Trope-a-Day: For Science!

For Science: Played terrifyingly straight, at least from dear old neophobic humanity’s point of view; while the Imperial science establishment does have a few notions of ethics (informed consent – while the Monument to the Martyrs of Science is large, it’s also to volunteers, really – sophont and prosophont rights, externalities), they don’t care much at all about the Potential Applications, social consequences, naturalistic fallacies, squickiness, or any other such pathetic mewlings from the WEAK, the INFIRM OF PURPOSE, the people who OBVIOUSLY don’t understand that KNOWLEDGE and PROGRESS are MORAL IMPERATIVES, and so on and so forth, and are happy to condemn anyone standing in the way of SCIENCE in exactly those stereotypical “bigoted, barbaric, knowledge-resenting knuckle-dragger” terms mentioned.

The formal motto, indeed, of the Fellowship of Natural Philosophy is “Knowledge is its own justification” – and the only reason that their informal motto isn’t “We do what we can, because we must” are meta-level copyright concerns.