Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

permitted by the old notion of nature. Second, once the discussion is
closed and a hierarchy established, the discussion must not be re-
opened, and one must be able to use the obvious presence of these
states of the world as indisputable premises for all the reasoning to
come. Without this requirement of institution, the discussion would
never come to an end, and one would never succeed in knowing in
what common, self-evident, certain world collective life ought to take
place. Such is therequirement of closure*of the discussion.
To make this clearer, Box 3.2 summarizes the terms we propose to
introduce.
Before going further, let us note that with the new separation of
powers and these four questions, we are not introducing any danger-
ous innovation: we are only describing more concisely what the im-
possible fact-value distinction sought to make indescribable. Let us
take the example of prions, those unconventional proteins that appear
responsible for the so-called mad cow disease. It is useless, as we now
understand, to require scientists to prove definitively that these agents
exist, so that politicians can then seriously raise the question of what
they ought to do. At the beginning of the mad cow affair, M. Chirac,
the French president, initially summoned M. Dormont, a specialist in
those tiny beings: “Accept your responsibilities, Dr. Dormont, and tell
us whether or not prions are responsible for the disease!” To which
the professor, as a good researcher, responded coolly: “I accept my re-
sponsibilities, Mr. President. My answer is that I don’t know.. .” Ob-
jects of a vigorous controversy, prions suffice to induce perplexity—re-
quirement no. 1—not only among researchers, but also among cattle

A NEW SEPARATION OF POWERS

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Box 3.2. Vocabulary selected to replace the terms “facts” and “values”

power to take into account: how many are we?

Perplexity.Requirement of external reality.

Consultation.Requirement of relevance.

power to arrange in rank order: can we live together?

Hierarchy.Requirement of publicity.

Institution.Requirement of closure.