Philosophy of Science Association

Science as Morality
Author(s): George Simpson
Source: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 1951), pp. 132-143
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science
Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/185659
Accessed: 19/09/2008 13:18

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press and Philosophy of Science Association are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy of Science.

http://www.jstor.org
 SCIENCE AS MORALITY
GEORGE SIMPSON

I
If, as may be generally agreed upon, the term science is to be taken to mean
verified knowledge, then it has three attributes: (1) the logical and methodologi-
cal; that is, how we arrive at verified knowledge; (2) the epistemic; that is, the
bodies of verified knowledge that have been arrived at; and (3) the sociological;
that is, the organization of men by means of which the bodies of knowledge have
been arrived at and the method prosecuted.
It is the aim of this essay to attempt to establish that the delineaments of
the good society are implicit in the sociological attribute of science as organ-
ized human activity.
II
To discover the kind of society and the structure of social relations consonant
with truth, the scientist has only to look to the pattern of social relationships
necessary to the prosecution of science itself. Scientific endeavors are themselves
a system of social relationships, and this system is itself the ideal towards which
the great society would aim if it too were scientific. (Of course, scientists them-
selves often violate this ideal, but their actions are then not derivative from sci-
entific attitudes.) Ideally the society of science would seek to transform itself
from a microcosmos in a welter of pluralized worlds into a macrocosmos from
which all lesser worlds would draw their moral sustenance.
What is the social structure of science that stipulates a system of social rela-
tionships fit for a reasonable society? First and foremost, science is a cooperative
undertaking. It requires the labors of many different men working in many
different places or together in pursuit of the same good. Second, it demands free-
dom of expression, of the press, of assembly, so that its findings may be dis-
seminated everywhere. Third, it asks for equality of opportunity for all men
since it must tap intelligence wherever it is found, and in addition, science itself
has shown that intelligence is spread throughout the population. Fourth, science
is a collective enterprise requiring the efforts of many men to discover the truth;
each specialty is in itself collective and part of the larger collectivity which is
the individual science, and each individual science is part of the larger collec-
tivity which is science as a whole. Fifth, science views political power as an
attribute of truth, not truth as an attribute of political power. Sixth, science
knows no territorial boundaries and is consequently international in its organi-
zation and outlook.

III
Cooperation.Cooperation betokens joint action and mutual aid. The advance-
ment of science with its intricate problems and techniques has made it virtually
132
 SCIENCE AS MORALITY 133

impossible for any single individual to make any discovery without the aid of
others, whether his own laboratory co-workers or others outside. Science is pre-
eminently a social relationship. Only in its rudimentary stages can such dis-
coveries as that of the vulcanizing process which resulted in rubber manufacture
happen to an individual like Charles Goodyear. Romantically, we may look back
with nostalgia upon the days of the great individual inventors; but this romanti-
cism may itself be a result of a propagandizing of individual enterprise long after
its social conditions have vanished. No discoveries are being made today by
lonely, isolated individuals fighting against poverty and adversity-except per-
haps in the social sciences.
In this joint action there arises a respect for others which is reciprocal. Even
though status-distinctions necessarily arise in scientific work-distinctions in
terms of experience and ability, age-groupings, apprenticeship and training-
these distinctions are part of the joint task. Where individuals participate to the
limit of their abilities in achieving ends they have agreed upon professionally,
the fruits of the labors give them sufficient compensations for the status-distinc-
tions necessitated by the work. These distinctions are based upon function, not
upon extraneous considerations. Where distinctions otherwise based enter into
scientific work-such as nepotism and social nepotism which are so common
today throughout our culture-to that extent the morality of science is itself
being violated. Ability, not status-attributes derived elsewhere, are the test of
scientific worth. The celebration of the work of a Negro scientist such as George
Washington Carver is less a tribute to science than a commentary upon a society
which is surprised that a Negro with all the discrimination practiced against
him can make contributions to science.
Although science does not deprive individuals of ambition and the desire for
prestige-both goods when used to advance the truth-it places ambition and
the desire for prestige within the bounds of mutuality. To be sure, when science
becomes subjected to large-scale administration there appears that bureaucratic
tendency to place strictures upon the hired men. But this is a commentary on
the social structures which interfere with the society of free men. Modern ad-
ministration can make the morality of science difficult of attainment in various
areas of living, but it can offer no norms or standards for such impediments that
can be drawn from science itself. Here convention triumphs over cooperation,
but not in the name of truth.
IV
The Bill of Rights for Science. The basic freedoms which are considered the
core of the democratic way of life are not their own excuses for being. They
came into political urgency when man found need for sloughing off interferences
with that free inquiry which made the discovery of truth possible. These basic
freedoms are guarantors of science; and science in its turn discloses them as the
political side of the shield of reason. The degree to which these freedoms are put
into social practice is one accurate index of the degree to which reason itself, and
the findings of science, are being put into political practice. Where the findings
134 GEORGE SIMPSON

