The neutrality defense rests on intentions, not consequences of science

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Completely missing from such an approach is ‘the political’ in its dimension of power, antagonism and relationships of forces. What ‘political liberalism’ is at pains to eliminate is the element of ‘undecidability’ which is present in human relations. … But it is only because they have been made invisible through a clever stratagem: the distinction between ‘simple’ and ‘reasonable pluralism’. In that way, exclusions can be denied by declaring that they are the product of the ‘free exercise of practical reason’ that establishes the limits of possible consensus. … Thanks to this legerdemain. rationality and morality provide the key to solving the ‘paradox of liberalism’: how to eliminate its adversaries while remaining neutral. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 135 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Scientific neutrality is itself metaphysical and masks domination — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 43; Perfect scientific neutrality is elusive and possibly undesirable when moral values are at stake — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 93; Science’s value-freedom dismantled normative barriers to genocidal co-operation — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 315 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Science’s value-freedom dismantled normative barriers to genocidal co-operation #complicates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 315
• Liberal neutrality masks power by presenting exclusion as reason’s product #complicates (0.74) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 135