Science Morality Research Articles

Learning Right from Wrong: A Cross-national Analysis of Education, National Scientific Investment, and the Morality of Science

Opposition to and skepticism of science have important social consequences, as highlighted by contemporary debates about vaccines and climate change. Recent studies suggest that opposition to science is rooted in moral concerns and reflects a belief that science breaks down traditional conceptions of right and wrong. This article turns attention to the education system and to national contexts to examine how people see science as a moral threat. We analyze data from the World Values Survey using multilevel regression models and find that individuals with higher levels of education are less concerned about the effects of science on morality. Yet, education differences in moral concern about science are more than twice as large in countries with the highest levels of scientific investment compared to those with the lowest. We conclude that although the link between education and the moral consequences of science is not limited to specific countries, its intensity varies across national contexts. We discuss these findings in light of recent scholarship on political and religious opposition to science, noting the importance of understanding publics’ views of the moral consequences of science.

Наука і мистецтво про моральну відповідальність за майбутнє людства

The article is devoted to the actual problem of the probable future of our civilization and the moral responsibility of mankind for it. In the twentieth century, humanity was actually faced with the threat of man-made destruction of life on the planet. The tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with great severity raised the question not only about the morality of science, but also the personal responsibility of the scientist for his discoveries. In particular, in 1955, the Einstein-Russell Manifesto was signed, which initiated the widely known Pahous Movement for Peace and Disarmament. Art has responded to the nuclear threat. In 1950, R. Bradbury's story "There Will Be a Graceful Rain" was published. One of the first to address the subject of doomsday was American filmmakers: R. Weiss («The Day the Earth Stalle», 1951), S. Kramer («On the Shore», 1959), S. Kubrick («Doctor Stranzhla», 1964), S. Lumet («Security System», 1964). The idea of moral responsibility of each person for his future was raised on the Soviet screen in the films: «The Escape of Mr. McKinley» (1975, M. Schweitzer), «Sacrifice» (1986, A. Tarkovsky), «Letters of the Dead Man» (1986, K. Lopushansky), «Visitor to the Museum» (1989, K. Lopushansky). It was in the 1970s and 1980s that they became a painful awareness of the insecurity and fragility of human life. It has become clear that nuclear energy can be not only a policy or an economy, but above all a tool of self-destruction. It has been scientifically justified that the greatest threat to humanity lies not where it was not expected. Nuclear war is not only the mass destruction of people, total destruction, radiation, infectious diseases, etc. The main danger is the climate change of the planet, changes in the biosphere (the effect of nuclear winter), which humanity will not be able to survive. marked by a painful awareness of the insecurity and fragility of human life. But today, the biosphere is threatened not only by human waste, environmental pollution, but also by the gradual destruction of the natural environment, the frantic depletion of natural resources, etc. The main thing that threatens our civilization is moral irresponsibility to posterity. What has to happen for humanity to realize the danger of indifference? Personal responsibility for the future of everyone and everyone for the future of everyone is the main principle of survival. The eminent philosopher M. Berdyaev wrote: «The end of the world depends on man, and he will be one way or another, depending on the actions of man... The greatest religious and moral truth to which a man must grow is that he cannot be saved alone. My salvation also involves the salvation of others, my loved ones, the salvation of the whole world, the transformation of the world».

Policy Brief

Asian Bioethics Conference (ABC20) was held on 22-25 Nov. 2019 at DGHS (Directorate General of Health Services) auditorium, Mohakhali and NEC (National Election Commission) Auditorium, Agargoan, Dhaka. Conference was organized by Bangladesh Bioethics Society (BBS) in cooperation of DGHS, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare; Social Science Research Council Bangladesh, Ministry of Planning; Bangladesh Medical Research Council, Mohakhali Dhaka; Asian Bioethics Association (ABA) and Eubios Ethics Institute, Thailand, New Zealand’s and Japan.
 Mr MA Mannan MP, Honorable Planning Minister, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh was the Chief Guest. 
 Dr. Md. Murad Hassan MP, Honorable State Minister, Ministry of Information, Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh was present as Special Guest.
 Md. Nurul Amin, Secretary, Planning Division, Ministry of Planning and Dr Iqbal Kabir, Director, Planning, Monitoring, & Research and Coordinator, DGHS were also present as Special Guests.
 Bioethics promotes strong ethical values, practice of ethics and morality in Science, Social Science, Commerce and Arts.
 The conference brought together scholars and policy makers from different disciplines from all around the world to discuss and deliberate the latest issues of bioethics in biomedicine, biotechnology, science, social science, education and research.
 Around 300 participants from different universities and government officials including 40 foreign delegates from Asia & Pacific and beyond were present at the conference.

