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I'm unsure if you're saying I'm coming from a deontological viewpoint (I'm not), I'm assuming you are a utilitarian, as you said. Remaining in a utilitarian paradigm, I hardly think societies with slavery maximized utility, this was more or less my point. More to the actual point, science must have deontological ethics for science to, well, exist. Any world where science has no moral rules is a fantasy, and a rather dystopian one. There must be some sort of social contract between scientists and the general population for it to actually be useful. We are already witnessing a rise in anti-scientific sentiment even with the rigorous reviews we currently have. And it has led to many deaths, directly or indirectly. Now imagine that scientists are allowed to conduct experiments purely for the sake of progress without consideration of absolute morality. People would actively be burning down science labs, and science itself would be seen akin to witchcraft. This would no doubt slow progress to a halt. To summarize, the idea of a world where we can have science without deontology is fictional, you seemed to argue it should be this way, I'm arguing that it can't, in practice, be this way. There just has to be rules, man. |