E.O. Wilson
The
ideological tendencies of scientism seek to scrap traditional philosophically
based ethics and produce a whole new ethical system based upon a scientific
understanding of human biology. The official name for the school is “ethical
naturalism.”
[1] “Bio-ethics” implies the
genuine ethical issues that emerge from biologically based intrusion of
humanity into the natural processes of living; cloning, artificial insemination
and the like. What I call “Ethical naturalism” is an attempt to actually
replace the philosophical discipline of ethics with one derived from science.
[2]
Of course the major issue is that science has no mission to determine how we
should live. Ethics is primarily about understanding how we should live, how we
treat others, how we decide what actions to take in a given situations. These
are not scientific questions they are philosophical questions. In their attempt
to wipe out all other forms of knowledge the scientism movement seeks to
eradicate philosophy from human thought. In this chapter I will argue that
applying science to ethics is the fallacy of trying to derive an “ought” form an
“is.” I also argue that the diversity of ethical theory is not a weakness but a
strength and one that disproves the wisdom of this urge to reduce ethics to
science.
Most people
find ethics very frustrating to study because it is complex, based upon a lot
of rules, and one never finds a clear cut exposition of what it all means. Another
reason people find the academic study of ethics frustrating, I think, is that
church conditions them to expect a simple list of rules. We are given to
understand form Christian devotionals that it’s a simple straight forward thing
to “love everyone” or something. The actual study of ethics is not only complex
but based upon many texts. There is no one authority that ethicists look to but
there is a multiplicity of schools and theories and it’s hard to get any
leverage for one view. It takes years of study to come to a conclusion that one
theory really captures it all and even then there’s no guarantee you’ve got it
right. While I would argue that this is a necessary and desirable state of
affairs it’s the opposite of what most people come to expect from religious
training. Moreover, modern ethics is descriptive and not prescriptive. This is
something most people can’t accept, or even understand. People not trained in
philosophical ethics expect that modern ethicists are supposed to be telling us
the best ethical view rather than just analyzing what goes into the making of
the various views.
Ethical
thinking is divided into two major schools of thought: deontological ethics and
teleological ethics. The former is based upon the notion that ethical thinking
proceeds from rule keeping, that the good is derived from an understanding of
duty and obligation. There’s a specific aspect of deontological thought called
‘rule deontology’ which says that ethical thinking should be understood in
terms of rule keeping, or that the nature of duty and obligation is best understood by an understanding
of rules. A lot of people think
deontology is just a simple rule keeping mentality; just follow the rules and
don’t understand them. That’s the simplistic version. The rules have reference
to duty and obligation which is the real meat of deontological understanding.
The latter school, the teleological says that ethical action should be judged
by the “consequence” of that action. The outcome is where we determine the
right or wrong, the “do” or “don’t” in a situation. This kind of thinking is
also called ‘consequentialism.’ What both of these have in common is that they
each seek to find the “good” in actions. That means they are about values. The
good isn’t some natural substance we can discover in parts per million, it’s
not a molecular structure; it’s a result of the valuations we place on
concepts, ideas, and actions.
Beginning
ethics students have a tendency to try and unite deontology and teleology. “Why
don’t we just combine them and say we get at that which is good by both,” or “why
does it matter?” We can’t combine because either one is exclusive of the other.
Either the valuation of good is loaded in the front and is there before we
begin or what comes first is neutral and it’s not made good or bad until we
attach value to it. Thus it’s outcome that determines the valuation. That
doesn’t mean that deontological ethics is not about values too. The values in
deontology are front end loaded so to speak: duty and obligation. In
teleological ethics they come out of the result in relation to the values of
seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. In a way we could say that teleological
ethics only real value is avoiding pain. If the outcome determines it then we
can’t say that part of it is outcome and part is before hand. Of course there
are exceptions to every rule. So we find that Kant has a hybrid system where he
uses both. He uses them in different ways, at different points. That way they
don’t get in each other’s way.
Most ethical systems are going to be one or
the other of these two schools. The attempt to make a scientifically determined
ethical system from understanding human biology is a version of teleological
ethics. They seek to derive the good from the outcome; that fits values of a
utilitarian nature. So ethics is about values. We made ethical axioms based
upon the values that we take to a given issue. It’s the subjective aspect of
value-based thinking that scientism finds so objectionable. Ethics doesn’t give
us clean neat little paint-by-numbers solutions. It’s not totalitarian. It
requires reflection, it offers conflicting solutions. As Dorothy Emmett put it
“morality is always contestable.”
