Abstract
The ideology of scientism, the belief that the methods and insights of science are applicable to the entire sphere of human activity, aims to validate moral acts on scientific grounds. Indeed, this perspective sees scientific knowledge as the only kind of authentic knowledge. From this viewpoint, the only rational alternative would be an ethical nihilism under which everything is permitted, since the traditional theological grounding of ethics is seen as a morass of irrational superstitions belonging to a pre-scientific age.1 This perception is widespread, and underlies the broad popular appeal of scientism, despite its more or less general rejection by contemporary philosophers and the often-repeated exposure of its potentially dangerous political consequences as a rational basis for the totalitarian state.2 Thus acceptance of scientistic beliefs is usually the unstated but implicit ethical premise held by the opposing sides in current debates—”establishment” versus “science-for-the-people,” “progress” versus “ecology” and “zero-population-growth.”
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Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971).
Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds., Scientism and Values (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand Co., 1960).
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, 2 vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892–3).
C. H. Waddington, in his The Ethical Animal (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), finds that Spencer’s ethical “theories have been so completely discredited that at this time little further needs to be said about them” (p. 23). But Waddington then produces a casuistic variant of Spencer’s hard-core evolutionist ethics, namely, one that holds that although the notion of “good” cannot be simply identified with progress, a particular set of moral values can be judged to be good if it promotes “anagenesis,” or evolutionary improvement (p. 202).
Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966).
A (undoubtedly unintended) caricature of this approach can be found in Wolfgang Wickler, Die Biologie der Zehn Gebote (München: Piper Verlag, 1971).
Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1967).
Richard P. Michael, “Bisexuality and Ethics,” in Biology and Ethics, F. J. Ebling, ed. (London: Academic Press, 1969), pp. 67–72.
James F. Crow, “The Dilemma of Nearly Neutral Mutations: How Important Are They For Evolution and Human Welfare?” Journal of Heredity, 63 (1972) 306–16.
T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
Ernst Mayr, “Teleological and Teleonomic, a New Analysis,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (1974), 91–117.
Patrick Heelan, “Medical Praxis and Manifest Images of Man,” in Science, Ethics and Medicine, H. T. Engelhardt, Jr. and Daniel Callahan, eds. (Hastings-on-Hudson: Institute of Society, Ethics and Life Sciences, 1976), pp. 218–24.
C. Galpérine, ed., Biology and the Future of Man (Paris: The Universities of Paris, 1976), pp. 377–415.
Bronislaw Malinowski, “Anthropology,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th ed. (New York: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 1926), Vol. 29, pp. 131–40.
Christian Morgenstern, “The Impossible Fact,” in Gallows Songs and Other Poems, trans. Max Knight (München: Piper Verlag, 1972), p. 25.
Gunther S. Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age. A View of the End of Progress (Garden City, N.Y.: The Natural History Press, 1969), pp. 115–21.
Benoit Mandelbrot, Les objets fractals (Paris: Flammarion, 1975).
Gunther S. Stent, “Limits to the Scientific Understanding of Man,” Science 187 (1975), 1052–57.
Noam Chomsky, “The Formal Nature of Language,” in E. H. Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language (New York: John Wiley, 1967), pp. 397–442.
Noam Chomsky, “The Formal Nature of Language,” in E. H. Lenneberg, Language and Mind (New York: Har-court, Brace and World, 1968).
Konrad Lorenz, “Kant’s Doctrine of the a priori in the light of contemporary biology,” in General Systems, L. Bertalanffy and A. Rappaport, eds. (Ann Arbor: Soc. Gen. Systems Research, 1962).
Gunther S. Stent, “Cellular Communication,” Scientific American 227 (September 1972), 42–51.
A collection of recent examples of this genre can be found in Biology and Ethics, F. J. Ebling, ed. (London: Academic Press, 1969).
J. M. Gustafson, unpublished draft manuscript prepared for discussion at the Hastings Center.
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Stent, G.S. (1981). The Poverty of Scientism and the Promise of Structuralist Ethics. In: Callahan, D., Engelhardt, H.T. (eds) The Roots of Ethics. The Hastings Center Series in Ethics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3303-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3303-6_13
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