This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal is devoted entirely to issues at the interface of ethics, social episternology, and philosophy of science. Exploring the role of values in science policy and the production of scientific knowledge is a core mission of the journal. A great deal of attention in the science and values literature has been devoted to the problem of inductive risk—briefly, the fact that we need to use non-epistemic values to settle our evidence bar for accepting scientific hypotheses, given that anywhere we set this bar balances the risks of false negatives (failing to accept a true hypothesis) and false positives (accepting a false hypothesis). Very recently, the scholarly literature has begun to expand to consider other forms of epistemic risks that are ineliminably part of the process of generating and disseminating scientific knowledge, and that must be managed using non-epistemic social and ethical values. This has opened up a wide variety of discussions of exactly what roles values play in the production of scientific knowledge, and how these can be managed in a democratic society concerned with the security and accessibility of this knowledge. Social trust in science is crucial, but in order for science to be legitimately trustworthy, we must find some way of understanding, managing, and communicating about the many integral roles that non-epistemic values play in shaping scientific methods and scientific communication. The four papers in this volume all contribute to this flowering set of debates.
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