Science’s value-freedom dismantled normative barriers to genocidal co-operation

Evidence

Indirectly (though centrally to its general social function), science cleared the way to genocide through sapping the authority, and questioning the binding force, of all normative thinking, particularly that of religion and ethics. Science looks back at its history as the long and victorious struggle of reason over superstition and irrationality. In as far as religion and ethics could not rationally legitimize the demands they made on human behaviour, they stood condemned and found their authority denied. As values and norms had been proclaimed immanently and irreparably subjective, instrumentality was left as the only field where the search for excellence was feasible. Science wanted to be value-free and took pride in being such. By institutional pressure and by ridicule, it silenced the preachers of morality. In the process, it made itself morally blind and speechless. It dismantled all the barriers that could stop it from co-operating, with enthusiasm and abandon, in designing the most effective and rapid methods of mass sterilization or mass killing; or from conceiving of the concentration camps’ slavery as a unique and wonderful opportunity to conduct medical research for the advancement of scholarship and – of course – of mankind. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 315

Categorization

• XREF: Core for the Islamophobia toolkit — how ‘value-free’ rationality in knowledge production becomes instrumentally usable by state power. — connects to: Older Nazi officials retained moral qualms the genocidal machine overrode; Genocidal thinking requires race imagery, medicine, and engineering modernity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 210; Ideological scientificality overrides factual reality in totalitarian action (+11 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which instrumentality supersedes ethics once norms are declared subjective.

Related

• Science models the ethos of ends justifying means (similarity 0.80)
• Elite silence follows the ideal of value-free rational professionalism (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Ideological scientificality overrides factual reality in totalitarian action #expands (0.82)
• Intellectuals must admit ideology rather than claim value-free science #responds-to (0.80) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 435
• Science models the ethos of ends justifying means #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 456
• Science became an autonomous value detached from its survival origins #qualifies (0.75) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 2032
• Foundations of profound scientific knowledge are less secure than their superstructures #complicates (0.72)