Ilya Kasavin

Max Weber's lecture raises a number of ethical issues in science. Among them there is a problem confronting the underdetermination of the disciplinary status of the ethics of science and goal to determine the nature and methods for a normative management of science. Along this way, one has to compare the philosophical and other ethical and regulatory programs as it relates to science; to respond to questions about resolving Hume’s guillotine and the paradox of Merton-Popper in the ethics of science; to demonstrate the ethics of science ability to justify science as a form of public good. The ethics of science evolves by transferring the methods of its justification from philosophical ethics: as descriptive, normative and applied ethics, as metaethics. It turns out that a clear choice among these programs is hardly possible for the ethics of science. On the one hand, it cannot work without borrowing empirical evidence from the cognitive sciences and the cultural studies, and on the other, cannot be limited to the actual state of affairs. Rather, specially scientific and philosophical aspects of the ethics of science differ as types of formal and informal regulation of science, as a profession and a vocation that allows justifying the special epistemic status of science and at the same time understanding it as a form of public good.