The World's Fair

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?"