thetics. Is modern engineering a profession without grandeur--surely a mechanistic activity--and therefore lacking in ethical content? Perhaps, but not because it does not, in the Kantian sense, have the value of persons as its chief goal; explain the lack of moral need to the families of those who die when bridges made of poorly reinforced concrete collapse.
The apple (so the fable goes) falls on Newton's head and creates a physical-science revolution that, no less than Copernican or Einsteinian theory, transforms the rational human experience of the universe. Darwin takes the voyage of the Beagle, writes what he thinks is a description of bird species, yet because of what he infers or deduces from his observations becomes the focus of both social and natural sciences for the following 150 years. We think differently about ourselves and our society, we experience life differently no less because of solitary mechanistic or scientific efforts than because of poetry, art, philosophy itself. And this is true because such efforts, solitary as they may be, at some point are projected into human experience, by way of human reason. Wherever the rational faculty comes into play, therefore, there resides an implication of or potentiality for moral associations and the concept of respect for the value of others.
Examples from the history of the natural and physical sciences are especially suited to illustrating Kant's view of the respect for the value of persons because they present an opportunity to show how reason may arrive at the point of departure from pure rational faculty to practical application.
In this study we must advance by natural stages not merely from ordinary moral judgment (which is here ever so worthy of respect) to philosophical judgment, as has already been done, but also from popular philosophy, which goes no further than it can get by groping about with the help of examples, to metaphysics (which does not permit it...