What I’m talking about is not scientism. In medical research and medical practice ethical questions come up all the time. Someone has to make a decision about these questions. I personally don’t have the time nor the resources to adjudicate all of these questions, therefore I have to trust the decision of some proxy on most questions. Trusting a group of people who care about ethics, and know about medicine is a good proxy (the ethics board).
This doesn’t mean that I believe them infaliable. If you believe that a particular ethics board in a particular case made a bad call let me know. Identify the case, tell me what the board decided and what you think should have been decided and why. I promise you that I will use all my faculties to learn more about the case and make a decision of my own if possible. Does that sound like scientism to you?
That being said this is a complete non-sequitur in the present case. The article is not about an ethics board who made a bad call. It is about a researcher who skipped the whole process and decided that he alone is enough to decide what is ethical and what is not. That is very suspect in itself. Furthermore people think that he made the wrong call, and what he did was not ethical.
Are you arguing that the ethics board system is so faulty that he was right to ignore it?
Are you arguing that he made the right call in thinking that this particular intervention is ethical?