Ethical Considerations 
have found that it is easier to run a society made up of indepen- 
dent individuals if they all acknowledge what is true. 
Man is anextraodinary creature, and he has one gift to which 
we have made no reference at all: he is the only social solitary. 
He is the only creature who does his best thinking and working 
alone, but does it only in the setting of a society. This conflict, 
or this interplay, between what is socially acceptable to his 
society, and what is personally desirable to him, makes up the 
whole problem of ethics. We have now learned to acknowledge 
that to be truthful makes it easier for man to be both solitarily 
creative and socially sustained than any alternative behaviour. I 
regard that as the major step that science has made in producing 
an ethic. 
Now as soon as you acknowledge the effective importance of 
truth, you bring in its train a whole system of values. You have 
to have justice, you have to have independence, you have to 
have freedom. Since I said all this in detail in a book, Sczence 
and Human Values, I won’t elaborate it here2. There I showed that 
once you organize a set of people like the Royal Society, or the 
Academy of Sciences, so that they have an overriding allegiance 
to what is factually true, then you build up, of necessity, social 
values between them. If cheating is not allowed, however ex- 
pedient the occasion, then people like Kammerer prefer to shoot 
themselves rather than live in shame in the society of scientists. 
The Old Testament and Puritan virtues of justice, tolerance, 
freedom, independence—these are the virtues that have been 
spread by what I call ‘‘the scientific ethic’. However, the 
scientific ethic is not the whole of ethics. The Old Testament 
does not contain all the virtues; and if I for one regard the 
growth of the biological sciences as critical for the future of man, 
it is because they may make accessible those inner truths, the 
psychological truths, which so far have not been fostered by 
science. So far, these personal values—the new Testament vir- 
tues of love and tenderness, for example—are enshrined in works 
of art: in Anna Karenina, the Dialogues of Socrates, and the paint- 
ings of Rembrandt. I do not know how they are communi- 
cated. Yet the arts do somehow give us the feeling of sharing 
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