The Liability of Science to Ethical Appraisal

My discussions with professor Evandro Agazzi started more than a quarter of a century ago, in the second half of the eighties. Our first meeting took place at the VIII International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Moscow in 1987.

As is well known, the area of the ethical issues generated by the progress of science and technology is among the most important in the philosophical reflec­tions of Agazzi. I have been involved in discussions with him on these issues during all these years, we had a lot of meetings and debates in Moscow, Genoa, Lecce, other Italian cities as well as in different countries over the globe.

B. Yudin (*)

Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia e-mail: byudin@yandex.ru © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_21

The main ideas elaborated by Agazzi after that Intersectional Symposium in Moscow were presented in his subsequent publications, such as “Responsibility. The Genuine Ground for the Regulation of a Free Science” (Agazzi 1989), Moral Dimension of Science and Technology (Agazzi 1998, that was in fact the Russian translation of his book later appeared in English as Right, Wrong and Science), “How can the Problems of an Ethical Judgment on Science and Technology Be Correctly Approached?” (2003), Right, Wrong and Science (2004).

In particular, in Moscow’s presentation as well as in some of the subsequent publications, Agazzi was interested in these two main problems: “On which grounds can an ethical appraisal of science be built? In which directions and to which limits it can be carried out to remain meaningful?”.

He built his understanding of the interrelations between science and ethics on an elegantly elaborated concept of autonomy that has been applied to different spheres of human activity, including science. Agazzi stresses the historical nature and changeability of the phenomena that emerge in the modern age “in differ­ent sectors of the spiritual and practical life of man” (Agazzi 1988: 49). He men­tions some of such sectors: politics (its autonomy was vindicated by Machiavelli), science (by Galilei), economics (by British liberals), art (by Kant and the Romantics). All these authors stressed the specificity of the respecting domains, in the sense of the need to develop purely internal criteria to appraise the fulfillment of their restricted and specific goals. The novelty in delineation of these sectors after Renaissance consisted in “the fact that the borderlines were now meant to express clear-cut ‘separations’, rather than simple ‘distinctions’, and that the con­sequent ‘autonomy’ of the different fields has quickly turned into a search for a kind of ‘freedom’ or ‘liberation’” (Agazzi 1988: 50).

This transition from distinctions to separations, or from autonomy to free- dom—continues Agazzi—led to the rejection of any form of outer interference in the respective domains. This freedom had been expressed in three different forms (or stages): firstly, as independence in the criteria of judgment, i.e. the criteria can be legitimately borrowed only from the domain under consideration and not from somewhere outside it.

Secondly, freedom entails an independence in action. This means, according to Agazzi, that

the politician ‘as a politician’, the business man ‘as homo oeconomicus', the artist ‘as an artist’ - and we can also add the scientist ‘as a scientist’ - are legitimated in acting accord­ing to the pure criteria of their profession, at least to the extent that they are performing within this profession (Agazzi 1988: 50).

Evidently, the second requirement is stronger than the first; it deepens possibilities of autonomy for an actor.

Thirdly, freedom is expressed as rejection of controls over the exercise of autonomy that would be exerted by external agencies in order to protect, for instance, more general social goals and values which could be endangered by the realization of the goals and values specific for the domain under consideration.

I want to stress the high analytical mastery, so characteristic of Evandro Agazzi, which is clearly demonstrated in his scrutiny of autonomy. The next steps of his reasoning on these issues are related with the search for grounds that would allow limiting in some situations the autonomy of a domain. Generally speaking, these are situations in which the realization of freedom in one of the domains causes serious problems for other domains. Taking into account science, we can say, according to Agazzi, that historically the question of restricting its autonomy became meaningful when its developments and its applications turned out to have not only positive, but also negative consequences for humans and society.

So, science as a specific domain of modern society becomes liable to ethical restraints only in so far as some actions which are permissible according to its inner criteria of judgment become unacceptable according to some outer goals and values. It is here that the reasons for limitations and controls imposed from outside can (and even must) be sought for.

