the largest panopticon that science has ever seen. This notion of connected virtue and control or surveillance is something we also find in Merton's work (Hosseini et al., 2022; Wunderlich, 1974), and the focus on replication and replicability can be understood as a manifestation of this. By contrast, the equity programme is optimistic about the potential of individuals to contribute to a commons through a willingness to share control over the articulation of questions and priorities in living labs or by way of citizen science, for instance.
During the Reformation, distrust in the virtue of Christians can be identified when civic institutions and politicians were discarded as guardians of the common good (Bruni and Milbank, 2019). In Medieval Christianity as well as Renaissance Humanism, human beings were seen as both virtuous and vicious, having free will to choose to do good, and installing institutions was seen as a way to support virtuous development. By contrast, Luther and many Protestants did not believe in the institutional mediation of the common good nor in the free will of humans to choose goodness. Bruni and Milbank (2019) argue that the Protestantism that emerged from the Reformation informed the subsequent shaping of society through its pessimistic anthropology, which ‘no longer depicts human beings as truly capable of positive reciprocity in relation either to Man or to God’. As a result, the Protestant incarnation of the common good became a ‘rule-observing game, played by isolated interests’. Virtue-based scientific reform also critically targets institutions and the incentives they offer. Whether they are the Catholic Church, scientific publishers or universities, through their governance processes and their operationalizations of targets and outcomes, they are seen as corrupting individuals’ abilities to live in accordance with the Bible or to do science ‘properly’.
In the equity programmes of reform and Reformation, the pursuit and propagation of trustworthiness look remarkably different: a large role is still ascribed to individuals, but the priority is very clearly the collective benefit or common good. Individual scientists and believers are, for instance, entrusted with awareness-raising and educating others or with advocating for changes in policies and practices within institutions. Additionally, they do good by actively engaging with and listening to underrepresented communities and by actively seeking out and taking on board perspectives and voices that are often overlooked. For example, notions of rigour need not be confined to strict rules but can also depend on and be shaped by sociocultural contexts. Research employing this notion of rigour-in-context (Halme et al., 2024) may involve deviating from established conventions to accommodate the underprivileged and build trustworthiness accordingly.
Participation
The virtue and equity programmes in scientific reform communicate differently. The first speaks with a highly regulated and disciplined voice, the second with a diverse chorus of voices. In its quest for good science, the virtue programme prescribes a set of rules encoded in tools and methods, but above all else, a distinct philosophy of science that does the same thing: enlighten the road to the expansion of certified knowledge. The need for new rules was actively articulated through the production of scandal: accusations of corruption and fraud, a narrative of crisis and decline (Harp-Rushing, 2020; Penders, 2024; Peterson and Panofsky, 2023). In scientific reform, the social character of scientific systems—ancient and well known by those inside—was recast into a scandalous discovery. Where the virtue programme frames this as novelty, panic and scandal in order to push radical change, the equity programme stresses continuity and seeks to continue existing participation and democratization processes.
In the virtue programme, the pursuit of radical change impacts whose voices are heard. Optimization through a focus on rules and their articulation and implementation in the context of reform invites top-down processes and places the power to articulate change in the hands of a select few. Here, bureaucratic innovations are at work, including but not limited to pre-registration, registered reports, preprint-based publication and recommended data repositories (Penders, 2022; Rubin, 2023). Deviations from those rules require, at the very least, an explanation. Whether that set of rules is a religious prescription for how to live or a scientific prescription for how to make knowledge, deviations from the protocol are frowned upon. If the deviation is too large, it can result in excommunication, disqualification, or perhaps a schism. Deviation from the proper path meets disapproval, while staying on that path is in itself the reward. In scientific reform, that path has multiple names, but ‘open science’ is one of them. The credo ‘open science is just science done right’ (Imming and Tennant, 2018) is a clear display of the morality at work.
In equity programmes, participatory community-based research (Minkler and Wallerstein, 2011) and different forms of citizen science show how multiple voices can be included in scientific research to enhance its democratic character. Arguably, the need for such democratizing reforms is grounded in the role science can play in the struggles of groups that have often been misrepresented and overlooked (Montoya, 2013). Besides this concern for social justice, the call for diversity is also based on epistemic considerations. Compare, for instance, the epistemic arguments Longino (1990) offers to locate objectivity in community and not in process. A more diverse community can cover, include and balance out more inside and outside threats to the validity of the knowledge they produce, thereby merging moral and epistemic arguments for inclusivity.
