Donal Khosrowi (Durham University), Julian Reiss (Durham University)
This paper has three sections. Section 1 advances a novel critique of 'evidence-based policy'. The core of the critique is that the demand that policies be 'evidence-based', when this involves preferences for specific methods to generate such evidence, can and often will result in inferior policy outcomes. Section 2 illustrates this by means of three brief case studies which focus on matters of distributive justice. Section 3 offers some proposals for how philosophers of science can contribute to improving methodology for evidence- based policy.
