Science Cannot Be Neutral

Our discussion in class yesterday covered a lot of ground. One topic that I found to be very interesting is the question of if morality has a place in science and if it can be separated from the desires and fears and human society. We can see in His Master's Voice that both the HMV project and the Manhattan project suffered from the difficulties of scientists being unable to remain completely neutral in matters that concern the whole of humanity. And how could they? They are, after all, part of humanity. Scientists are just humans who happen to work in a field that impacts the rest of human society in many cases. Expecting them to hold themselves to a higher level of morality than the rest of the population is simply unrealistic. As emily_f writes in her blog, "...science is very much a part of the social situation in which it is conducted and in order for science to be neutral or for humans to be free, we must throw off these constraints. Of course, how to throw off these constraints isn’t really addressed, nor is it even established that this is possible.... Science will always be colored by society." This means that scientists can neither be considered to be either completely moral or completely immoral...they are simply human.

Despite this fact, scientists are often expected to be "incorruptible" and "ideal," as Lem puts it. He writes that, "A politician may be a villain without ceasing to be a great politician, whereas a villainous genius--that is a contradiction in terms. Villainy cancels genius" (4). In the eyes of society, scientists are inherently good by the nature of their work; they couldn't possibly be as intelligent as they are and have some evil motive. However, history tells us this is not true. In emily_f's blog, she mentions the scientists who worked for the Nazis. Clearly, these individuals were not working with a sense of morality in mind; quite the opposite in fact.

So, in terms of the HMV project, the scientists cannot remove themselves from the human implications of the discovery and their work on it. The implications of the possibility of another intelligent species in the universe is not something that can be ignored, even if someone tries as hard as they can to be neutral. Even though it is questionable whether or not there is an alien species responsible for the transmission, even the tiniest possibility creates immense controversy that cannot be ignored by any member of humanity.