Peirce´s View of the Role of Ethics in Scientific Inquiry

Abstract

During the decade of the 1890s Peirce begins to reflect on the relationship between ethics and scientific inquiry. The question on which he focuses his attention is whether ethics can somehow collaborate in the improvement or growth of the scientist´s activity, or whether, on the other hand, it can be an impediment. Peirce considers the issue from two perspectives: one intrinsic to science itself, and the other extrinsic to it. In so doing, he raises two basic questions: first, whether there is an ethics specific to scientific research, with certains habits and virtues that scientists should embody. The second question is whether any ethics that is external to science may intervene in its research activity and how it could do so. The purpose of this paper is to examine the responses given by Peirce to these questions, beginning in the 1890s, and in later years, and to show how these answers are modified as Peirce refines and deepens his conception of ethics.