of science are inextricably tied to a technology and economy which restricts the
flowering of freedom in social relations, there the supremacy of technique in
natural and physical science is made much of.
For science free speech does not mean the defending to the death, with Vol-
taire, of every man's right to say what he pleases after we have accumulated
knowledge on a given issue. It does, however, open up opportunities for men
with training to offer hypotheses for pushing the boundaries of our knowledge
further.
The pooling of knowledge is the foundation-stone of the freedom of assembly.
And the pooling of knowledge is particularly an aspect of the scientific way of
life. No greater travesty on freedom of assembly can be found than that assem-
blage of presumably free men which is administered in such a way as to achieve
a pooling of the avoidance of knowledge. Indeed, the functions of many of our
political instruments today achieve just that. It is power and the fear of science
which lead men to refuse free assembly to other groups. And instances can be
multiplied on the use of presumably free groups where knowledge is not per-
mitted an airing through tactics of parliamentarianism, log-rolling and packing
meetings. The resentment which men feel in the presence of such manipulations
is the distaste for the supplanting of truth.
It was Jefferson's concern that when the free flow of ideas was interfered with
by large-scale organization, the growth of cities, and the decline of a free yeo-
manry, freedom of assembly itself became meaningless and democracy, which
he rightly saw as the life of reason in society, was endangered. This same con-
cern is found in Charles H. Cooley, John Dewey, and others, who emphasize
the pervasive significance of primary groups and face-to-face relationships. The
paradox is that the same instrument, which has made large-scale organization
in farm, factory, and city, possible-namely, science applied to economic tech-
nology-creates social conditions which tend to render its morality inactive.
Science is trained, organized discussion; but modern mass-society makes such
discussion almost impossible. The training necessary for literate discussion of
modern problems is not slight, and the organization of groups that can take
action accordingly has yet to be accomplished.
Ironically, the totalitarian party-congresses of Nuremberg are the end-results
of a mass-society made possible by the application of the findings of natural and
physical science. Freedom of assembly has turned into its opposite. The central-
ized control over modern means of communication-the press, radio, even the
school-causes men to look with suspicion upon that real freedom of assembly.
In fact, only revolutionists are supposed to meet in small groups to discuss
problems of the day. And modern man has come to look with disfavor on any
topic, problem, or issue which cannot command an audience running into the
hundreds, if not the thousands. The amplified loudspeaker comes to take the
place of the voice of reason; the mass takes over the individual; technique is mis-
taken for science; and administration supplants democratic participation. Sci-
ence which can advance only in and through the actions of individuals banded
together for cooperative enterprise in behalf of truth is thus made a mockery of
 SCIENCE AS MORALITY 135

