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 ) 77

58 E AGAZZI pretend to be “absolute” (in the sense of being totally disconnected from the others and worthy of being pursued for its own sake above any other consideration); however no “relativism” is entailed by this claim, since values are not said to depend upon the different situations, but simply to apply to these situations in different ways Ethics must start with this awareness, which is simply the projection of the evidence that men are pushed to action by a great variety of motivations, which they consider to be legitimate in themselves, while spontaneously admitting that not everything is permitted in following these motivations, so that valuejudgments are necessary at every point in order to determine the right course of action Making one single value absolute (be it pleasure, wealth, power, family, fatherland, friendship, beauty, truth, love, religion) would amount to admitting that in pursuing this value anything is permissible This would simply mean that the truly moral attitude is suspended in that sphere, since no value-judgments in a proper sense would be adopted for directing the course of action, but simply “efficiency-judgments’’ concerning the best means to be employed to fulfill the pre-established value Hence, a subhuman way of acting would characterize this sphere The correctness of this statement is not suspended even if one admits a hierarchy of values (e.g that which is implicitly presented in the ordering of the above list) Indeed we have been accustomed to concede that one acts at a subhuman level when one is oriented exclusively to, for example, the search of pleasure or wealth This is true, but does not depend essentially on the fact that these are values of lower rank; it depends rather on the fact that these are promoted (consciously or unconsciously) to the position of absolute values To be persuaded, it suffices to remember how many morally condemnable facts have been or could be the consequence of making the higher-ranking values absolute as well Hence our conclusion is that science too does not constitute an exception to this general rule If we limit ourselves to considering science as a system of knowledge (i.e if we consider only its contents), science has no ethical relevance However, as soon as we consider its also being a human activity, i.e the activity which aims at producing this knowledge, we must conclude that it cannot help being subject to the general conditions of any human activity, that of being guided by choices inspired by valuejudgments, which must take the plurality of values into consideration From this awareness follows what we said about the evaluation of ends, means and consequences in the case of pure and applied science