ABSTRACT
Traditional views place science and ethics at opposite poles among human disciplines. Science is objective, theoretical, concerned with describing and explaining the facts or what is, dealing with means; ethics is subjective, practical, prescriptive, concerned with values and what ought to be, focused on choice and decision, and dealing with ends. Some of the dichotomies that kept science and ethics apart seem to have been quietly passing away, outmoded by scientific progress and the refinement of methods. For example, science as objective versus ethics as subjective was part of the metaphysical partition of matter and mind or spirit. Contemporary technical moral philosophy has shown great concern in drawing a fine line between doing philosophy and doing science. Under the restrictive view of philosophy that has dominated much of the twentieth century, to do philosophy was to engage in conceptual or linguistic analysis. To do moral philosophy was to analyze the language of morals.
