HardingFSE:2001

A reading for STS 6401.

Equally important, the notion of value-free objectivity is morally and politically regressive for reasons additional to those already mentioned. It justifies the construction of science institutions and individual scientists as 'fast guns for hire.' It has been used to legitimate and hold up as the highest ideal institutions and individuals that are, insofar as they are scientific, to be studiously unconcerned with the origins or consequences of their activities or with the values and interests that these activities advance. This nonaccidental, determined, energetic lack of concern is supported by science-education that excludes training in critical thought and that treats all expressions of social and political concern–the concerns of the torturer and the concerns of the tortured–as being on the same low level of scientific 'rationality.' (pp. 162-163)