as a morality. And those who see only the manifestations of the facade with im-
punity proclaim the neutrality of science in the face of the problems which make
unreason king.
Freedom of the press is guaranteed under democracy so that truth may prevail
despite political privilege, economic interest or prejudice and superstition. When
men have found the way to discover truth, they ask for open and easy access to
it. Certainly freedom of the press is not intended as a means to foster unreason.
And yet the editorializing of news, choice of news-items, concentration of owner-
ship of the press with large syndicates operating over large areas of territory
and population, have not achieved this ideal of science. All the trappings of
science are used to demonstrate the press' partiality to it, such as science col-
umns, public-opinion polls, and the like; but these cannot compensate for news-
distortion, tabloid intellectual pornography, and intellectual self-aggrandize-
ment. At the masthead of the editorial pages of some newspapers today there
stands some ingenious homily which is supposed to make amends for any sins
against reason that may occur in daily print. "Let the giver of light lead the
way"; "let the people know the truth" and the like. Subservience to the organ-
ized voice of unreason itself becomes the attribute of democratic society. A calm
mass-hysteria betokens dignified obeisance to what is called truth. And all is
carried on in the name of an individualism whose roots have atrophied and
whose sap has coagulated. The conditions for proclaiming reason are themselves
unreasonable.
The ownership and control over the means of dissemination of the findings of
science make the life of reason, of truth in action, almost impossible for the
average man. The discovery of social truth requires insight and understanding
of the way in which the means which are supposed to disseminate it tend to hide
it or utter it half-heartedly. Procedure takes the place of process; and truth
becomes identified with the administrative agency which purveys it. The result
can even be that the morality of science is looked upon as dictating conformity
with the technically existent, by identifying science with the techniques of
achieving truth and not with the moral pursuit of it. Morality itself becomes a
technique-a body of rules whereby man can achieve self-interest in the name
of cooperation. No one emphasizes man as an end as much as an advertiser who
is using him as a means. This has become the modern golden rule: Treat men
as means while making them believe you are treating them as ends. The con-
sumer is proclaimed as the ruler of the market even while he is being maneu-
vered into the position of doing what he is told. Finally, his very bondage ap-
pears to him as freedom, and he begins to ask for only "abvertised brands."
Morality becomes the kind of means-end schema wherein the pursuit of sci-
ence has been socially structured to buttress the social power which makes the
inherent morality of science a mere means also. Science becomes a means to
achieve self-interest, but the character of the self is not rational. Or as George
Lundberg in Can Science Save Us? would say, science can tell you how to achieve
whatever end it is you want to achieve. Even if you want to achieve the suppres-
sion of freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, science will tell you how to
136 GEORGE SIMPSON

do it. In short, science has finally discovered the way to annihilate its own
morality. But then it is really no longer science, but a kind of social catechism
which praises its own castration as the surest path to social potency. Thus, it
achieves social status by losing its rational distinction.
These basic freedoms and civil rights are the assurance of the social conditions
for making the discovery of truth possible. Through them men may without fear,
apprehension or social ostracism seek to ferret out the answers even to problems
relating to the mechanisms of social power. The democratic attachment to civil
liberties is based on a belief in the truth that makes men free. Every struggle
against tyranny over men's minds has been part of the universal struggle for
truth and science. And today the struggle is against that tyranny that proclaims
science's disinterestedness to human ends and that folly that sees science simply
as a technique. The new tyranny denies the values of science; seeks for morality
outside the free purposive activity of men in pursuit of the truth; and mistakes
the organizational structure by which science has become a technique, for de-
mocracy. It is small wonder then that we are deluged with books on the crisis
of our age, on obscurantist tracts on a new basis for history, on analyses of hu-
man destiny which find it outside the activity of men organized in societies, and
stuffy attempts to recreate a theology whose social roots have rotted. When
men misunderstand the new, they misinterpret the old to fit the misunderstood
new. The real crisis involves our failure to find common ground for science and
morality. The uneasy truce between values not involved in science and science
not involved in values has finally made men uneasy. And the more uneasy men
have become the more they have denied to science its aboriginal morality which
has been concealed from them by the social structures which have most to gain
from its concealment.
V
Equality. Science is egalitarian in a two-fold sense: first, in that its findings are
open to all men and it may be pursued by all men willing and capable of being
trained in its method; second, in that science itself tells us that ability and in-
telligence are found equally in a population throughout its mass. Not only is
the truth no respecter of persons, but every person is originally capable of being
a respecter of the truth.
The first of these is practiced when we expose all men to the findings of science
and presumably make possible free entry into scientific occupations by all. That
is the function of free public education. To the extent that discrimination is
practiced in developing the potentialities of any individual or group of individu-
als, to that extent the morality of science is undermined. One reason for the
crisis in our values relates to the fact that in education we do not draw our
standards and norms from science but from an eclectic hodge-podge of left-overs,
hand-me-downs, unanalyzed "self-evident" truths which turn out on analysis
not to be self-evident at all, and homilies on democracy which mistake it as its
own guarantee. That this results in a studied hypocrisy becomes evident even
to some of the young, and all too soon they learn how to master techniques for
attaining narrow self-interest in the name of the advancement of truth.
 SCIENCE AS MORALITY 137

