Science and Values

Abstract

Scientific inquiry may no longer be regarded as only an exercise of curiosity and adventure. Science today is too powerful a tool; it holds an immediate import for human affairs that takes it far beyond the boundaries of the scientist's personal predilections. Like many endeavors of the mind, science is morally neutral, in itself neither good nor evil. But unlike other intellectual and aesthetic undertak ings, unlike art, music, and literature, science -intrinsically holds dangers to the human condition that have come to equal—indeed to exceed—its potential for progress and prosperity. Advances of knowledge and technology have always represented a double-edged blade. Shaped flint, the wheel, the nuclear reactor—it is the usage to which the implement is put that defines its moral value, not the implement as such. The potency of the implements now at hand far exceeds the ethical sophistication of the users. Science urgently requires a framework of appropriate ethical values if it is not, for malevolence or for ignorance, to serve the demonic. It is for lack of such a value framework that not a few leading scientists have felt obliged to leave certain fields in recent years and to seek others in which the dangers of misuse seemed less imminent. A case in point is the exodus of investigators, like the late Leo Szilard, from atomic physics following the development of the atomic bomb; some physicists then devoted themselves to establish ing a society and a journal aimed at calling awareness to the monstrous possibilities inherent in a conscienceless harnessing of atomic energy. Another instance of flight from a specific area of investigation is that of bacteriologists in the 1950s and 1960s from aerosol biology.