“Nowadays...—writes Agazzi—we are confronted with the outcomes of such a process of “liberation”, which has led to several intuitively unacceptable results: the autonomy of many single domains, if pushed to excess, brings them conflict with other domains” (Agazzi 1988: 50-51). So,

the delicate problem we now confront is that of effecting a critical revision of the said points [i.e. of the three constituents of the “autonomy” concept - B.T], without becoming involved in obscurantism, regressive involution, or negation of the positive aspects which are certainly contained in the claims of autonomy and freedom (Agazzi 1988: 51).

I am now going to discuss in more detail some aspects of the interrelations between autonomy of science and limitations imposed on its realization. From the ethical point of view the concept of autonomy is important in two different aspects. Firstly, autonomy—understood as the capability to act freely on the basis of one’s own considerations and decisions—is a prerequisite for the very possibil­ity to speak meaningfully about the ethical responsibility of a person or a social entity. But, secondly, the autonomy of a person or a social entity poses limits on the relevance and significance of any ethical appraisal made from outside. Both of these points are essential for Agazzi’s deliberations.

I think that the autonomy of a profession must not be understood as something just given by some authority: usually there exist external forces infringing on the profession’s autonomy, so that its maintenance demands from a profession various decisions and actions, sometimes even rather hard and far-reaching. On the other side, as stressed by Agazzi,

the autonomy of many single domains, if pushed to excess, brings them into serious con­flict with other domains. In particular, this is being recognized in the field of science: the needs of protecting the environment, of avoiding technological catastrophes and regulat­ing genetic manipulations (to remain within the most common examples) are producing a demand for the regulation of science and technology (Agazzi 1989: 2).

Now I want to stress the interdependence between the autonomy of an actor and the possibility to appraise his/her actions from an ethical point of view. Autonomy is a prerequisite for the moral amenability of an actor or agency. Indeed, any attempt of moral assessment of a non-autonomous, i.e. involuntary, forced act would be morally misdirected. That means, by the way, that the wider is the space of autonomous decisions and actions for acting agencies or individual actors (i.e., the space of freedom), the bigger is the burden of moral responsibility which is laid on their shoulders.

I want also to point out that the autonomy of a domain—I am going to dis­cuss here mainly science—can represent not just an instrumental value, but a value in itself as well. This is why the scientific community is usually very much con­cerned in maintaining and strengthening its autonomy. At the same time, for dif­ferent reasons, other domains rather often strive to limit the autonomy of science. I think, it would be possible and interesting to consider the whole history of mod­ern science—starting at least from Galilei or the Royal Society of London—as a history of the struggle for science autonomy. This means that the real degree of science autonomy at every moment of time can be understood as a measure of a compromise between the cohesion of the scientific community and its ability to defend its autonomy, on one hand, and the effectiveness of different external forces striving to breach the autonomy on the other hand. So, external interven­tions into the domain of science, even those which are directed to minimize nega­tive consequences of some scientific advances, lead to a lessening of the moral autonomy of science.

Along with such historical account of the emergence of the ethical agenda in contemporary science Agazzi, departing from his previously elaborated three- staged construction of autonomy, discusses also the logical grounds of these newly arising ethical concerns.

I have some reservations regarding the identification of an aim (or goal) with a value; it is unclear for me in which sense an aim “represents” a value. To my understanding, the discourse about “values” characterizes our preferences of some objects, acts, states, conditions etc. over others. This does not mean that our aims in every case are determined by these preferences. Our values can direct us in the choice of our goals, yet in general they belong to a more fundamental, more stable level in the structure of a personality or a domain, whereas the activity of setting and achieving goals takes place closer to the level of everyday practices. Sure, some aims or goals more immediately linked with the values of a domain under consideration; we can name them institutionalized aims (or goals). I think that when Agazzi equates aims with values he has in mind just these, institutionalized aims of a domain.^[CLXXVII]

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