Trustworthy Institutions Stick Their Necks Out: Prediction, Accommodation, and the Ethics of Public Health Communication

Brendan Shea (Rochester Community and Technical College)

This session will be part of ‘Truth, Democracy, and Misinformation’, the 20206 Symposium of the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics.

The AAAPE exists to promote awareness of applied ethics and foster relationships between practitioners and academics.

The event will be held on online. The event is free for members and ticketed for non-members. More information, including the full program, schedule, and registration is available at: https://events.humanitix.com/aapae-misinformation-workshop

  Abstract

In February 2020, US public health authorities advised the public that wearing masks was unnecessary, only to reverse this guidance a few weeks later, explaining that the earlier advice had partly reflected concerns about supply shortages. Millions of people noticed. For many of them, the lesson was not that science self-corrects but that official announcements track something other than the truth. Episodes such as this one, I’ll argue, are central to understanding why medical misinformation and conspiracy theories continue to flourish, and they also suggest how health institutions and medical professionals might best respond.

I begin from a claim that has become increasingly plausible in recent philosophy of medicine (Goldenberg 2021; Levy 2022; Kelsall 2025): that distrust of health institutions is not (mainly) a failure of individual rationality, but is instead a reasonable response to the evidence that distrustful people actually possess, including documented patterns of institutional non-honesty (Brown and Barra 2023) and of experts who meet criticism with derision rather than engagement (Brooks 2025). If we take this seriously, then the standard toolkit of debunking, labeling, and content moderation treats the symptom while feeding the disease.

I’ll then offer a diagnosis of what distinguishes trustworthy from untrustworthy communication, drawing on the distinction between prediction and accommodation in the philosophy of science. The slogan is Popper’s, but the account is not: what matters is not falsifiability but the confirmational asymmetry defended by weak predictivists (Maher 1988; Hitchcock and Sober 2004; Barnes 2008), on which successful prediction is evidence about the reliability of the method that produced a claim. Conspiracy theories fail this test not because they never predict, but because the methods that generate them would have delivered a theory whatever the evidence had been. Institutional communication, I’ll argue, can fail it in the same way. Guidance that shifts without acknowledgment, for example, or thresholds that move when convenient, tells reasonable audiences that the process behind the guidance is tracking something other than the evidence, and they discount it accordingly. On this analysis, the crucial difference between legitimate expertise and its imitators is not who speaks, but whose methods have made checkable commitments and survived them.

This diagnosis motivates a constructive ethics of institutional communication, which I’ll develop in terms of three interlocking professional obligations. 1. Institutions ought to communicate in dated, checkable predictions whose failure would be recognized as such, wherever the evidence permits. 2. They should acknowledge uncertainty honestly rather than projecting a confidence they do not have. 3. Labels such as “misinformation” and “conspiracy theory” should be reserved for claims that fail the predictive test, rather than being deployed against dissent as such.

I will conclude by considering both the promise and the (real) limits of predictive communication. Trust, on this account, is earned in the way that theories earn confirmation, since in both cases what is being estimated is the reliability of the process behind the claims. Institutions cannot simply demand it from us, but can only underwrite it.

About the Author

Brendan Shea (PhD, University of Illinois) teaches philosophy and computer science at Rochester Community and Technical College and is a Resident Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. His research spans bioethics, philosophy of science, and the ethics of computing and AI, and he serves as a public member of the Institutional Biosafety Committee at Mayo Clinic. He is the author of several open-access textbooks on logic, ethics, and computing, and of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Karl Popper.