Abstract
LECTURING to the Science Federation of the University of Manchester on January 23 under the title “The Irresponsibility of Science”, Prof. H. Levy asserted that the problems of unemployment and the distribution of leisure are problems which the man of science must help to solve. It is part of the duty of the scientific man to examine the external properties of science and to face the ethical problems which the application of scientific discoveries is liable to create. The habit engendered in the scientific worker by his very method of endeavouring to isolate objects or causes and consider the influence of single factors in a problem has a very real danger in that it leads scientific workers to assume that all scientific questions are independent of ethics. Practically all scientific work, however, has a social aspect and its social properties cannot be clearly separated from its scientific properties any more than theoretical and applied science can be sharply demarcated. At the present time we are being forced to consider indeed the limit beyond which the process of improving the weapons of production is likely to disturb the structure of the original scientific movement itself. The scientific worker cannot ignore the fact that in practice what is intended as a gift of more leisure for all becomes unemployment and loss of consuming power for some. Scientific men must endeavour to find what factors go to the creation of an unstable society under the impact of science in this way. Prof. Levy suggested that scientific men should analyse the tendencies of science so that they could direct them. Science, which has been a revolutionary factor, has now become a disturbing factor in the world, affecting the stability of communities, and the study of that disturbance is one for international science.
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The Disturbing Influence of Science. Nature 131, 162 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131162a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131162a0