Abstract
This paper approaches the question concerning the “human character” of science. Recent controversies over particular scientific endeavors have led some commentators to assert the impropriety of imposing moral, political, or religious limits on scientific inquiry. In such claims, I suggest, we also have an attempt to minimize the “human character” of science, and, in particular, of “good science.” I want here to look more closely at the relationship between science – “good science” – and morality. This relationship exists, I shall argue, on at least three axes which I shall call the external ethics of science, the social ethics of science, and the internal ethics of science. Of these, only the first – the external ethics of science – suggests that good science may not necessarily be good morally. If good science has the characteristics I describe in this paper, then the project of science “populated and exercised by machines” is chimerical. Good science as science is and must be a human activity permeated by human concerns and norms.
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Notes
- 1.
Quotations in this paragraph are from the invitation to participate in the March 2018 conference, “Will Science Remain Human? Frontiers of the Incorporation of Technological Innovations in the Bio-Medical Sciences,” received by email July 19, 2017.
- 2.
The name given to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 45 (public welfare), Part 46 (protection of human subjects).
- 3.
I have made these points at greater length in Tollefsen 2008, Chapter Two.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
The history of this particular form of racism in science is told in Jones 1992.
- 7.
For example, Owen-Smith et al. write: “Though history has taught us the benefits of thoughtful, rationally driven science policy (the response by the scientific community to recombinant DNA research offers a historical case in point), some types of research are chilled by thoughtless, irrationally driven science policy. We take the response by the political conservatives to climate change and human embryonic stem cell science to be exemplary of this negative case” (Owen-Smith et al. 2012, 727).
- 8.
For a helpful discussion of Nazi science which reveals many of these vices, see Evans 2009, Chapter 6. Nazi medical science was, of course, especially egregious.
- 9.
This bleak verdict seems to me to be substantially confirmed by the work of J. Benjamin Hurlbut in his study of the history of human embryo research; see Hurlbut 2017. I should stress that while the failures of Nazi science are used to illustrate a point about the internal ethics of science, and while I think that contemporary human embryo research also involves moral failings, I do not intend to suggest any moral parity between Nazi researchers and contemporary scientists.
- 10.
Nor, of course, do I assume that even epistemically science is an entirely technical activity. But that question, though central to this volume, is beyond the scope of this paper.
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Tollefsen, C. (2020). What Is ‘Good Science’?. In: Bertolaso, M., Sterpetti, F. (eds) A Critical Reflection on Automated Science. Human Perspectives in Health Sciences and Technology, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25001-0_14
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