But it has also reactivated an old threat to science: the demand that certain kinds of scientific knowledge be forbidden

We are in an era where there are numerous forces marshaled against the pursuit of truth. I came across this article which reads as relevant today as when it was published in March 1978.

The moralistic fallacy by Bernard B. Davis of the Bacterial Physiology Unit, Harvard.

The increased focus of our age on social justice, and on the need to control the costs of technology, has had admirable consequences. But it has also reactivated an old threat to science: the demand that certain kinds of scientific knowledge be forbidden. George Steiner, in his recent Bronowski Memorial Lecture, rejected this proposal, on the pragmatic grounds that it just won't work. However, Nature's editorial of 2 February, drew a different conclusion: that we are now groping for a code to protect society from dangerous knowledge, much as we have developed ethical codes to protect the subjects of biomedical research.

[snip]

Recognition of the distinction between reality and the knowledge of reality has profound consequences. It tells us that if we wish to build social policy soundly we must not confuse the normative with the empirical. More specifically, we must rest the goal of racial justice on grounds of moral conviction , rather than on vulnerable assumptions about questions of fact; and we must recognise that we can adapt our social institutions to our evolutionary legacy, but not vice versa. We must also recognise that justice and equality are subtle and complex concepts however simplistic the forms that they assume in the ideological marketplace: and these concepts will eventually have to be defined in ways that do not depend on a particular assumed distribution of abilities. If we choose otherwise, and suppress human behavioural genetics for fear that the results may contradict our assumptions, the costs may be high. For a major goal of this field. long emphasised by J. B. S. Haldane. is to help us to adjust educational procedures to individual differences in cognitive potentials and in patterns of learning.

For several reasons, then, the assumption of an inherent conflict between genetics (or other areas of science) and justice seems philosophically unsound. The objections can be summarised quite simply: since blocking off an area of inquiry on moral grounds fixes our knowledge in that area, it becomes. in effect, an illogical effort to derive an 'is' from an 'ought'. I would suggest that we call this procedure the moralistic fallacy, since it is the mirror image of what Hume and G. E. Moore identified as the naturalistic fallacy. But, alas, identification may not get us very far. For as Stephen Toulmin recently emphasised in Daedalus, we are in the midst of one of history's swings between a romantic concern with the good and a classic concern with truth.

We may not like what we find truths to be but we are far better positioned knowing what they are than by trying to make our epistemic way by wishes, hopes and desires.