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 ) 78

ETHICS AND SCIENCE 59 The regulation of science Some corollaries derive from the considerations developed thus far The first is that specifically ethical limitations and regulations may concern the practice of scientific research In fact, as soon as we admit that moral principles must govern human actions, we are obliged to accept that everything is not permissible, and that, at the extremities of the interval of what is permissible, there is what is obligatory on the one side, and what is prohibited on the other However, while moral principles and values are of a very general nature, obligations, permissions and prohibitions concern concrete actions, and must be specified through concrete norms The difficulty with the norms is that they cannot very often be the more or less immediate translation of some general principle, since they must apply to complex situations and actions, which are “complex” because they involve the interference of a number of principles and values This consideration has a first elementary consequence, i.e the fact that criteria, standards or norms elaborated for evaluating the conformity of an action with a given particular value cannot be extrapolated to the evaluation of its conformity with a different particular value In the case of science and ethics, this means that moral criteria could not interfere with the internal judgments concerning what has a scientific value, and with the criteria for assessing the validity of scientific results Symmetrically, moral evaluations have to be based upon ethical criteria of judgment, and are, as such, independent of any interference coming from scientific considerations This is the correct meaning of the reciprocal “autonomy” discussed earlier A second consequence is that ethics, owing to its generality (which entitles it to regulate all kinds of human actions), has to view the most satisfactory fulfilment of all the human values that may be involved in a certain action This means, in our case, that it is a real ethical commitment to grant to science the maximum of freedom compatible with the respect due to the other values involved Hence, the freedom of science is part of the ethical consideration of science We have thus recognized that the legitimacy of explicitly establishing norms regulating scientific activity cannot be denied After all, we are already accustomed to the existence of norms regulating pure and applied research from the point of view of security or of secrecy, and one does _