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Anonymous
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Above, I deliberately quote you out of context to draw your attention to something of an (I hope!) unconscious bias I feel I detect in what you posted. I don't intend this as any sort of attack, but I think it does illustrate what I meant about society's anti-intellectual bias. (For example: why say "Scientists are not especially skilled in ethical reasoning" when you could have said "Scientists are no more or less likely to be skilled in ethical reasoning than anyone else"? I feel certain it's the result of social conditioning, and that's why I feel compelled to question it.)tomsk said:
Basically, reading the whole of your post it comes across to me that while intellectually you accept the validity of scientists taking part in ethical and moral debates on an equal basis, emotionally you are nonetheless biased towards giving their arguments less weight, and unconsciously you are seeking to rationalize that bias by painting scientists as first of all arrogant and then less qualified to take part in the debate to the same degree as, by implication, the average man in the street. (You claim to doubt the contribution to any serious debate by those who approach it from the standpoint of revelationary religion, so other than the man in the street -and his representative, the politician- who is left? Philosophers? Pfui.)
Agreed, many scientists do come across as arrogant and patronizing when they take part in a debate. But so do many of those whose role in such a debate you would not question, consciously or unconsciously. Furthermore your assertion that scientists "are not especially skilled in ethical reasoning" begs the question: how do you know? I haven't seen enough public debate between scientists and non-scientists on any ethical questions to be able to form any sort of generalized view as to their gifts in that area. That's one of the things that bugs me about the debate in the first place! (As for the Horizon segment you cite, it doesn't strike me as evidence one way or the other: I personally gave up expecting the producers of that particular 'pop science' strand to do justice to any of the topics they tackle sometime in the late '80s.)
Finally, I'd draw your attention to the following statement you made:
A broad statement that essentially encapsulates your reservations about scientists' approach to ethical questions. But how do you reconcile that position with the fact that scientists have repeatedly been the ones blowing the whistles on unethical research, been the ones most vocally opposing the unethical applications of research and being the ones who bring the ethical questions to the debating table in the first place (when they've been allowed to)?
(To illustrate what I mean consider the handy example of the atomic bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often cited as an example of how badly science can serve us when ethicists and moral philosophers don't keep an eye on them. OK, so hands up everyone who didn't know that the Manhattan Project scientists petitioned the US Govt. to refrain from using the bombs against populated targets? Or that the suggestion that a desert test should be witnessed by invited Japanese observers instead was dismissed out of hand by the politicians and the military brass as 'impractical'?)