From Gargantua to Pantagruel: Rabelais’s Warning About Science Without Conscience

October 27, 2025
Author: Juan Manuel Palomares Cantero
Versión en español

What happens when science advances faster than conscience? In recent months, various health agencies in the United States have dissolved bioethics and science advisory committees, eliminating forums designed to ensure prudent deliberation about the ethical limits of progress. What appears to be an administrative reorganization reveals a deeper crisis: a loss of confidence in the need for moral judgment within research¹ and public policy^2. Ethics, and especially bioethics, are not academic ornaments, but the moral memory of science, its critical conscience. When technology is emancipated from discernment, humanity becomes the object of its own power.

Hans Jonas³ warned that technological mastery without responsibility threatens the continuity of authentic human life; progress is just only when it is oriented toward the common good⁴. This text invites reflection on the moral value of ethics committees, the reasons for their weakening, and the consequences of a science without conscience. Finally, it underscores the urgency of recovering a bioethics of solidarity and subsidiarity, capable of reconciling knowledge and responsibility. Ethics should not be understood as a limit on development, but as a concrete expression of hope and shared humanity.

The Moral Function of Ethics Committees

Ethics committees constitute one of the highest forms of institutional moral conscience. Their origin, after the horrors of the Second World War and documents such as the Nuremberg Code⁵ and the Belmont Report⁶, made clear that scientific progress without moral orientation can lead to serious violations of human dignity. They are not accessory bureaucratic structures, but concrete manifestations of the principle that all science requires ethical guidance to remain human. Their moral function goes beyond the technical review of protocols: they embody institutional prudence, a space where scientific rationality enters into dialogue with moral deliberation. In them, bioethical principles are brought to bear on the challenges of biomedical, technological, and social research^7. From this perspective, ethics committees are guardians of the recognition of the person as an end and never as a means or an experimental variable.

Hans Jonas warned that modern technological power demands a new ethical imperative: to act in such a way that the consequences of our actions are compatible with the permanency of an authentically human life on Earth. Ethics committees embody that anticipatory responsibility: they prevent harm, promote proportionality of risk, and foster reflection on the ultimate ends of science.

The committees represent an indispensable counterweight to institutional utilitarianism and the logic of efficiency. Their existence reminds us that the legitimacy of knowledge does not derive from its effectiveness or profitability, but from its fidelity to the common good and to human dignity. By institutionalizing prudence and interdisciplinary dialogue, ethics committees preserve the noblest dimension of knowledge: its vocation to serve, care for, and humanize.

The Weakening of Public Ethics and Its Causes

The recent dismantling of science and bioethics advisory committees in the United States—among them the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)⁸ and the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP)⁹ — reflects a troubling ethical fragility in contemporary institutions. According to reports, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)¹⁰ justified this decision by invoking administrative efficiency; however, eliminating these spaces for moral deliberation creates a vacuum of responsibility that weakens the prudential character of science and public policy. This phenomenon, as the Union of Concerned Scientists warns¹¹, follows a technocratic logic that seeks to accelerate decision-making by reducing ethical filters. Under the appearance of efficiency lies the displacement of the principle of responsibility toward a paradigm of productivity, where deliberative processes are seen as obstacles to progress.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur¹², described this drift as a crisis of ethical mediation: when instrumental power emancipates itself from moral judgment and sets itself up as an end in itself. Public ethics erodes when governance is confused with mere management and moral deliberation is replaced by procedural efficiency. This substitution dissolves institutional solidarity and detaches science from its orientation to serve the person and the community. From the perspective of personalism, this implies forgetting the intrinsic value of every human being and reducing research to an instrument subordinated to economic or ideological interests¹³.

This weakening reveals a crisis of trust: societies cease to believe that their scientific and political structures act with prudence and justice. In the face of this, bioethics must recover its critical and prophetic voice, reminding us that science without conscience becomes a blind power.

