Onko politologialla tieteenulkoisia eettisiä velvoitteita

Authors

• Harto Hakovirta

Abstract

The discipline of political science is inherently linked to the ethical conflicts and issues of its external social and political setting. The extremist view of pure, value-free science is therefore particularly unsuited to a political scientist. However, any attempt to define the moral obligations of political science primarily in terms of social and political interests inevitably leads to antinomies, and to prescriptions which are incompatible with genuine scientific interests in theory-building. In so far as there are secondary obligations emanating from the social and political environment of the discipline, their moral aspect can be best understood against the universal ethical standard of reciprocity. Even from the point of view of society and the state, the more freely the political scientists are allowed to pursue their own theoretical goals, the better the output of political science is likely to be. Political scientists are congenitally capable of maintaining a sense of the social and political context and implications of their science.