The disjunction between the egalitarianism of science and the inequalities of

status, income, material well-being, educational opportunity, violates the moral-
ity of science by making the opportunities for achieving truth unequal, by es-
tablishing impediments to achieving truth to those bereft of the opportunities,
and by giving the rich and well-born a vested interest which slants emotion and
desire in the direction of propagating a society which makes such inequality
possible. It finally adds up to a waste of talent and frequently to rewarding lack
of talent. If democracy involves rewarding ability, shall lack of ability also be
rewarded?
What men are basically unequal in is native ability and intelligence. This
"natural" inequality is overwhelmed, however, by the social inequalities which
make it impossible for society to take advantage of the natural inequalities in
such a way as to make the most out of each individual's talents. Equality, sci-
entifically considered, means equality of social conditions so as to permit natural
inequality to find its own level. It is not a levelling process of grinding all indi-
viduals to a standard pattern. Indeed, it is precisely the system of social inequal-
ity which tends to standardize all individuals who do not possess social preroga-
tives. A mechanical uniformity takes the place of the feast of talent which nature
offers; and under bureaucratic auspices, stepping out of line is the greatest
offense. Even the great scientist must learn his place. He, too, becomes a special-
ist, and science, the great agent of non-conformity, is overwhelmed by the
energy that scientists must consume in order to fit into the social situation
accorded them.
But if men are unequal in native ability and intelligence, it requires social
conditions for discovering those of superior intelligence and aiding them to ad-
vance. Such a work as Frederick Osborn's Preface to Eugenics amply justifies,
through science, the proposition that ability and birth are not synonymous.
"The final conclusions of all these studies [on heredity and environment] is that
differences in hereditary (genetic) potentials for intelligence are widely scattered
in different family lines throughout the whole population. In order to sort them
out with any accuracy, it will be necessary to equalize or allow for environmental
conditions affecting the development of intelligence." (p. 99) Science thus asks
for the equalizing of environmental opportunities in order to accurately dis-
cover where inequality of talent appears, in order to give opportunity for all
talent to find its outlet. Not only are men to be equally exposed to the truth;
but the truth concerning their variety of talents is to be exposed for the purpose
of developing all talents.
It is in opportunity for educational and economic advancement that the
egalitarian character of science makes itself most evident. Science stipulates
what every man should know, and consequently establishes the necessity for
free, universal education without discrimination as to race, creed, or color. And
by seeking to make the most of individual talents it requires economic and social
conditions of such a kind that such talents can make themselves seen or heard.
The great obstacle in squaring our educational and economic opportunities lies
in the family-environment into which talents are born. The familial environment
is the basic moulder of personality, and can distort talent or undermine it. Not
138 GEORGE SIMPSON

