Ethics in Science: The Unique Consequences of Chemistry
This article discusses the ethical issues unique to the science and practice of chemistry. These issues arise from chemistry’s position in the middle between the theoretical and the practical, a science concerned with molecules that are of the right size to directly affect human life. Many of the issues are raised by the central activity of chemistry––synthesis. Chemists make thousands of new substances each year. Many are beneficial, but others are threats. Since the development of the chemical industry in the nineteenth century, chemistry has contributed to the deterioration of the environment but has also helped to reduce pollution. Finally, we discuss the role of codes of ethics and whether the current codes of conduct for chemists are adequate for the challenges of today’s world.
Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World
Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein and other great physicists and biologists are household names, but the great chemists have recieved little recognition. Yet it could be argued that chemistry, more than andy other scientific discipline, has made the modern world possible, largely through products that we take for granted. The author Sharon Bertsch McGrayne tells the history of the chemical revolution through the lives of the men who created it. We don't recognize their names, but their legacy is all around us. Before Nicholas LeBlanc discovered the chemical process for making washing soda in the early 1800s, soap was a highly taxed luxury item, and now it's something we use many times a day without a second thought. Without chemical fertilizer there might have been worldwide starvation in the mid 1900s. Even something as simple as affordable dyes, which brought bright clothing to the masses and democratized fashion, is given full attention. This text looks at not only the upside of each pivotal discovery, but also the often devastating unforeseen effects they wrought on the environment and public health.
On the Need for a Scientific Ethic
The use that the scientist makes of his principles is well known. In the normal course of scientific investigation, a hypothesis which explains some physical phenomenon adequately in every particular, but which runs counter to, say, the laws of inertia, cannot be held without further experimentation. Such experimentation must continue until the irreconcilability of the hypothesis with the laws is resolved. In most cases the hypothesis will fail to submit to further tests, will be declared inadequate, and will give way to a new one. Occasionally, however, a hypothesis will continue to satisfy all demands made upon it. All predictions made in its terms will be confirmed. Satisfied that his hypothesis is sound, the scientist will now turn to a re-evaluation of his laws. He does not hesitate to do this. Assuming the existence in the situation of a novel factor not explicable in terms of the current theoretic superstructure of his science, he is prepared to reformulate his assumptions so as to include the new data. He does not stand on his principles as absolute and unchanging, for to do so would be to render his problem insoluble. To consider the laws of science as inherent in nature and as such true for all time and for all situations is to negate the function of science. Central in this procedure is recognition of the fact that the laws and principles which guide inquiry have grown, historically, from concrete situations; that they have developed out of the particular problems which have had to be solved in the continuing effort to gain reliable knowledge and, with it, increasing control of the environment. They are, in a sense, precedents. They are generalized ideas of successful solutions of past problems which it is wise to employ as guides in the analysis of similar problematic situations now occurring. The fault of traditional morality lies in its failure to see that ethical principles are of the same hjind as the laws and rules which guide scientists in other fields. Instead of treating their principles as the fruit of previous ethical activity ever ready to be tested and tested again in the moral situations of the present, traditional moralists arbitrarily set up a dualism, a dichotomy, and declare that although it is true enough that moral problems cannot be solved except in terms of the principles of ethics, the principles, in their turn, are in no way dependent upon the situations they are called upon to solve. In arriving at considered judgments by the use of moral principles as guides to conduct and in recognizing them as the springs of moral activity, as the causes of calculated and deliberate behavior, the moralist of this school admits the continuity of principle and problem. But he forces himself to travel down a one-way street. He fails to see that the principles themselves are arrived at by the use of the same method that gives him his solutions; he fails to see that continuity is a two-way, reciprocal and interacting affair. By thus cutting off his principles from the stream of everyday thinking and acting, he deprives them of foundation and of source. This arbitrary separation,