The Moral Character of Mad Scientists: A Cultural Critique of Science

Abstract

The mad scientist stories of fiction and film are exercises in antirationalism, particularly its Gothic horror variant. As such, they convey the argument that rationalist secular science is dangerous, and their principal device for doing so is to invest the evil of science in the personality of the scientist. To understand this cultural critique of science, it is necessary to understand how the symbols of the scientist's personality are manipulated. This article argues that mad scientists become increasingly amoral as nineteenth-century texts are adapted to twentieth-century films. The consequence is that this cultural critique is becoming even more severe, due to external reasons independent of the glories or the crimes of real scientists.