Science And Human Values

My theme is that the values which we accept today as permanent and often as self-evident have grown out of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. The arts and the sciences have changed the values of the Middle Ages; and this change has been an enrichment, moving towards what makes us more deeply human.

The concepts of value are profound and difficult exactly because they do two things at once; they join men into societies, and yet they preserve for them a freedom which makes them single men. The society which I will examine is that formed by scientists themselves; it is the body of scientists.

It may seem strange to call this a society and yet it is an obvious choice; for having said so much about the working of science, I should be shirking all our unspoken questions if I did not ask how scientists work together. The dizzy progress of science, theoretical and practical, has depended on the existence of a fellowship of scientists which is free, uninhibited and communicative. It is not an upstart society, for it derives its traditions, both of scholarship and of service, from roots which reach through the Renaissance into the monastic communities and the first universities. The men and women who practice the sciences make a company of scholars which has been more lasting than any modern state, yet which has changed and evolved as no church has.

The values of science derive neither from the virtues of its members, nor from the finger-wagging codes of conduct by which every profession reminds itself to be good. They have grown out of the practice of science, because they are the inescapable conditions for its practice.

Science is the creation of concepts and their exploration in the facts. It has no other test of the concept than its empirical truth to fact. Truth is the drive at the centre of science; it must have the habit of truth, not as a dogma but as a process. Consider then, step by step, what kind of society scientists have been compelled to form in this single pursuit. If truth is to be found, not given, and if therefore it is to be tested in action, what other conditions (and with them, what other values) grow of themselves from this?

First, of course, comes independence, in observation and thence in thought. I once told an audience of school children that the world would never change if they did not contradict their elders. I was chagrined to find next morning that this axiom outraged their parents. Yet it is the basis of the scientific method. A man must see, do and think things for himself, in the face of those who are sure that they have already been over all that ground. In science, there is no substitute for independence.

It has been a by-product of this that, by degrees, men have come to give a value to the new and the bold in all their work. It was not always so. European thought and art before the Renaissance were happy in the faith that there is nothing new under the sun. John Dryden in the seventeenth century, and Jonathan Swift as it turned into the eighteenth, were still fighting Battles of the Books to prove that no modern work could hope to rival the classics. They were not overpowered by argument or example (not even by their own examples), but by the mounting scientific tradition among their friends in the new Royal Society. Today we find it as natural to prize originality in a child's drawing and an arrangement of flowers as in an invention. Science has bred the love of originality as a mark of independence.

Independence, originality, and therefore dissent: these words show the progress, they stamp the character of our civilization as once they did that of Athens in flower. From Luther in 1517 to Spinoza grinding lenses, from Huguenot weavers and Quaker iron-masters to the Puritans founding Harvard, and from Newton's heresies to the calculated universe of Eddington, the profound movements of history have been begun by unconforming men.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man. For dissent is also native in any society which is still growing. Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Dissent is not itself an end; it is the surface mark of a deeper value. Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. And as originality and independence are private needs for the existence of a science, so dissent and freedom are its public needs. No one can be a scientist, even in private, if he does not have independence of observation and of thought. But if in addition science is to become effective as a public practice, it must go further; it must protect independence. The safeguards which it must offer are patent: free inquiry, free thought, free speech, tolerance. These values are so familiar to us, yawning our way through political perorations, that they seem self-evident. But they are self-evident, that is, they are logical needs, only where men are committed to explore the truth: in a scientific society. These freedoms of tolerance have never been notable in a dogmatic society, even when the dogma was Christian. They have been granted only when scientific thought flourished once before, in the youth of Greece.

I have been developing an ethic for science which derives directly from its own activity. It might have seemed at the outset that this study could lead only to a set of technical rules: to elementary rules for using test tubes or sophisticated rules for inductive reasoning. But the inquiry turns out quite otherwise. There are, oddly, no technical rules for success in science. There are no rules even for using test tubes which the brilliant experimenter does not flout; and alas, there are no rules at all for making successful general inductions. This is not where the study of scientific practice leads us. Instead, the conditions for the practice of science are found to be of another and an unexpected kind. Independence and originality, dissent and freedom and tolerance: such are the first needs of science; and these are the values which, of itself, it demands and forms.

The society of scientists must be a democracy. It can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect, between independence from the views of others and tolerance for them. The crux of the ethical problem is to fuse these, the private and the public needs. Tolerance alone is not enough; this is why the bland, kindly civilizations of the East, where to contradict is a personal affront, developed no strong science. And independence is not enough either: the sad history of genetics, still torn today by the quarrels of sixty years ago, shows that. Every scientist has to learn the hard lesson, to respect the views of the next man - even when the next man is tactless enough to express them.

Tolerance among scientists cannot be based on indifference; it must be based on respect. Respect as a personal value implies, in any society, the public acknowledgements of justice and of due honour. These are values which to the layman seem most remote from any abstract study. Justice, honour, the respect of man for man: What, he asks, have these human values to do with science? The question is a foolish survival of those nineteenth-century quarrels which always came back to equate ethics with the Book of Genesis. If critics in the past had ever looked practically to see how a science develops, they would not have asked such a question. Science confronts the work of one man with that of another and grafts each on each; and it cannot survive without justice and honour and respect between man and man. Only by these means can science pursue its steadfast object, to explore truth. If these values did not exist, then the society of scientists would have to invent them to make the practice of science possible. In societies where these values did not exist, science has had to create them.

Science is not a mechanism but a human progress. To the layman who is dominated by the fallacy of the comic strips, that science would all be done best by machines, all this is puzzling. Buthuman search and research is a learning by steps of which none is final, and the mistakes of one generation are rungs in the ladder, no less than their correction by the next. This is why the values of science turn out to be recognisably the human values: because scientists must be men, must be fallible, and yet as men must be willing and as a society must be organised to correct their errors. William Blake said that 'to be an Error and to be Cast out is apart of God's design.' It is certainly part of the design of science. (J. Bronowski: Science and Human Values, Julian Messner).