Science and Values : On values and credibility in science and scholarship

Abstract

Science is not only a particular kind of knowledge formation defined by theories, methods and special criteria of rationality to which theories and methods are subjected, and an institution, that is the social form in which science is realised as a particular kind of knowledge formation, but it also has a moral form. With regard to this moral form, science is not only methodically enlightened rationality, or a means to differentiate and stabilise the social organization of consumption and the satisfaction of needs, but is also an idea that relates to the second nature of man, that is, it is his epistemic or rational nature, or, better still, his form of life. This is shown by the fact that falsehood and deceit also have their place in science. With respect to these kinds of ethical problems, the ethics of science or the ethics in science has to deal with principles governing the relation between research and its application, with principles of the internal ethical essence of research, and with principles which constitute an ethos in science and its institutions, nowadays often expressed in so-called codes of conduct. That an ethos in science is often not observed is the reason why the attention of science as an institution towards the observance of the scientist’s ethos should be more strongly enforced in the future, also in order to overcome a certain crisis of confidence both with and within the sciences.