Technoscientific Research, 2nd Edition

11 Basic concepts of Western ethics

In December 1937, Edwin G. Conklin (1863–1952), the retiring President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, delivered an address in which he stressed the importance of ethics for science: “But there is an aspect of religion with which science is vitally concerned, viz. ethics, and this has been well called ‘the religion of science’”¹. In this way, he also indicated that the role of ethics in research practice may be similar to that of religion in everyday human experience. Regardless of the attitude with respect to religion, any researcher of the twenty-first century is in need of ethical guidance for at least two important reasons: because of the atrocities which happened in the ...