290 
areas in which the values involved are not as easily quantifiable. While 
all those things are there, it does seem to me the justification is ulti- 
mately consequences, and therefore we have to be as rational as we can and 
use the prudent procedures to assess those kinds of consequences. 
Now, clearly one of the areas of disagreement we have among us is even 
when we have the data, what are the proper inferences of that data — not so 
much, I take it, in terms of specific scientific inferences, but what are 
the inferences to be drawn for policy, and what are the inferences to be 
drawn for guidelines, since these guidelines are not merely guidelines on 
how to conduct research: these are guidelines which pertain to matters 
related to research. 
I am puzzled, in a way, as to why we draw so many different inferences 
from even an agreed-upon base of data. I am inclined to toss in here from 
jargon from my own trade. In my own trade some people have come to make a 
distinction between what they call the hermeneutics of suspicion and the 
hermeneutics of trust. All they are talking about is that you can take a 
basically suspicious attitude and interpret your data from a standpoint of 
fundamental suspicion, interpret the testimony of other people from the 
standpoint of fundamental suspicion, interpret the documents of other people 
from a standpoint of fundamental suspicion; or you can do the obverse side 
of that and engage in the hermeneutics of trust — namely, basically, having a 
trusting relationship to data, text, and interpretation. 
Now, I would draw an inference from what I have heard in the last 
hours, several hours in this place, namely that one of the biggest dif- 
ferences between persons in this room is whether they are fundamentally 
suspicious or fundamentally trusting, not only of the sciences, but of the 
public in the capacities that the public and different people would bracket 
off in different ways on this. Now, when we come to those kinds of dif- 
ferences among us, I find it very difficult to think that we are going to 
come to rational procedures by which we are going to overcome those dif- 
ferences. Presumably data and arguments would help us to modify those 
positions, but it seems to me at that point we are dealing with some 
fundamental affectives, responses that we have gotten wherever they have 
come from, towards the problems that are at hand, and they are going to 
color the way in which we interpret our data, the way in which we par- 
ticipate in these discussions. Those kinds of disagreements are moral 
disagreements. They are moral disagreements at a level at which it is very 
difficult to overcome them, and I think it is a matter of learning to live 
with them, to take them into account, and to attend to them as deliberately 
as possible, hopefully sometimes in circumstances in which there is less 
pressure than there is in terms of the time we have to deal with. 
I think another kind of basic division that I will draw sharply first 
of all, and then try to indicate how I think it is a hard one for us to live 
with. One kind of basic division that we have between us in this kind of 
testimony is people who believe fundamentally that it is a primary function 
of the state to protect persons in those persons' own best interest, and 
therefore a tendency towards a paternalistic view of the state. We have at 
[ 494 ] 
