Biological Ethics

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II. Ethics of scientific knowledge

Introduction: Science and ethics

A. Ruiz Retegui

The experimental sciences are of very recent origin, short-lived compared to the age of mankind. Their birth was relatively sudden and they have made impressive progress: they have advanced cumulatively and very quickly. But it is above all worth noting the immense power that this knowledge has had and continues to have in shaping man's life. The method of these sciences has so permeated the present-day mentality that one can rigorously speak of a scientific-technological civilisation.

It is an obvious fact that long before there were experimental scientists, people had thought a lot, they asked themselves a wide range of questions, from those that were closest to everyday life to the most fundamental questions. Logically, today we are still interested in the intellectual achievements of the past insofar as they are answers to questions that continue to challenge us today; insofar as we are also asking them ourselves today. That is why, in principle, we are not particularly interested in the answers that various peoples gave to very material and immediate questions - and if we are, it is merely historiographical - but we are very interested in the answers to perennial questions: those that accompany man, every man; and we continue to read "the classics", those who faced them with rigour, conscientiously, whatever their era.

The classical questions are questions of "substance": the questions about the meaning of life, love, happiness, the question of whether good and evil are relative, and so on. That is why they are questions that always accompany man; because, as Aristotle says at the beginning of the first of his books on metaphysics, "all men naturally have a desire to know".

The ultimate questions, or questions about the basic issues of human life, also include questions about more immediate issues. Man is not only called and capable of purely contemplative knowledge, but also of action, and therefore also needs knowledge for internship. The human being is not a being coined in advance by instincts: he is not given a ready-made life, he has to make it for himself and at the same time his activity has transcendence for his own being. Man has within himself desires and impulses that are sometimes in conflict and sometimes also in conflict with those of other men. Even to do what he desires, he must first know what he desires; he must seek and find the rule, the criterion for his own behaviour. Thus, the knowledge for internship ranges from how to cultivate the land, or make his house, or mitigate pain, to a knowledge about the rightness of his actions.

Experimental sciences are intimately linked to the desire to know that Aristotle spoke of, but it is not identified with it; it is a knowledge that is in the realm of the means. It seeks a knowledge on how phenomena are produced and aims to find laws of how they work. As experimental sciences, they cannot say anything about the fundamental questions - which is the task of Philosophy-. It is science which says that by inhaling such and such a compound, which follows such and such a precise process in the organism, the heart stops; but it is a knowledge which cannot and does not claim to say anything about the goodness or badness of this phenomenon: it cannot pronounce itself on the ends. The ethics of the scientific knowledge requires the recognition of this limit of the experimental sciences.

In the following chapters we will consider these questions in more detail: man's quest for truth, the meaning of science in relation to human life, and the ethics of scientific knowledge .