A18
Atlas Star
Posts: 23,794
Political Matrix
E: 9.23, S: -6.35
|
 |
« on: November 05, 2007, 06:07:01 PM » |
|
(I'll just assume this is legit.)
I don't think this was an "abuse of science"; rather, the whole field of medicine is part scientific and part normative.
When a doctor seeks to alter a person's psychological or bodily state, he needs to understand the body and mind, and how they function. This is certainly a valid branch of science. But deciding what should be altered and what should not is normative--and hence unscientific.
Take a person who is hallucinating. Our universal reaction--to brand this an illness--is based on the strong conviction that hallucination is a bad thing. But that involves an unscientific value judgment. It is learning how to treat this condition that is the role of science.
In reaching his repulsive conclusion that this yearning of man to be free was a "disorder," this uncivilized hack was not abusing science; rather, he was not acting as a scientist at all. The scientific part of his writing was proposing a "cure," all within the framework of his normative system.
An abuse of science is not a meaningful concept, in my humble opinion. You can hardly abuse a method of arriving at knowledge, except I suppose in the sense of not adhering to it while claiming to.
|
