Bentley Glass - Science and Ethical Values

The three essays gathered here represent a natural extension of ideas expressed in a more preliminary form in the first and last of the three essays contained in an earlier book, Science and Liberal Education, which like the present volume was stimulated by an endowed series of lectures at one of our great American universities. I am deeply indebted to the University of North Carolina for the opportunity to pursue my thoughts about the relations of science to social and moral ideas more fully, in the form of these John Calvin McNair Lectures.

In the first of these three lectures I have picked up the thread of thought developed in my earlier essay on Darwinian Evolution and Human Values. Without too much repetition, I hope, I have tried here to show that ethical values do grow out of the biological nature of man and his evolution. These values are relative. The values at one level of biological organization, such as that of the gene or cell, may stand in conflict with the values at the level of the individual, just as the values at the level of the individual may conflict, and often do, with those that inhere at the level of the human population or living community of species. Resolution of these conflicts of ethical values is one of the gravest human problems. Sin follows the knowledge of good and evil. Innocence is largely compounded of ignorance of consequences. As mans knowledge of consequences grows he is ineluctably faced with problems of choice between the values of lower levels of living organization and those of higher levels, between the values for today and those for tomorrow, between the values for the local group and those for the wider, all-encompassing community of life.

The essay Human Heredity and the Ethics of Tomorrow treats more fully the ethical problems and quandaries earlier introduced in the essay entitled Genetics in the Service of Man. Here I have endeavored to illustrate more specifically, within the field of my own scientific specialty, the nature of the stupendous ethical problems that will face mankind in the very near future, as man begins to apply his knowledge to the control of his own reproduction and future evolution.

Finally, I have reversed the line of thought and have tried to demonstrate that science itself is a subjective, social, human enterprise completely dependent upon its own ethical foundations. In these days when the natural sciences are assuming so great a role in the development and alteration of our civilization, when every man must modify his ways of life decade by decade to accommodate himself to the changes wrought by scientific technology in human culture, far too little thought is given to the ethical basis of our science. To be sure, I am not the first to write about this subject, and perhaps I have added very little to what has been said by others. Nevertheless, I find that on our university and college campuses the cleavage between our two cultures exists not so much because scientists are little interested in the arts or because humanists are little conversant with the great scientific concepts of the twentieth century, as because the scientist is too blithely confident that more and more scientific knowledge will be good for man irrespective of its applications and too hopefully confident that others can cope with the ethical problems he creates, while the humanist fears the aggrandizement of science in our society and fails to appreciate the nature of the ethical problems that science generates, or perhaps even to recognize their existence.

A sound philosophy of human life must bring these streams of thought together, to interact fruitfully and compassionately. Today, the philosophy of science means mostly the structure of science and its logic; the history of science is a scholarly pursuit little related to the study of social change. Both the philosophy and the history of science are needed as a part of the incorporation of science into our humanistic tradition and learning. Yet they are not enough. Even the study of the sociological relations of science, today in so rudimentary a state of infancy, will not be enough. Besides these, we need a fuller, more frequent consideration of the relations of science to ethics, to the full range of human values. To the future development of such a humanistic study this small book is dedicated.

BENTLEY GLASS

Johns Hopkins University

June 16, 1965