A New Frontier in Gambling Policy: Internet Wagering as Morality Policy

The 2006 enactment of a measure that essentially prohibited online wagering represented the U.S. federal government's first major foray into gambling policy in decades. Bringing the theoretical leverage of political science's morality policy literature to bear on this issue, this article draws extensively upon transcribed debate from the Congressional Record to investigate the language used by congressional opponents of online gambling. The results indicate that they deployed moral (“online wagering poses a special threat to youth”), mixed (“online wagering has negative effects for families, communities, and society”), and instrumental (“legislation is needed to modernize the law and empower the states”) arguments. The results improve our understanding of the factors that shape federal online gambling policy, and offer theoretical implications for our understanding of morality policy as a category of public policy.

Correction: Does “Science” Make You Moral? The Effects of Priming Science on Moral Judgments and Behavior

The authors would like to make corrections on some of the information reported in the article and provide further clarifications on the analyses carried out, as below: The N's reported in the main text are correct and the N's reported in the abstract should be updated to reflect those in the main text. In our studies we never forced participants to answer every question. Thus, some participants choose, either purposefully or inadvertently, to not answer all the questions asked. SPSS, the software we used for data analysis, does listwise deletion of any such cases of missing data. In Study 2, the values reported after the means are the standard errors of the estimated marginal means, and not the standard deviations of the raw data. This was an inconsistency in reporting, and the SDs of the raw data are 28.02 and 7.69 for the control and experimental conditions, respectively. An examination of the raw data shows that in the control condition, two participants evaluated the date rape act as very low on the immorality scale (scores of 10 and 40 out of 100), which explains the larger SDs in the control condition relative to the experimental. The df reported is the corrected total degrees of freedom rather than the df error. In Study 3, the denominator for the df's in the F statistic should be 30, and the means should be: M = 2.86, SD = 1.40 for the control vs. M = 4.07, SD = 1.47 for the experimental conditions. The previously reported means were the estimated marginal means when gender is included in the model; however, since gender did not significantly impact the dependent variable of interest, the estimated marginal means should have been replaced with the raw means, indicated above. In Study 4, the means/SDs should be corrected as follows: M = 3.04 (SD = 1.11) for the control and M = 2.24, SD = 1.43 for the experimental. For the gender effects, the results should read: there was a main effect of gender, F(1, 39) = 4.27, p = .045. Women allocated more money to themselves (M = 2.96, SD = 1.20) than men did (M = 2.27, SD = 1.28); no gender by condition interaction emerged, F(1, 39) = 2.20, p = .14. The previous gender results were the results of an analysis used in the original submission when a third condition was present; however, we dropped the originally included third condition following the recommendation received by a reviewer. The raw data and syntax for the different studies are available via this Correction. Science Morality Study 1 Data: http://www.plosone.org/corrections/pone.0057989.001.cn.sav Science Morality Study 2 Data: http://www.plosone.org/corrections/pone.0057989.002.cn.sav Science Morality Study 3 Data: http://www.plosone.org/corrections/pone.0057989.003.cn.sav Science Morality Study 4 Data: http://www.plosone.org/corrections/pone.0057989.004.cn.sav Science Morality Study 1 Syntax: http://www.plosone.org/corrections/pone.0057989.005.cn.sps Science Morality Study 2 Syntax: http://www.plosone.org/corrections/pone.0057989.006.cn.sps Science Morality Study 3 Syntax: http://www.plosone.org/corrections/pone.0057989.007.cn.sps Science Morality Study 4 Syntax: http://www.plosone.org/corrections/pone.0057989.008.cn.sps

Aesthetics and Ethics in Engineering: Insights from Polanyi

Polanyi insisted that scientific knowledge was intensely personal in nature, though held with universal intent. His insights regarding the personal values of beauty and morality in science are first enunciated. These are then explored for their relevance to engineering. It is shown that the practice of engineering is also governed by aesthetics and ethics. For example, Polanyi's three spheres of morality in science--that of the individual scientist, the scientific community and the wider society--has parallel entities in engineering. The existence of shared values in engineering is also demonstrated, in aesthetics through an example that shows convergence of practitioner opinion to solutions that represent accepted models of aesthetics; and in ethics through the recognition that many professional engineering institutions hold that the safety of the public supersedes the interests of the client. Such professional consensus can be seen as justification for studying engineering aesthetics and ethics as inter-subjective disciplines.

