"To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher"
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Science, Compton suggests, is already smuggling in a moral accomplishment: a disciplined commitment to evidence, shared standards, and a willingness to be corrected. The line lands because it refuses the easy story that science is value-neutral and therefore politically innocent. Instead, he frames science as a moral practice that can either fortify civilization or sit inert on the lab bench, impressive but socially unmanaged.
The intent is practical, not mystical. Compton, a Nobel-winning physicist who lived through the era when physics became geopolitics, is writing in the shadow of weapons, industrial scale, and mass persuasion. In that context, “implicit in science” reads like a warning label: the method builds power, but it also models habits a society needs if it wants to survive its own tools. Yet scientists alone can’t translate laboratory virtues into public life. They don’t own the language of meaning, duty, and purpose that moves crowds or steadies institutions.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to professional siloing. The philosopher supplies conceptual clarity: what counts as progress, what we owe future people, how to reason about risk. The religious teacher, in Compton’s mid-century idiom, stands for moral formation and communal legitimacy - the ability to turn abstract restraint into lived norms. He’s not ceding authority to dogma so much as admitting that civilization runs on narratives and ethics, not just correct equations.
It’s also a plea for coalition: if science won the power to reshape the world, it also inherited responsibility for the world’s moral temperature.
The intent is practical, not mystical. Compton, a Nobel-winning physicist who lived through the era when physics became geopolitics, is writing in the shadow of weapons, industrial scale, and mass persuasion. In that context, “implicit in science” reads like a warning label: the method builds power, but it also models habits a society needs if it wants to survive its own tools. Yet scientists alone can’t translate laboratory virtues into public life. They don’t own the language of meaning, duty, and purpose that moves crowds or steadies institutions.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to professional siloing. The philosopher supplies conceptual clarity: what counts as progress, what we owe future people, how to reason about risk. The religious teacher, in Compton’s mid-century idiom, stands for moral formation and communal legitimacy - the ability to turn abstract restraint into lived norms. He’s not ceding authority to dogma so much as admitting that civilization runs on narratives and ethics, not just correct equations.
It’s also a plea for coalition: if science won the power to reshape the world, it also inherited responsibility for the world’s moral temperature.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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