Optimization through continuous democratization expands the chorus of voices that get a say in the articulation of science. Some common themes and phrases that are often used by equity-driven movements include ‘leaving nobody behind’ (Kruschick and Schoch, 2023; Stracke, 2020) and ‘breaking the barriers to scientific participation’ (Parthasarathy, 2010). These phrases reflect the idea that science should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or identity, and that research should be conducted in a way that is fair and inclusive for all. The equity programme in scientific reform advocates for research that explicitly draws on and addresses the knowledge, inputs and needs of these groups. Wider participation, democratic modes of organization and shared values across stakeholder communities take precedence over procedural accuracy and rigour.
During the Reformation, the voices that mattered were trained to speak based on Scripture while addressing timely social and political concerns. The fragmented religious landscape that grew in the Reformation was politically complex and volatile; however, it also showed that many different voices mattered. As a result of continuous disagreement about rules (indulgences, sacraments, predestination and others), the Reformation witnessed the proliferation of many different churches, a plural landscape of processes and protocols that each argued to prescribe proper worship.
Participation in both scientific reform and the Reformation has been shaped by new rules and regulations that aim to prevent scientists and Christians from going astray. The processes of exclusion that accompany this form of governance invite resistance and the active pursuit of alternative structures that allow for greater diversity.
Discussion
We are not claiming that scientific reform is the mirror image of the Reformation nor that we may expect religious wars to pave the future path of science and scientific reform (although credibility struggles under the banner of ‘science wars’ do exist; see Goldman, 2021). More abstractly, we seek to display the moral concern that gave rise to both movements: how they are rooted in discontent with institutions and distrust of the capacity of both institutions and individuals to do the right thing and how they both rely primarily on the identification of virtues. The implicit yet powerful connotation is that virtues require surveillance; individuals are the relevant unit for understanding science; and many (but perhaps not all) institutions stand in our way. Both reform and Reformation allow a shift of authority and different avenues for participation and gatekeeping in terms of virtue, equity, faith and charity. In fact, Protestantism's promotion of the use of spoken languages in the Church, as opposed to Latin, can be framed as a move towards openness and more inclusivity, and a move that allowed relative outsiders to engage with faith themselves instead of only indirectly by relying on the authority of learned experts. Therefore, open science can be framed not only as a driver of efficiency and speed in science but also as a vector for inclusion.
How such shifts and changes pan out is highly dependent on social and political contexts. In the case of the Reformation, the differences between a reformed Zürich and a reformed Wittenberg display how power struggles shape moral programmes, and how value or worth is encoded, understood and performed in real life. Similar to the plurality of valuation in the Reformation, scientific reform displays sometimes divergent and sometimes convergent articulations of worth. 3 The continued coexistence of these multiple parallels demonstrate the fuzzy and permeable boundaries between regimes of epistemic valuation and the moral programmes that accompany and shape science in society.
The institutional embodiment of various rival moralities each professes a different route and goal for good science and polarizes discussion on reform and influencing trajectories of change. How do we do excellent science, build communities, organize trust and care for plural voices? The answers to each of those questions depend on how we assign worth and value. We argue that reform debates need to make these moral programmes visible—not just by identifying driving values, but by legitimizing the prioritization of these values and by allowing discussion about that legitimacy in the context of sociopolitical settings. This will help us decide when to adopt a hyper-rational approach geared towards efficiency and speed, which also makes science less social and thus potentially less diverse and inclusive, or when to opt for a slower, but in our view more responsible, equity-based approach geared towards representational justice and diversity-based epistemologies.
Conclusion
To build legitimacy, it is vital to discuss and reflect on moral programmes in the scientific reform movement and the orders of worth structuring its institutions, collaborations and wider societal connections. Comparing the scientific reform movement with the Reformation helped to identify how such moral programmes relate to sociopolitical conditions. We identified and compared the value and equity programmes in scientific reform, which in practice often act as rival moralities. The value programme prioritizes individual excellence, disciplines individual scientists through surveillance and control, and regards institutions, such as journals that support the scientific community, as obstacles. By contrast, the equity programme seeks to promote equal voices, openness and the democratization of science. It wants to redress existing forms of injustice, exclusion and under-representation. In theory, these moral programmes may be related and combined in a variety of ways, but in practice, we see that they are often opposed. Further examination of these moral programmes and their relations is needed to orient additional scientific reform. Moreover, other orders of worth can be added to the two that we identified. We propose that such examinations are a form of care for the soul of science.
One of the famous mottos of the Reformation, rewritten to fit science, sounds:
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
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