Science and Public Good: Max Weber’s Ethical Implications

ABSTRACT

The ethics of science becomes a significant part of science and technology studies since it pays attention not exclusively to the moral impact of society on scientists but to that of science on society as well. How can society benefit from scientific intellectuals apart from their ability to produce expert knowledge? Does and must science contribute to common good? The ethical impetus generated by Max Weber’s lecture ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ (Science as Vocation) helps bridge a gap between these two dimensions: a ‘profession’ as a feature of science’s social institute and ‘vocation’ as an existential propensity of a person. Hume’s guillotine and the Merton-Popper paradox are also attempts to elucidate and to sharpen the factual autonomy of profession and vocation pointed out by Weber in order to reconcile these two dimensions. I propose a project of the ethos of science assimilating some approaches in virtue epistemology in order to resolve the paradoxes.As a result, the special epistemological status of science is justified not as an internal and autonomous priority of knowledge but as science’s ability to generate and transmit cognitive goals, norms and ideals to society.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics of science
• profession and vocation
• special epistemic status of science
• science as public good

Acknowledgments

The research and the paper would not have been possible without the support of many people. I am highly grateful to Georg Theiner, Christiaan Reynolds and Alex Ruser, whose critical comments were abundantly helpful and offered invaluable assistance for improving the paper. Special thanks go also to all research group members, especially Alexander Antonovsky, Eugeni Maslanov, Alexander Nikiforov and Svetlana Shibarshina for sharing the literature and providing invaluable critical discussion. I would like to convey thanks to the Russian Science Foundation for granting the financial means and to RAS Institute of Philosophy and Lobachevsky University for providing laboratory facilities. I also wish to express love and gratitude to my dear family for understanding through the duration of the studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The research was performed at Russian Society for History and Philosophy of Science within the project supported by Russian Science Foundation [No. 19-18-00494] «The Mission of the Scientist in the Modern World; Science as Profession and Vocation».

Notes on contributors

Ilya T. Kasavin

Ilya T. Kasavin ‒ DSc in Philosophy, Professor, Correspondent Fellow of Russian Academy of Sciences, department head at RAS Institute of Philosophy; professor and chair at Lobachevsky University. He is currently the President of Russian Society for History and Philosophy of Science. His publications in English language include: Interactive Zones: On the Prehistory of the Scientific Laboratory, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2014, 84 (6); The Philosophy of Science: A Political Turn, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2015, 85 (6); Realism: A Challenge for Social Epistemologists. Social Epistemology, 2015, 1; The Formation of Social Technologies: Stages and Examples. Russian Studies in Philosophy, 2017, 55 (1); Towards a Social Philosophy of Science: Russian Prospects, Social Epistemology, 2017, 1; Gift versus Trade: On the Culture of Scientific Communication, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2019, 49 (6): 453–472.