Janet, as seems to be the norm, has another interesting thread going on at Adventures in Science and Ethics, about searching for biological bases for homosexuality. I did an interview for The Believer recently with a historian and philosopher of sexuality, Arnold Davidson, who's at the University of Chicago (and the University of Pisa too, actually). The interview hits on the subject at hand by putting questions about science and sexuality into historical context. It's an interesting piece, I think. Go, go. Go check it out. Look at that, twice linked in a mere three lines.
And as for Foucault, well, an earlier version of the interview had a section about how a very young Davidson -- as a graduate student at the age of 19, to be exact -- got his intellectual start after meeting and befriending Foucault at a conference at Columbia in the '70s. So fine, I'm not really gonna talk about Foucault in this post, but you should know that Davidson's work is building from Foucualt's, though going in different directions and beyond just that basis. And I think the debate about homosexuality and, more specificlaly, gay marriage -- a thoroughly cultural topic, to the core, since science is a subset of culture -- really should be further indebted to this kind of philosophical scholarship than it has been.
My point of greatest interest: that the debate at Ethics & Science seems to be taking a particularly ahistorical view of things: first, as if the discussion is new, and bears no reference to historical shifts in thinking, values, and scientific practice; and second, as if our particular historical moment (i.e., now) does not reflect specific moral concerns and ethical framings of the issue of sexuality.
And I suppose that puts an earlier post, about ethics and scientists, in a new light: of course all science is ethical, has ethics, deals with ethics, on an everyday basis -- choices of research topics, values infused into research, decisions about experimental plans, etc.. They are all ethics-laden. Scientist's don't avoid ethics, except for being bothered by "rules" that prescribe their actions and codes of conduct as being perceived as imposed from outside. But that's a very narrow and slim view of "ethics." That's all I meant with respect to that earlier post: what is ethics?
Instead of, "do scientists avoid ethics?," I'd ask, "what do scientists consider ethics to be?"
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On the ahistoricity, guilty as charged. (I've been having this discussion for years, but it's the first time I've brought it to my blog. I have no idea whether the folks posting comments have thought about this stuff before.)
Historical context, clearly, plays a role in what kinds of questions scientists pursue (or even ask), and that has to connect to the goods the public hopes to get from science. But in the discussions "out there" in the media, the framing strikes me as pretty ahistorical, too. Instead, the non-scientists look to science for a report on "how things are" -- and then, magically, they find a way to make that picture support whatever stance they had already adopted.
I agree with you all the way, and think your comment is well put. So then it becomes not just, what do scientists consider ethics to be, but "what do scientists understand history to be?" And, as you say, it's beyond scientists alone. How does the media frame it as well? Where's the Framing Science guy? He should be here now.
Just because there's no comments on The Believer's site, I'll leave this here.
It's a very interesting interview, but I think there's one factual error. The interviewee says that in previous historical epochs, all the arguments against masturbation are theological in nature, not moral or ethical. However, he misses the fact that Kant gave an argument against masturbation (derived from the categorical imperative of course) based on something like not treating one's own desires as ends-in-themselves or something (I don't actually know Kant very well at all). Just a minor point in a very nice interview (on both sides). And I may also have misinterpreted whether "earlier epochs" meant "earlier than now" or "earlier than the 18th century".