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An improvement over the current state of affairs, where it is decided by the moral fads of unaccountable administrative bodies.
If we must be the toys of power, let it at least be power that has a chance to feel the consequences of mistakes.
Thats why having principles sucks. It will be an improvement in this one case. But the expansion of legislative caprice can be broadly interpreted for a long time. There are equally useful alternative toys of power to exact justice. Torts maintain a comparatively narrower scope, and stay within the realm of liability.
We signed a death warrant on Science the moment we thought it could be a "neutral" way of resolving political disputes. The instant that idea was entertained Science was doomed to either go the Olson Kennedy route, where scientists themselves abandon the scientific process in pursuit of their political agenda, or to be brought to heel by another institution with political power (and I agree with the other poster, that it's better to have politics be done by a transparently political institution, than under the guise of "neutrality").
For you to get what you want, we'd need to take science out of politics.
What's sad is that had it been kept out of hot political issues, it could still be useful to validate our answers to these questions once they are no longer politically hot. Now that it's balls deep into political issues, even old mistakes will have to be maintained or memory holed because previous examples of Science being wrong are going to be used as examples of why today's Science could be wrong, and we can't have that!
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In the absence of a shared religion or culture you need something. Seemed like a smart idea at the time.
Yeah, I can't judge, I cosigned it too back then.
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In 2017 Oren Cass published an a great article on the problem of "policy based evidence making" in my favorite magazine, National Affairs. Part of the thesis was a call against government expansion, which won't be the case if Skrmetti prevails. Unlike policy, science gets mugged by reality in comparatively short time spans. I'm confident that "gender science" won't hold for a hundredth as long as the precedence Skrmetti will establish. Moreover, it would broaden the scope of legislative intrusion. Imagine a scientific consensus emerges that natal males playing female contact sports poses statistically significant injury risk. An ideological legislature could dismiss that, and instead pursue their own policy, ethical, or ideological goals. The same principles are in play.
Science remains the best way to find out what is true, all else being equal. No passenger would be tempted to troubleshoot a high-flying faulty airliner by the legislative process; to defer to a representative for the best way to perform life saving surgery.
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/policy-based-evidence-making
No one arguing against Skrimetti actually wants to stop government expansion. What they want, as the Alabama brief eloquently argues, is to have political controversies be resolved by unelected, supposedly scientific bodies like the FDA, or the alphabet soup of medical associations.
If you actually want a government that does not interfere in science, you need to roll back the entire regulatory state. Otherwise the supposedly neutral institutions will simply become a political faction, and science will go out the window anyway (which is exactly what happened).
Well, first you'll have to explain what's so bad about that. Unless I'm missing something Skrimetti is just about banning / age limits on gender medicine. I don't see how it's qualitatively different from banning heroin or other recreational drugs.
And if these controversies are settled through scientific institutions, all that will happen is that political factions will use underhanded means to take them over, and produce shoddy science that serves their political goals. Which, I repeat, is exactly what happened. The WPATH and Olson Kennedy did not fall from a coconut tree, as they say.
I think I've been pretty clear that entire reason I'm against Skrmetti prevailing has noting - whatsoever - to do with banning flawed gender medicine. The precedent it sets can be argued in favor of the next Bad Thing(tm). Just sue the current bad thing for torts.
What I'm asking is what precedent is it setting? As far as I can tell it's nothing new. Are bans on surrogacy some "dangerous precedent"?
Again, if that's what you're going for you shouldn't be arguing against Skrimetti, you should be arguing for the total abolishing of the regulatory state.
As I stated, legislators can eschew medical/expert consensus for anything they please. Imagine the scientific consensus states that natal males in womens contact sports poses an injury risk. Well, Srkmetti would provide precedent that elected representatives can ignore that consensus. Is mifepristone safe? Thats now up for legislators to decide on their own. Does MDMA provide a therapeutic benefit to veterans with PTSD? Etc.
No, I want both internal and external experts to study things without their findings being handwaved away by politicians with an ideological agenda. Or course in this scenario, I don't trust the APA, AMA, and WPATH view on gender medicine. But experts will be mugged by reality far faster than case law. The cass report led to a reversal in the UK; science slowed down gender medicine in the Nordic countries. It takes far too long to get bunk science out of the legal system because the legal system is unscientific; relies on case law (eg bite mark analysis). In general, trust experts more than politicians because experts are responsible for the modern world.
How is this not already the case? We routinely ban various drugs (you brought up MDMA yourself), medical procedures (surrogacy, euthanasia)... how does banning this particular field of medicine set some dangerous new precedent?
Good! This is the part that I wanted you to explain how there's anything bad about! If people want to have unisex sports, they should be allowed to vote for people who will give them unisex sports. These controversies should not be decided by the scientific community, and giving it this sort of power will only lead to a degradation of science.
And abolishing the regulatory state and applying your approach of "just sue the current bad thing for torts" to everything is the only thing that will give you this result. If you only use that approach for things that "experts" agree with, but allow them to ban things they disagree with via agencies like the FDA, AMA, etc., all that means is that the experts are political actors themselves, and will therefore jettison science themselves, or will be slapped down by someone more powerful. The regulatory state, not cases like Skrimetti are the things that are preventing experts from studying what they want, and having their findings be taken seriously.
The Cass Review was commissioned through a political process to begin with, and it's enforcement is likewise political, which you can tell by observing that it's effects are constrained to the UK. If this was the scientific community self-policing, it would lead to a reversal in the entire anglosphere, if not the world.
The case law in this case is about whether these controversies can be decided by the legislature, and I don't think legislatures are any less responsive than "experts".
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I don't think this is as good of an example as you think given how Boeing has been doing lately. Someone gets mugged by reality alright, but it doesn't have to be the scientist or the people who give him money. And until you have a way to close the loop, they can keep being insane for long enough to destroy your society.
Science is good at figuring out precise models of the natural world, it is absolutely terrible at making decisions about the results of those models, or itself.
The modern world being so complex you need layers upon layers of experts to even understand problems is the story the managerial class tells about why it should rule, but that's only a story. We could be doing other things, with other tradeoffs.
I think what did the most damage to this story in recent times is Elon Musk. I think that's what they hated most about him, before the Twitter purchase.
The managerial class had evaluated the question and decided that while electric cars were a cute idea, they were not a realistic replacement for ICE cars. It also concluded that space exploration was just too expensive and that it should just be about launching drones to increase the prestige of institutional Science, and as a way to transfer more ressources to contractors so embedded in the US government they're practically an arm of it.
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