the least of the moral principles of science has to do with the training and re-
training of parents and children. Besides educational and economic equality of
opportunity, talents require emotional equality of opportunity or the bearer of
talent may have his abilities atrophied and his potentialities thwarted by paren-
tal ignorance of the basic psychological forces at work in the individual. A good
part of all talent is wasted in the struggle of the individual born to poor educa-
tional and economic circumstances to extricate himself from the emotional
turmoil into which his rearing has thrust him. Despite his aristocratic orientation
which runs contrary to the findings of science today, Plato in the Republic was
keenly aware of this emotional disability which the family could visit upon the
individual. His solution-the taking of the child at birth from the parents to be
reared in state-nurseries-has certainly not been acceptable to western societies.
But the alternative to his solution today is the training of parents and parents-
to-be in the principles of mental hygiene, the facts of psychological adjustment
to father, mother, siblings. Our failure on this score lies in our unwillingness or
inability or hesitancy to put into practice-that is, to put truth into action on
the findings of psychiatry based upon the results of half a century of clinical
study.
If science asks for equality in education and economic environment, it asks
even more for equality in emotional environment. And the last involves a recon-
struction of the rearing of children. This is no short process. The last stronghold
of human irrationality lies in the family. Man's struggle for the morality of
science reaches its zenith in his struggle to control the dark forces of unreason
and the deep founts of hidden emotion that are within him. His mastery of the
world is not complete until he understands and controls the springs of his own
motives. To this there is no short-cut, except through science and the introduc-
tion into our educational and social relations of the discoveries which we have
made in the last half a century. Nothing is more poignant these days in higher
educational circles among the married students that the war has put among us
than the yearning for knowledge concerning child-care, the emotional problems
of childhood and parenthood, the dim awakening to the significance of the family
in creating social attitudes and social values. It is both poignant, and heartening,
for it betokens the stirrings of interest in applying science to the inner fortress
of emotion, desire, and interest.
But the emotional stability necessary for applying the morality of science to
the rearing of children is concatenated with economic opportunity and social
recognition. Where both the latter are lacking, the first can hardly be expected
to be forthcoming. The sins of society shall be visited upon the children, and the
fruits of such visitation will be the absence of those emotional circumstances
which make the development of talent possible. It is no accident that it is from
the ranks of the lowest income groups that prize-fighters come, for the frustration
wreaked upon them by society and the family gains its only outlet in respectable
aggression through the prize ring. To summarize this argument with Robert S.
Lynd in Knowledge jor IVhat? "The chance of securing more coherent, con-
structive behavior from persons depends upon recognizing the large degree of
irrationality that is natural to them and upon structuring the culture actively
 SCIENCE AS MORALITY 139

to support and encourage intelligent types of behavior, including inevitably

opportunity for creative, spontaneous expression of emotion."
VI
CollectiveEndeavor.Science posits as the basis for social harmony joint activity
of men toward a common goal. For the scientist the common goal is truth con-
cerning that segment of the universe which is his special concern. That requires
communication, cooperation, free exchange of ideas, lack of bias. It is inherently
a free collectivism, transcending the individual at the same time as it safeguards
his individuality and is carried on through generations. Here truly the individual
enters into a compact with other individuals and past and future generations to
abide by the method of science, to expose his findings to the scrutiny of his
fellows, to place the truth as his highest value. It is a compact in behalf of criti-
cal intelligence, with shared values and participation as the foundation of its
social relationships. Science is a social relationship seen in this frame of reference,
and in its search for truth is a prototypical social relationship, betokening how
men would act in every sphere of living if truth were their standard and norm.
Seen this way, the moral basis of science is manifest just as the moral basis in
economics of what is called capital is seen when capital is understood as a social
relationship, and not merely as a symbolism of goods and services, production
and consumption, income and distribution, costs and output, prices and supply
and demand. That this fundamental sociological bond has been obscured is due
to the failure to understand science as a way of life, an occupation, and a body
of goals and values.
The real wonder of science is that men should be able to surrender their
self-interest in the narrow sense, should be able to place the human organism in
the service of intelligence and rationality. The tragedy of science is that scien-
tists should become so preoccupied with the particularity of their spec alties or
techniques that they too join in the chorus that sings their praises while under-
mining their morality. The process by which we educate scientists, in both the
natural and the social sciences, is singularly devoid of any indication of the
values involved in the profession. For we do not give students that view of
science which shows it to consist of men in action. And this action is collective,
requiring the contribution of different individuals. Significant as the splitting of
the atom and the formation of a new element has been, the atomic bomb has
been even more startling in its demonstration of the intricate, interdependent
character of all the sciences. The atomic bomb was a social achievement despite
its destructive auspices. That learned and trained individuals separated by
thousands of miles, working in many different fields, should have jointly turned
out such a discovery is a tribute to morality and to that collective enterprise
which is less spectacularly but none the less positively shown in all science. Men
thus share the truth by jointly striving to reach it. That their joint efforts should
have resulted in an instrument of warfare up to this point and an aid in the
settlement of disputes by armed force is explicable if we understand that the
world is not structured socially as is science.
There is nothing Pollyannish about the morality of science. Because truth is
140 GEORGE SIMPSON