[3]
Those who seek scientific precisions and no need to question further don’t like
traditional ethics because it doesn’t yield neat easy solutions but requires a
life-time of study and thought. Those who seek cold hard objective fortress of
facts don’t want to have to spend years thinking about it and then still risk
being wrong. James Rachels made a famous defense of ethical naturalism in which
he expressed the idea that ethics not being based upon scientific fact is an
oddity:
Ethical naturalism is the idea that
ethics can be understood in terms of natural science. One way of making this
more specific is to say that moral properties (such as goodness and rightness)
are identical with natural properties, that is properties that figure into
scientific descriptions or explanations of things. Ethical naturalists also
hold that justified moral beliefs are beliefs justified by a particular kind of
causal process. Thus C.D. Broad observed that ‘if naturalism be true, ethics is
not an autonomous science, it’s a department or an application of one or more
of the natural or historical sciences.’
[4]
We see there the tendency to crowd out all other forms of
thought but the scientistic ideology. Rachels expresses surprise that no one thought
this way before, for example in the early twentieth century. “During this
period philosophy was thought to be independent of the sciences. This may seem
a strange notion especially where ethics is concerned. One might expect moral
philosophers to work in the context of information provided by psychology which
describes the nature of human thinking and motivation.”
[5]
That would only be strange if one based right and wrong upon desires and
motivations rather than something beyond human valuation, or if one based ought
upon something other than what is (such as what
should be). The ethical
naturalists remove the transcendent grounding and based ethics squarely upon
scientific data as though it’s perfectly natural to think science tells us how
to live, or as the values are built into nature and all we have to do is get
some scientific data. Examining the thought of three famous ethical naturalists
this becomes apparent.
E.O. Wilson
We can see
this motivation in the thinking of E.O. Wilson, who in this generation is
probably the grand daddy of scientific ethics:
Centuries of debate on the origin of
ethics come down to this: Either ethical principles, such as justice and human
rights, are independent of human experience, or they are human inventions. The
distinction is more than an exercise for academic philosophers. The choice
between these two understandings makes all the difference in the way we view
ourselves as a species. It measures the authority of religion, and it
determines the conduct of moral reasoning.
The two assumptions in competition are like islands in a sea of chaos, as
different as life and death, matter and the void. One cannot learn which is
correct by pure logic; the answer will eventually be reached through an
accumulation of objective evidence. Moral reasoning, I believe, is at every
level intrinsically consilient with -- compatible with, intertwined with -- the
natural sciences. (I use a form of the word "consilience" --
literally a "jumping together" of knowledge as a result of the
linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common
groundwork of explanation -- because its rarity has preserved its precision.)
[6]
The first problem loaded into this quotation is the
implication that there is no value in back of ethics; the value application is
so obvious that just knowing the fact will obtain it for us. Notice that
eliminates any sort of value oritend thinking, such as philosophy and religion.
It’s all just a matter of logic and facts. What facts, how do we interpit them?
That seems not to occur to him. He brings it all down to religion vs science.
Notice there is no philosophy in his world. It’s not a matter of philosophy,
religion and science, but just religion and science. Philosophy has ceased to
exist for him. It seems to be a matter of hard fast get it right with
scientific precision vs. the shaky nature of religious faith which has nothing
to offer apart from faith. He asserts in the second paragraph that science and
religion are competing. Competing for what? They exist to provide two totally
different kinds of knowledge. Science is about the workings of the natural world,
which has nothing to do with determining what should be done and religion is
there to give us an understanding of aspects of reality that are beyond
scientific understanding. That would seem to be scientism’s point; there is
nothing beyond their grasp. In the second paragraph he asserts that logic and
empirical evidence will agree in the end. Is this a statement of faith? Logic
can’t be decided by empirical matters, Popper told us this in the chapter on
Fortress of facts. We can’t prove a universal principle with empirical
evidence. Wilson says that “moral
reasoning” will dove tail with scientific objective evidence, yet I say the
implications of scientism will destroy ethical thinking altogether. Look at the
ominous beginning to the subject; ethics requires a multiplicity of views it’s
about the subjective issue of values yet these are the aspects Wilson
sees as the problem that he wants to eliminate.
Wilson
seems to indicate that through scientific understanding we will bring together
different disciplines. Of course the implications are clear that theology won’t
be one of them and it seems as though philosophy doesn’t exist for him. So he’s
really talking about bringing together different kinds of scientific
disciplines to take over a form of thinking that has never been understood as
part of the scientific domain (remember, as we said in chapter one, the title
of his book—consilience—refers to the reduction of all forms of knowledge to
science alone). In this sense there’s a strange reversal of roles.