Science Without Conscience: Bioethical Implications

When science becomes separated from conscience, it loses its deeply human meaning. The pursuit of knowledge ceases to be an act of service and becomes an exercise of dominion. François Rabelais warned as early as the sixteenth century that “science without conscience is nothing but the ruin of the soul”¹⁴, and that warning takes on unprecedented urgency today in the face of advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and gene editing, where the capacity to transform life often outpaces reflection on its consequences. The weakening of ethics committees—spaces where technique once encountered its moral limit—intensifies this crisis by severing the link between knowledge and responsibility. Contemporary technoscience tends to absolutize innovation, forgetting the question of meaning and generating what Hans Jonas called a “moral gap”: the mismatch between human power and our ethical capacity to control it.

From a bioethical perspective, closing that gap requires recovering prudence as the virtue of discernment, not as a brake on progress. To be prudent in science is to anticipate the effects of every action on persons, communities, and the environment, ensuring that no benefit is obtained at the expense of human dignity. Diego Gracia¹⁵ reminds us that knowledge reaches maturity when it is oriented toward the good rather than power, when it joins beneficence with justice and autonomy with compassion.

A science without conscience leads to depersonalization: subjects become data, decisions become algorithms, and bodies become manipulable matter. The risk does not lie in technology itself, but in its detachment from moral meaning. For this reason, bioethics is the living memory of humanity: custodian of the common good, promoter of solidarity, and guarantor that progress is, above all, a service to life.

Toward a Bioethics of Solidarity and Subsidiarity

The crisis of public ethics is not solved by diagnoses alone, but by a moral reconstruction of institutions and of the scientific culture. In the face of the tendency to reduce ethics to regulations or fragmented committees, it is urgent to rediscover its communal root: the awareness that every human action, and especially scientific action, has shared consequences. The principles of solidarity and subsidiarity present themselves as axes of a bioethics capable of reconciling freedom and responsibility, technique and humanity, the individual and the common good.

Solidarity, in its profound sense, is not mere empathy but the recognition of a common belonging. We all form part of the same community of destiny. As Martha Nussbaum notes¹⁶, our humanity is revealed in the capacity to recognize the other’s vulnerability and respond with rational compassion. A bioethics of solidarity integrates rights and responsibilities, promoting distributive justice and shared care in domains where scientific decisions affect collectives—such as vaccination, biotechnology, or environmental policy—.

Subsidiarity, for its part, affirms that authority should be exercised at the level closest possible to the person, respecting autonomy and accompanying responsibility. Applied to science and public health, it means that ethics committees, universities, and scientific communities should not be replaced by centralized decisions or political interests; their deliberation constitutes the moral fabric of society.

Both principles are ordered to the pursuit of the common good¹⁷, understood not as a sum of interests, but as the set of conditions that make everyone’s flourishing possible. Only a bioethics rooted in solidarity and subsidiarity can offer a mature response to technoscience: an ethics that does not limit progress, but orients it toward humanization, restoring the meaning of knowledge as service and shared hope.

Conclusions

Ethics is not an academic luxury, but the heart that keeps science’s conscience alive. Its absence, disguised as efficiency or neutrality, leaves societies defenseless against the errors of the past. Dismantling ethics committees in the name of administrative agility erodes the very idea of humanity in research. Every scientific decision has a human face; ignoring it reduces life to data and dignity to a variable. The challenge is not to slow progress, but to reconcile it with conscience: to make science a form of care. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais warned that “science without conscience is nothing but the ruin of the soul.” Is it not time to ask whether, in the name of progress, we are once again forgetting the soul of science?

Juan Manuel Palomares Cantero is a lawyer who holds a master’s and a doctorate in Bioethics from Universidad Anáhuac, Mexico. He has served as Director of Human Capital, as well as director and general coordinator at the Faculty of Bioethics. He currently works as a researcher in the Academic Directorate of Integral Formation at the same university. He is a member of the Mexican National Academy of Bioethics and of the Latin American and Caribbean Federation of Bioethics Institutions. This article benefited from writing assistance using ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool developed by OpenAI. 

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