"Human beings exercise responsibilities within a social setting and a framework of obligations which transcend the principle of intelligence"
About this Quote
Polanyi is smuggling a moral grenade into the lab coat. In a century that worshipped “intelligence” as the master key - from IQ testing to technocratic planning - he insists that being smart is not the same as being answerable. The sentence pivots on “exercise”: responsibility isn’t a private virtue you possess, it’s a practiced action performed under social pressure, expectation, and consequence. You don’t get to opt out by retreating into the clean, antiseptic realm of cognition.
The real provocation sits in “transcend.” Polanyi isn’t dismissing intelligence; he’s denying it final authority. Obligations come from elsewhere: tradition, professional norms, tacit knowledge, shared standards of decency, the quiet agreements that make institutions function. That’s classic Polanyi, the scientist-philosopher who argued that knowledge is personal and communal at once, never purely mechanical. Even the most rigorous inquiry rests on trust: in peers, in methods, in the good faith of citation and replication. “Framework” signals that ethics is infrastructure, not decoration.
Read in context - mid-century Europe, totalitarian ideologies, the seductive claim that society can be engineered by the brightest minds - the line reads like a warning label. When intelligence becomes the only principle, responsibility gets recoded as a technical problem, and moral debate turns into an optimization exercise. Polanyi is arguing that citizenship, science, and conscience are bound together by obligations that can’t be derived from brainpower alone. Intelligence can invent the tool; it can’t tell you who deserves its consequences.
The real provocation sits in “transcend.” Polanyi isn’t dismissing intelligence; he’s denying it final authority. Obligations come from elsewhere: tradition, professional norms, tacit knowledge, shared standards of decency, the quiet agreements that make institutions function. That’s classic Polanyi, the scientist-philosopher who argued that knowledge is personal and communal at once, never purely mechanical. Even the most rigorous inquiry rests on trust: in peers, in methods, in the good faith of citation and replication. “Framework” signals that ethics is infrastructure, not decoration.
Read in context - mid-century Europe, totalitarian ideologies, the seductive claim that society can be engineered by the brightest minds - the line reads like a warning label. When intelligence becomes the only principle, responsibility gets recoded as a technical problem, and moral debate turns into an optimization exercise. Polanyi is arguing that citizenship, science, and conscience are bound together by obligations that can’t be derived from brainpower alone. Intelligence can invent the tool; it can’t tell you who deserves its consequences.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Michael
Add to List
