Boris Yudin vs Nikolay Trubnikov: Biomedicine and the Problem of the Value Status of Science

Abstract

The latest advances in modern biomedicine are increasingly influencing specialized and everyday practice, transforming the overall socio-cultural context in which the development of modern science is taking place. At the same time, many general humanistic principles and values are problematized, which until now seemed obvious, natural and completely unshakable. Transhumanism as an ideological trend and a social project aimed at the radical transformation of a person by means of biomedical science is a clear example of such problematization and, at the same time, a threat to the status of a person that has developed in the course of natural evolution. Thus, the question of the value status of science, of the ethical regulation of scientific progress, of its criteria is extremely aggravated. Consideration of two alternative philosophical approaches to this problem simultaneously indicates the vital necessity of taking into account the human factor in modern scientific knowledge, and the absence in it of specific indicators and measures for such accounting. In biomedicine, this circumstance manifests itself especially clearly, which objectively turns it into the main subject field of philosophical reflection on the improvement of the concept of man and the renewal of the value status of science in the cultural system.

Acknowledgments: The author expresses his gratitude to the scientific advisor, Doctor of Philosophy, Professor of the Department of Philosophy of the Chelyabinsk State University, Rybin V.A.