Is Science Communication Ethical? A Question of Justice

So far this book has focused on the ethics of science communication practice, culminating in a set of proposed principles for the field. This chapter takes a different tack and looks at the ethics of the field of science communication as a whole; is there something specifically moral about science communication as a field. The chapter considers oft-repeated claims that there is an anti-science crisis and a science communication crisis and argues there is no such crisis. There maybe an epistemic crisis, or an expert-trust crisis, but these stretch far beyond science. The chapter then looks at the effect of presenting these crises as being specifically about science on other fields of knowledge and to the social imagining of what good knowledge is.