Well, you might be right, but I don’t see that in this article and this blog post.
I partially share your irritation with much of science journalism. But…
Moral and scientific enlightenment aren’t the same. One is based on values and personal experiences, whereas the other is based on theory and observations of the scientific community. Einstein’s scientific discoveries were very much a product of the era and environment in which he worked, building on necessary work that came before it. Morality and ethics require no such prior foundation. Going against the prevailing mores of the time require a measure of courage and motive for doing so, but those mores aren’t the product of collective effort to empirically verify knowledge the way that science is. One needn’t wait for social mores to catch up to live by the moral principles they may or may not embody; and Einstein is a prime example of this in that he did go against the grain of prevailing social mores later in life.
