Logic, methodology and philosophy of science VIII proceedings of the eighth international congress of logic, methodology and philosophy of science, and philosophy of science proceedings) ( PDFDrive ) 74

ETHICS AND SCIENCE 55 regarding human actions, the conditions of the action also have special importance They are similar to the means, but differ from them mainly in that the means are tools for directly reaching the end as a terminus of a certain action, while the conditions are something which makes the action itself possible, and thereby serve the end only indirectly This distinction is useful in order to understand that an action seeking the realization of a morally legitimate goal through the adoption of morally acceptable means still remains open to moral questioning until its conditions have been analyzed The most familiar example of this kind of problem, which has been discussed with reference to science in the past few years, is that of the allocation of funds for research Several questions might emerge in this context One might concern the provenance of the funds: e.g would it be morally admissible to accept from a “benefactor” funds which we seriously suspect to be the product of criminal activities, such as narcotic trafficking or kidnapping? Problems also exist in much more normal situations: scientific research is fed throughout the world by great supplies of public money, but public money is always insufficient to fully satisfy all the needs of the community Hence the money allocated to science is necessarily subtracted from other possible destinations such as, say, hospitals, schools, social security and environmental protection Since the satisfaction of these needs corresponds to the existence of several aims or values, which it is not only legitimate, but even dutiful to pursue, we easily see that a problem of moral choice inevitably surfaces, a problem whose solution implies determining priorities and also limiting or cutting certain scientific projects Several other problems, besides that of the allocation of funds, obviously surface when we consider the question of the “conditions” for the existence of pure and applied science; these problems are not treated here It would be question-begging to say that in these cases the decision criteria are of a social rather than of an ethical nature, for in any case they should serve to determine what ought to be done, and this is the typical feature of any ethicaI question To rely upon social motivations for answering the question simply means that, in certain cases, we accept that social values play the role of moral standards (which is by no means incorrect, provided we are aware that there should be other moral standards as well) Let us remark that in the special example considered above, the solution of the moral problem may be easier in the case of applied science than in the case of pure science, for it is usually easier to show how an applied research could “compensate” through its expected