Methods of Medical Treatment Within Australian and United Kingdom Patents Law

The accommodation of methods of medical treatment within Australian and United Kingdom ('UK') patents law has been controversial since the first patent applications in respect of such methods were filed in the early 20th century. For the last 30 years that controversy has been accepted as having a moral basis, the issue being whether the public interest in encouraging research and innovation in the medical arena through the provision of patent-related incentives for creators of new and useful therapeutic methods on the one hand is outweighed, on the other, by the various public policy objections to permitting the monopolisation of such methods. Those objections include fears that the monopolisation of medical methods would: (a)hinder medical research by restricting the free availability of knowledge; (b) be inconsistent with the teaching of medical students and practitioners; (c)expose medical practitioners and patients who use and accept the use of a patented method without a licence to liability for patent infringement; and (d)enable patentees to exact unreasonable payments for life-saving or potentially life-saving techniques. The controversy regarding the patentability of methods of medical treatment has not always been understood as an ethical one. Prior to 1971 the inherent patentability of methods of medical treatment was expressly regarded by both Australian and UK decision makers as turning on the essentially black letter law question of the nature of an 'invention', a question that only arose in those jurisdictions after the introduction of modern patents legislation. Reconception of the issue from 1971 in moral terms can be attributed to a number of possible causes, including the recovery by decision makers from the initial shock caused by the prospect of allowing patents for potentially life-saving treatment, and the general increase in community (and judicial) interest in the morality of science and its implications for patents law. However, it can also be viewed as a recognition by the judiciary of the questions that have always laid at the heart of the issue concerning methods of medical treatment and patents law namely, whether methods of medical treatment should be patentable and, as a precursor to that question, to what extent (if any) legal constructions of the term 'invention' and patent eligibility generally can legitimately and openly accommodate ethical and other public policy considerations. There is a great deal of literature concerning the specific public policy arguments for and against the patenting of methods of medical treatment, and it is not the purpose of this article to review such arguments nor to argue for their resolution along particular lines. Rather, the purpose of the article is to consider by historical analysis the relationship between decision makers' responses to medical method patents and their conceptions of inherent patentability generally. The thesis advanced in the course of such consideration can be summarised as follows. First, for the last 100 years much of the important jurisprudence relating to inherent patentability in the UK and Australia has derived from cases involving methods of medical treatment. Secondly, those cases are distinguished by the failure of decision makers to resolve convincingly or consistently: (a) the basis for the exclusion from patentability of methods of medical treatment; and (b) the extent (if any) to which legal constructions of inherent patentability can legitimately accommodate ethical and other (non-commercial) public policy considerations. And thirdly, this failure is largely responsible for the unduly restrictive legal principles that governed inherent patentability in Australia and the UK until 1959 and methods of medical treatment until the 1970s. It is also responsible for the ongoing uncertainty on the part of Australian decision makers concerning the relevance of morality and public policy generally to inherent patentability. Central to this thesis are the issues noted above concerning what an 'invention' is and whether patents law, in its various 20th century guises, permits decision makers to consider moral issues when determining a subject matter's prima facie eligibility for patent protection. At a time of increasing public and legal debate regarding both the ability of certain new technologies to be treated as inventions and the moral implications of such treatment, an historical account of the development of decision makers' responses to these issues has never been more important. That account serves, among other things, as a reminder of the potential consequences for law of dressing public policy decisions in black letter principle, or of otherwise assuming inherent (un)patentability without proper consideration of the foundations for that assumption.

The Morality of Science

Research Article| March 01 1971 The Morality of Science F. W. Smith,, Jr. F. W. Smith,, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The American Biology Teacher (1971) 33 (3): 177–178. https://doi.org/10.2307/4443401 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation F. W. Smith,; The Morality of Science. The American Biology Teacher 1 March 1971; 33 (3): 177–178. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/4443401 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe American Biology Teacher Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1971 The National Association of Biology Teachers Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The morality of science and the values of democracy

The morality of science and the values of democracy