Is Chemical Research Ethically Neutral?
Chemical knowledge has always been mysterious and suspicious in western societies because it is knowledge of radical change. Early Jewish and Christian mythology, particularly the apocryphal Book of Enoch, associates chemical knowledge with the secret knowledge of primordial Creation that the Fallen Angels had once betrayed to humans.
Up to the eighteenth century, performing chemical changes was routinely accused of modifying divine Creation against God's will, and some people think so even today. On the other hand, the prospects of radical change have always fueled fantasies of changing the material world at will according to human needs or specific economic interests, from alchemy to the chemical industry and current visions of nanotechnology. Since thoughtless industrial chemical production has caused severe environmental problems, through pollution, accidents, and unsafe products, anything related to chemistry is publicly considered with suspicion. Many consider the archetypical mad scientist, the chemist Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's novel, emblematic of the modern academic-industrial endeavor of chemistry.It would be wrong to disregard the specific cultural embedding of chemistry from a philosophical point of view, because it has essentially shaped ethical views of chemistry. After all, ethics is a branch of philosophy, such that ethics of chemistry is a natural branch of philosophy of chemistry. From the fact that, for instance, mathematics is rather poor in ethical issues but rich in logical issues, it would be mistaken to conclude that the focus of all philosophy of science is on logic. Each discipline has its own variety of issues that call for philosophical treatment. Although this essay does not include an ethical analysis of chemistry for the sake of brevity (see Schummer 2001), it prepares such an analysis by some conceptual clarifications that are focused on the issue of whether chemical synthesis is ethically neutral or not (i.e., if it can be made subject to justified moral judgments).
At first it is useful to point out the distinction between the academic discipline of chemistry and the chemical industry, of which only the former concerns us here. The chemical industry, as any industry, is definitely not ethically neutral because it deliberately acts according to (non-epistemic) values, and its actions have direct positive and negative consequences for human beings. The important question is whether chemical research that synthesizes new chemical substances is ethically neutral. Strictly speaking, no scientific research is ethically neutral insofar as it produces knowledge about the world that could enable people to perform ethically relevant actions. Those can be either actions to prevent harm, such as when understanding the causes of stratospheric ozone depletion by chlorofluorocarbons enables one to take effective measures against the depletion; or actions to cause harm, such as when understanding the biochemical metabolism of human beings allows one to choose a more effective poison. On this general level, because scientific knowledge enables effective actions, scientists have a particular responsibility for the kind of knowledge they pursue. Apart from and above that, is there anything that makes the synthesis of new substances ethically relevant?
We are accustomed to making a distinction between science and technology, including technological research or engineering sciences. In this view, science describes the natural world and makes true discoveries of the world, whereas technology changes the world by producing artifacts and making useful inventions for change. In this view, technology is, unlike science, ethically relevant above the general level because, like industry, it deliberately acts according to values of usefulness and directs its actions accordingly. Because chemical synthesis meets that definition of technology, it would seem that chemical synthesis is essentially a technology rather than a science and therefore ethically relevant above the general level.
However, the distinction between science and technology includes two related problematic assumptions, which incidentally have their roots in the cultural background mentioned at the beginning of this section. First, it assumes that science cannot, by definition, be about understanding radical change, because that is the domain of technology. However, if the goal of science is describing and understanding nature, the assumption is equivalent to the thesis that there are no radical changes in nature so that there is no place for such a science. The underlying philosophical view has been known since antiquity as the opposite of process philosophy, and its Christian counterpart is the notion of nature as the perfect divine creation. As has been argued above, chemistry is all about understanding radical change, about transformations of substances into one another. If one acknowledges that there are radical changes in nature, understanding and discovering such changes is clearly a scientific endeavor. And because chemical synthesis is the best experimental way we have to study such radical change, it meets all requirements of scientific methods.
Secondly, the distinction between science and technology assumes that the world can clearly be divided up into natural entities and artifacts, which in the Christian (and Platonic) tradition is equivalent to the distinction between entities made by God in the primordial Creation and entities made by humans. In this view, science is about the natural world whereas technology is about producing artifacts from the resources of the natural world. However, pure substances isolated from natural resources are also artifacts because they always result from purification techniques, just as anything produced in an experimental setting counts as an artifact. Moreover, a substance that can be isolated from natural resources through purification can, as a rule, also be synthesized in the laboratory from different compounds, such that there is no scientific way to distinguish between natural and artificial substances, in contrast to artifacts in technologies which can usually be clearly recognized as artifacts.
Furthermore, if chemical changes are natural and if nature is essentially process-like, there is no reason to question that the outcomes of such changes are natural, regardless of whether the changes have been experimentally directed or not and whether the outcomes have been known before or not. In sum, the distinction rests on an archaic notion of nature, as something given and static without changeabilities, whereas all modern experimental sciences focus on the study of the dynamics of nature (Schummer 2003b).While we can therefore reject the idea that chemical synthesis per se is a kind of technology rather than science, that does not mean that chemical synthesis is always performed as science. It all depends on the research questions in each case. If the research is performed to study chemical changeabilities, it rather belongs to science. If the synthetic research aims at useful products, it would rather be counted as technological research. However, modern science, in chemistry as well as elsewhere, is a collaborative enterprise that is driven by a variety of motives and intentions that no philosopher is able to identify. One can pursue a specific scientific research question that is also important for a technological goal and integrated in a broader project. And one can pursue at the same time scientific and technological knowledge without much compromising, which some philosophers have recently discovered as the latest move towards “technoscience,” although that has been known in chemistry for centuries.
Finally, if we ignore all these complications and take chemical synthesis in the purest sense of science: is it apart from the general level ethically neutral because it is science rather than technology? The answer is no, and the main reason lies again in the fact that chemistry is about radical change. Synthetic chemistry does not only produce knowledge but also actively changes the world, which may affect anybody living in that world.
Assume that in the course of scientific studies on chemical reactivities a chemist has produced a new substance which happens to be extremely toxic, and which, by some means, leaves the laboratory and causes severe human poisoning or an environmental disaster.
We would rightly hold the chemist responsible for that harm, not only because of the lack of security measures, but also because the chemist was the original creator of the agent that caused the harm. In such a case, the chemist might insist that he had no intention to cause the harm, which would hardly excuse him because the lack of intention might just be negligence. Also, the argument that he could not foresee the toxic properties of his creation would not count much, because chemists know well that any new substance is unique and has infinitely many properties which, by all scientific standards, bear surprises, such that harmful effects are not unlikely. After all, that is expected from radical change unlike from gradual or marginal change. In sum, even if chemical synthesis is not technology but science, it is beyond the general level ethically relevant because it performs radical changes on the world.6.