The poverty of scientism and the promise of structuralist ethics

Günther Stent

pp. 243-264

in: Daniel Callahan, Tristram Engelhardt (eds), The roots of ethics, Berlin, Springer, 1981

Abstract

The ideology of scientism, the belief that the methods and insights of science are applicable to the entire sphere of human activity, aims to validate moral acts on scientific grounds. Indeed, this perspective sees scientific knowledge as the only kind of authentic knowledge. From this viewpoint, the only rational alternative would be an ethical nihilism under which everything is permitted, since the traditional theological grounding of ethics is seen as a morass of irrational superstitions belonging to a pre-scientific age.¹ This perception is widespread, and underlies the broad popular appeal of scientism, despite its more or less general rejection by contemporary philosophers and the often-repeated exposure of its potentially dangerous political consequences as a rational basis for the totalitarian state.² Thus acceptance of scientistic beliefs is usually the unstated but implicit ethical premise held by the opposing sides in current debates—"establishment" versus 'science-for-the-people," "progress' versus "ecology" and "zero-population-growth."