the supreme value achieved through cooperative, trained efforts of rational

beings does not give warrant for accepting as given the social auspices under
which truth is being found. It is in'behalf of quite other values that scientists
are asked to work, and their horrorand shock at the use to which their discov-
eries are put would serve, if they recognizedthe morality of their calling, as a
spur to re-structuringsocial relatlonshipsin the image of the only eternity they
know, of the search for the causes of things, as Lucretiussaid. Placed in this
predicament,the scientist can always fall back on his present social function as
a technician,and here the modernsocial scientist comesto the aid of the natural
scientist, by trying to prove that the status of technicianis the highest tribute
that can be paid to the man of science. Throughthis, the bonds that shackle
the morality of science are today tied by scientists themselves,and their collec-
tive moaningat the destructiveuses to which their findingsare put is a form of
exhibitionismof guilt maskingas conscience.
VII
Political Power.Nothing has been more hearteningas a result of atomic re-
searchand the atomicbombthan the resurgenceof participationin politicsof the
scientistswho helpedto discoverit. The fact that man not only conquersnature
but indeed makes nature in his own image has led to reflectionupon the kind
of image man has made himself into. For man's present ability to make nature
in his own image throughatomic energy and the "chemicalrevolution"has led
men to see that man can now unmakehimself by failing to harnessthe fruits of
reasonin naturalscienceto a societyNvherethe fruitsof socialreasonare achieved.
The scientist is involved alway in a search for the potential; the actual is
what he has alreadyachieved.In politicsthis meansthe searchfor the conditions
of emancipationfrom the shacklesof the very political power which has made
the actual possible. Science in the service of political power whose
foundations are themselvesirrationalis the beginningof the end of reason.
The ability to conquernatureis also the ability to destroyman, And of all the
forces of destruction none is more powerfulthan that which claims that the
method and knowledgeand social organizationby which man achievesthe con-
quest of natureare themselvesno part of the values and ideals by which he may
conquer human irrationality. The social conditions under which man today
conquers nature makes possible not man's conquest of himself, but the conquest
of man by other men. Instead of universalizing,these social conditionsparticu-
larize; and in polities this results in squabblesover who shall conquerwhom.
Man's destiny becomessynonymouswith narrowinghis allegiances,and in its
highest political reachesresults in allegianceto nothing but power itself. Since
no agreement as to ends was initially possible, it should occasion no surprise
that no generalend was achieved.
The fervent nationalismwhich accompaniedthe begimningsof the application
of science to technology and economiclife, the so-called industrialrevolution,
was not derivat've from the moral ideals of science, but from the social condi-
tions in which scientifictruth was operative.The most nationalisticof countries
 SCIENCE AS MORALITY 141

were those which started industrialization late, particularly Germany, and which
in feverish haste sought to develop itself against the domination of the English
and French. This also held in Asia for Japan. Against emotion, interests and
desires harnessed to the wild, careening chariot of nationalism, the appeal to
internationalism was as naught. Science served the nation, and though scientists
may not have been in uniform, their efforts were supposed to have been bent in
the same direction as those in uniform.
VIII
Intemnationalism.When nationalist ideas are tied in with scientific pursuits,
it will always be found that the nationalism arises from the social purposes pur-
sued by the technology and economy which are making use of the fruits of sci-
ence. The ends being served by science are not of the scientist's own making,
but appropriated from the culture in which he lives. But the morality of science
is above all cultures in the sense that its goals and ends are the ones to which
culture is to be bent, and not the other way around. It is not reason that is to
be kneaded by society, but society which is to be transformed into reasonable-
ness. That is, the ideal of science demands a reasonable society; and it judges
the society in which it itself is operative in terms of the degree to which reason
is put into action.
So inextricable is internationalism from science and reason, that men have
long envisaged an international society even when the material determinants
as set by the application of science and technology at a given period made such
a society impossible of achievement. Immanual Kant's search for a formula of
perpetual peace is certainly no mean instance of a philosopher of reason seeking
to overcome men's narrow nationalism. It is the universality of reason that led
Kant to see a basis for an international community. But despite the fact that
Kant was a great geographer, the physical contours of such a community were
themselves restricted to the world as it was then understood.
The relativism of cultures, a concept which has great currency because of the
development of anthropological research, does not deny this ideal of science.
That all societies have not yet reached the control over nature that western in-
dustrial society has reached, suggests neither that we should surrender this one
of the moral ends of science nor that we should inflict our culture forcibly on
others. The diversity of cultures is itself a scientific fact, discovered through re-
search and fortified even within western culture itself by regional analysis. It
would be a strange internationalism that urged that new culture-patterns be
thrust upon those not yet ready nor willing to accept them. The cake of cus-
tom, habit, tradition, family-life, economic structuring of relations-these are
not to be devoured by an omnivorous, anthropophagous intellectual imperialism.
But the goal of internationalism, based upon the possibility of the universal ap-
plication of science and reason and the use of discusssion, debate, testing of
hypotheses, itself dictates, in accompaniment with comparative culture-analysis,
the kinds of activities that each culture is capable of incorporating at its given
level of development. But men of reason-the scientific attitude and outlook in
142 GEORGE SIMPSON