Traditionally the religious ethical thinking tends to be the one pursuing for
objective ethics on the grounds that God’s word gives us a universal inviolable
standard that makes moral decisions clear. The atheist is usually the
relativist. Here the atheist takes over the objectivists’ ground; science will
establish facts of ethics so we don’t need to wonder anymore. The religious
thinker winds up recognizing the relative nature of a value based assumption.
What we need to realize at this point is that conservative types of Christian
thinkers have always made a mistake in thinking that the issues in morality are
about objective proof. Because they have made an issue of objectivity, they
have played into the hands of the biologically based ethicists. Objectivity and
certainty are not the big issues in ethics. They never have been. He seems to
assume that all religious ethics and philosophical ethics rely upon
transcendence, nor does he seem to see the difference in transcendence and
transcendentalism.
“The choice between
transcendentalism and empiricism will be the coming century’s version of the
struggle for men’s souls. Moral reasoning will either remain centered in idioms
of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or it will shift toward
science-based material analysis. Where it settles will depend on which world
view is proved correct…”
[7]
The myth of
ethical uncertainty and fear of ethical uncertainty are seen in Chruchland and
Harris re-telling of the myth of the enlightenment. By re-telling the myth of
the enlightenment I mean the old idea: religion is stupid and oppressive and
stifles scientific knowledge and keeps us bogged down in superstition, while
science frees us (from religion and superstition) for a bright shining future
of gadgets and control of nature and getting things right.
Churchland
Patricia S.
Chruchland, (1943--) is a Canadian-American Philosopher who works in the filed
of
neurophilosophy. She has taught at University
of California, San
Diego since 1984. In
Braintrust: What Neuro Science
Tells us about Morality[8] Chruchland’s
basic argument is that morality is social, and social life is essentially the
interactions of different sets of neurons. Values originate in the brain and
grow out of the social interaction of these sets of Neurons. Thus there’s no
trick to moral values, they are just imposed upon us by the goals our neurons
set for us and the demands of social interaction. The title of the second
chapter is “Brain Based values.”
Moral values ground a life that is a
social life. At the root of human moral practices are social desires; most
fundamentally these involve attachment to family members, care for friends and
need to belong. Motivated by these values individually and collectively we try
to solve problems that can cause misery and instability and threaten survival.
Since are brains are organized to value self welfare as well as welfare of kith
and kin, conflicts frequently arise between the needs of self and the needs of
others. Social problem solving grounded by social urges leads to ways of
handling these conflicts…robust institutions about right and wrong take root
and flower.
[9]
So right and wrong are just a concept that has grown out of
the need to solve social conflicts and resolve tension between the needs of the
individual and those of the group. The most troubling aspect of the way she
talks is that the brain seems to be a little man inside who is doing the real
thinking and then fooling us into thinking it’s our idea. Brains care. Neurons
care. We don’t care, we just think we do, brains do. She goes on to ask “how do
brains come to care about others?”
[10]
It’s actually the unseen pilot, the real us inside us that does the caring. She
gives a naturalistic take on how caring forms as a biological urge, of course
it’s totally divorced from even an ideal much less a spiritual reality of love.
Her answer is rooted in self preservation, and somehow the sense is turned
outward to others, probably because we depend upon others for our own survival.
[11]
She discusses the evidence that mammals understand the way in which their own survival
is tied up with the survival of the group.
Thus what
she’s doing is building a biological basis for social contract theory. The fact
of it being grounded in nature and brain chemistry is supposed to give it a
magic “ought” that makes it right. After all, the concept of right is nothing
more than a chimera designed to cover up the practical need for social
alliances. “Depending upon ecological considerations and fitness
considerations, strong caring for the well being of offspring has in some
mammalian species has extended further to encompass kin or mates or friends or
even strangers as the circle widens. This widening of other caring in social
behavior marks the emergence of what eventually flowers into morality.”
[12]
So caring is just an accident of having peptides like Oxycotin.
[13]
It doesn’t mean anything accept in pragmatic terms. Chruchland shows total
unconcern for moral philosophy in her understanding of the moral dimension.
She’s supposed to be informing us about what science tells us about morality
but it sort of slips out that the moral thing is just a joke, charade, delusion
or gimmick. “We could engage in a semantic wrangle about weather these values
are really
moral values (emphasis hers) but a wrangle about words is apt
to be unrewarding.”
[14] A wrangler over words is apt to be quite
unrewarding, especially when it might disprove your thesis. “Of course only
humans have human morality. But that is not news only a
[15]tedious
tautology. One might as well note that only marmosets have marmoset morality…”
Her whole concept of morality apparently is just a semantic game. At that rate
informing us of what science tells us about morality is a joke; apparently it’s
telling us that morality is just a word game. She goes on, however, in trying
to construct a meaningful social contract theory.
