Weber I

I would like to reflect on the question that prof. PTJ's asked in his lecture-let
"can politics and science be separated?"

In Weber's lecture it is clear that he believes that politics and science should be separated, but he seems to have trouble answering the question of "can politics and science be separated?"

Weber repeats over and over that the role of the scientist is to create tools to understand the world, not to make value judgments.

On page twenty he acknowledges that "many of [his] highly esteemed colleagues are of the opinion that it is not possible to act in accordance with this self denying ordinance..."(20)

But he never again addressees this issue.

Instead, Weber continues to answer the question of should "Now we cannot provide a university teacher with scientific proof of where his duty lies. All we can demand of him is the intellectual rectitude to realize that we are dealing with two entirely heterogeneous problems."(20)

So according to Weber, though we can not scientifically prove that the two should be separated, Weber, the scientist, states the normative proposition that they should be. But can they be?

I think some signals for the answer to this question exist earlier in the text

"[science] might prove useful for somebody who is able to ask the right question?" Isn't the choice to try and answer that "right question" inherently a political choice? even if the researcher is just the one attempting to answer the "right question," posed by others, isn't the choice to answer this or that question inherently a political choice and isn't whom you answer that right question for a political choice?

What happens when this logic is extended to some real word situations

Let’s take the supposition that the scientist is responsible for creating tools and the politician is responsible for making value judgments and apply this supposition to some real world examples.

Were the scientist who created Napalm to incinerate Japanese, and later Vietnamese, civilian populations, making a political decision?

Were the scientists at IBM making a political decisions when they developed machines for Hitler--or was that value judgment beyond their responsibility?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then the question becomes, when does a scientific question not have political implications?

Further, the choice of who to lecture about is a political choice. For example, a friend of mine is in a class called "The History of the Workingman." The first text read in the class was Weber's “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Was the choice to start with Weber's “Protestant Ethic” and not Marx's "Capital: A Critique of Political Economy," a political choice? does that choice have political implications?

PS
I find this quote funny

"the qualities that make someone an outstanding scholar and academic teacher are not those that create leaders in practical life"(25)--hahha ha, is that why there are so many socially awkward people in the academy? OK that was just a joke--but FOR REAL!!!