Professional Ethics and Scientific Research: Conceptions from Researchers Members of the National Researchers System (SNI) in a Mexican Private University

French philosopher Edgar Morin says: “Modern science was founded on the disjunction between judgement of fact and judgement of value, meaning, one side, knowledge, and on the other, ethics…” (2006, p. 27) in a way that scientific research was considered axiologically neutral, without ethical implications, because ethics was considered a subjective element; while scientific knowledge was assumed to be objective.

This separation produced, according to the same author, the “privatization of ethics” which was left to an intimate scope of people, that produced a “weakening of responsibility and solidarity”. This issue imposed a big distance between individual life based on ethics,and society life that was apparently sustained exclusively on science and technology perceived as completely independent from any ethical consideration.

This historical process of modernity produced in the epistemological scope, a separation of the subject who knows according to his own knowledge and in the social scope a lack of unity between knowledge generated by researchers and the concrete life of persons and communities.

From the crisis of modernity it has been raised by some thinkers such as the same Morin or Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1999) that knowledge is a complex process inseparable from ethical dimension and that all production of knowledge from researchers – and especially those in the fields of Education and Social Sciences – has an axiological and ethical implication. This work presents the partial results of an investigation made with researchers members of the National Researchers System (SNI) about their conceptions on ethics in the field of research.

Keywords.

Professional ethics, scientific research, judgement of fact, judgement of value.

References.

Lonergan, B. (1999). Insight. Estudio sobre la comprensión humana. Salamanca. Ed. Sígueme-Universidad Iberoamericana.

Morin, E. (2006). El Método VI. La Ética. Madrid, España. Ediciones Cátedra.