Fear Science Bringing Gifts

Moralization in the field of scientific activity and its submission to universal morality contradict the flagrant facts of scientists’ indifference to moral standards. Even “worthy” scientists are no exception in this regard. We recall Louis Pasteur’s proposal to test rabies vaccines in those sentenced to death and Pavlov’s experiments on street children. Inside science, “incorrect borrowing” is a far greater sin and is more dangerous for the reproduction of the scientific community than a contradiction with the so-called universal morality, on which society itself does not agree today. Universal morality is simply incompatible with a whole host of “corporate ethics” as codes of isolated communicative systems. If there are any unifying values that can act as conditions of social consensus in a differentiated society, then this is rather a strategy of non-interference in other people’s affairs. Science does not interfere in the affairs of religion with its rational justification of religious ontology, and politics does not interfere in science with its distinctions between the “proletarian sciences” and the “corrupt girls of imperialism”. Universal morality as applied within science acts as corporate ethics, not as the one mythically affirmed by sacred forces. The obvious “comprehensiveness” of the ethics of science compels us to abandon the idea of affirming the mythical foundation for the legitimation of science based on its hypothetical “transcendence”. Such an appeal to the cognitive resources of mythological consciousness, including, first of all, the ban on questioning, on analytical and comparative methodology, raises doubts about their productivity and persuasiveness. Of course, if one adheres to the mythical justification of the authority of science, then this entire procedure would end with a reference to the corresponding arche (or origo), i.e. to a certain institution that laid the foundation for a particular order of nature. But the resources and self-justification of science are far from exhausted, are not they? Why not use scientific rationality itself, the resources of critical discourse and comparative analysis in order to legitimize science?

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