Science, Technology, Ethics and the Person – Edited by Domenico Galpatti

Since the middle of the last century, Romano Guardini has been arguing that humanity must accept and maintain confrontation with “force” in order to rearrange it morally. He added that as the “mission and destiny” of Europe, its primary role is to conduct a “critique of power” to bring it back to the horizon of meaning.

A policy aimed at re-emerging from the person’s ‘centrism’, without falling into offensive rhetorical ‘chorus’, but rather assuming that he is the efficacious ‘bari-centre’ of thought capable of ‘taming’ the tortuous complexity of post-modernism must necessarily confront the development of ‘morally sensitive’ issues “. It is the “power” that is manifested there.

This is not a whim of Catholics, but polemics that affect everyone and that no one can escape from at any cost. Rather, the political forces need to confront it. They represent the crucial testing platform, on which one must show oneself whether the examples and causes of indigenous identity are suitable to climb the steep slopes of the historical moment that challenges us, forcing us to confront radical questions that touch the heart of the world. We understand ourselves. Indeed, it is an area in which even the “ontological” question is called into question, that is, the concept of essence, the “barter” of man, and therefore the “code”, that is, anthropology, conscience about itself and about life and about the history that humanity constantly reworks.

Science tries to make a style of its own and returns to its reductionist method, assuming it to be the only source of true knowledge, questions that hitherto have been the exclusive purview of philosophical thinking and theology itself. Yet it is a matter, rather and certainly, of building a closer and more interesting relationship between these two aspects, but in no way of considering the transcendental dimension of thought obsolete.

It can be said that the same political forces, if they intend to confront the transformations that are pressing on us, and try to rule them, instead of passively submitting to them, must go through, each in their own way, a process that we can call “anthropological re-establishment”. In other words, they must readjust their ideal form, according to this bending of our mental universe imposed by the gravitational force of the self-imposing moral dimension. Knowing, on the other hand, that questions of this kind necessarily belong to the freedom of conscience and self-awareness of everyone, since they cannot be delegated to any other case that does not respond to the interior of everyone and the responsibility that everyone must bear, consciously, first of all towards himself.

Moreover, they are topics that are part of a broader objective context characterized by the growing gap, destined to widen every day, between the possibilities offered to us by science and our ability to orient them according to a consciously assumed moral system. The scientific and technological potential – biotechnology, in particular – is so unheard of that it creates astonishment and excitement on the one hand, and at the same time bewilderment and alarm.
As we saw in the days of the epidemic.

The “technical science” is discussed to indicate how the original relationship is largely inverted. It is no longer the same passion for knowledge that reveals to us the profiles that, through the techniques derived from them, can be traced back to the purposes of practical utility, but, on the contrary, the latter becomes a reason for choosing the commitments that basic scientific research itself is called to trial.

Dominic Galpatti