action-need not delude themselves because of the power of the ideal that
internationalism is around the corner. For science itself bespeaks the fact that
man in his diversity and perversity fights off the structuring of society in terms
of reason. Internationalism can only be achieved in terms of the brute facts of
culture-diversity, national allegiances, and human irrationalities existent in an
historical period. The morality of science does not ask that men keep butting
their heads against stone walls to see how good it feels when they stop or how
soft-headed they can become in the process. It is, as William James might say,
a tough-minded code but with great tenderness for the tragedy of mankind in
being imprisoned by an irrational biology and psychology superinduced to irra-
tionality by a sociology and ideology nurtured by education, the family, and
organs of propaganda and communication. Though in Hegel's terms the real
may be the rational, that still does not make the irrational the unreal for the
scientist.
But not to hold to the ideals of perpetual peace, international community, and
the possibility, no matter how vague, of something akin to international good
will, is to surrender all that mankind's struggles for reason have set store by.
And it is particularly in philosophy as a discipline and subject-matter that these
ideals must be kept aloft. The specific sciences-natural as well as social-have
now involved themselves so completely with techniques and instrumentalities
that they have lost sight of, and oftentimes have lost even the possibility of
seeing, what ideals are inherent in that great society of all ages which has dedi-
cated itself to the discovery of truth.
To be sure, there are those today in philosophy who seem to be solely inter-
ested in epistemic and methodological techniques, but care is required not to
lead us to mistake refinements (and sometimes over-refinements) of one part of
philosophy for its larger systematic framework.
Not the least of the present virtues of systematic philosophy is that it has not
been caught up in the sweep of employment as a handmaiden of officialdom.
For that it is often sneered at and secretly envied. Just as often it is misunder-
stood and even maligned by scientists themselves as being unworldly (since it
may disapprove of the way the world is being run); impractical (since it criti-
cizes present practices); and visionary (since it sees what can be done aandought
to be done as well as what is being done). Indeed, in certain professional circles
of scientists, the epithet 'philosophical' is the final degradation when applied to
a colleague, even though to a philosopher the patriotic and occupational chau-
vinism thereby evinced may seem the last refuge of a scoundrel.
The failure of such an organization as the League of Nations, and the difficul-
ties into which the United Nations has been running do not, to be sure, make
men sanguine about internationalism. But to make the world over in the image
of reason and science is not an undertaking for overnight; it may be that for our
historical period it is insuperably difficult, but that cannot alter the moral exi-
gencies of science. That is the kind of world science when seen in proper perspec-
tive as a morality, looks towards, but that does not mean that we are going to
get it right away or all in one piece. But not to strive for it is treason to ration-
 SCIENCE AS MORALITY 143

ality, and when the forces of universal reason are as depleted as they are today,
it would mean being carried away by uncontrolled instruments of ad hoc pleading.
When scientists become smug and philosophers (particularly social philoso-
phers) do not tell them so, mankind's really last hope goes a-glimmering. It is
not true that reason is ineffective; it is merely that there is not enough of it. Ad
if there is any treason of the intellectuals, it lies in their decision that since there
is not enough of it, they can surrender it too. Of course, if this is carried far
enough, it does not take a mathematician to see that eventually there will be
none of it.
City Collegeof New York