Indeed she
does define morality as something basically akin to science:
Morality seems to me to be a natural
phenomenon—constrained by the forces of natural selection, rooted in
neurobiology, shaped by the local ecology, and modified by cultural
developments. Nevertheless, fairness requires me to acknowledge that this sort
of naturalistic approach to morality has often seemed insensitive to
metaphysical ideas about morality, such as that morality is essentially
dependent on a supernatural source of moral information and moral worth.
Because this is a not uncommon view, it may be useful to consider what a
supernatural approach can teach us.
[16]
Of course there is also the idea that morality has a lot to
do with such supernatural entities as Immanuel Kant, and we might also ask what
concepts of duty and obligation and the kingdom of ends has to tell us about
morality. Churchland doesn’t mess around with armatures in moral philosophy
such as Kant, nor with Moore, Macintyre, or Rawls. Instead, she arbitrarily
defines morality by the biological basis for behaviors labeled as “moral”
rather than by the subject matter or the logic or some ontological basis. This
relates to what we said about reductionism in that chapter (5) because it’s
simply re-labeling and losing of phenomena. Any aspects of moral thinking not
reducible to brain chemistry are just assumed not to matter and to merely be a
matter of semantics.
Of course
when it comes to exploring what “a supernatural view has to teach us” she just
plays the same trick again; reduces the supernatural out of existence and
reduces moral thinking to biology. Rather than argue against the existence of
God, however, she merely “deconstructs” morality by first taking apart
conscience. Appealing to Socrates she points that conscience doesn’t always
advise us the right way, it doesn’t always tell us the same things.
[17]
Of course there are not very many moral philosophers of the stature of Kant who
tells us about conscience. Who is to say that Socrates didn’t take the right
way given the circumstances?
Harris:
Sam Harris
wrote
the Moral Landscape, subtitle: “how can science determine
human values?” So it’s not going to just inform us of our values but
“determine” them. Presumably regardless of what we do value, the priests of
knowledge, those lucky enough to go to big name universities and major in
genetics will determine what we want in the future. Harris begins by observing
that he’s talked with thousands of people, most of them well educated, who
believe that human values are not based upon truth content, and that well being
and misery are so poorly defined we can’t know what they mean.
[18]
He warns that he’s not trying to give a scientific account of what people do in
the name of morality. Nor is he suggesting that science can help us get what we
want out of life. “Rather I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us
understand what we
should do and
should want –and therefore, what
other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives
possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions
just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, such answers
may one day fall within reach of maturing science of the mind.”
[19] So
apparently it’s not just a matter of understanding what human beings value and
want, but of teaching them what they should value and want? Who is to decide
this? Science can tell us what to think is, but it can’t tell us what is right.
According to Churchland there is no true “right and wrong,” just brains wanting
things. Science can make it seem right in our minds through control so that
what we want is what science tells us to want. But of course this is “helping”
we who are too feeble to help ourselves, we who are stuck in the religious
thinking. He just told us science we can’t help us get what we want then he
tells us that it will. How can this be? Because he wants to use science to
change what we want to what he wants us to want. But of course he masks this in
terms of what we
should want. Then what does it mean that he includes
telling others what they should want? Then falling within reach of the science
of the mind? That’s not a hint about control? He wants science to reach beyond
the mere ability to explain the physical workings of the world and to become
the orbiter of values. Of course that means arbitration of values would be
controlled by scientists. None of these would be Svengalis can ever explain how
science can know what the proper values are in the first place. Presumably they
will choose pleasure over pain for the greatest number, but how do they know
that’s what should be?
He goes on
treading on the toes of ethicists. He says, “Once we see that a concern for
well being (defined as deeply and inclusively as possible) is the only
intelligible basis for morality and values, we will see that there
must be
a science of morality.”
[20]
In light of this quotation it is apparent that Harris’s ethics are basically
teleological. He’s clearly a consequentialist if not a utilitarian.
[21]
In other words, it is the end result that makes an action moral, not duty or
obligation to act, but how the action turns out. The extent to which it
conforms to the desired goal is what makes it moral. The way he works it out is
that science will tell us which of the problems is more devastating and which
hurts more people that will tell us how to spend our resources. “…would it be
better to spend our next billion dollars eradicating racism or malaria?”
[22]
So he’s already working from an implicit value system that’s based upon an
ethical philosophy which has already put in place well being as the end toward
which ethical thinking must strive, and the underlying value behind ethical theory,
to the exclusion of deontology (duty and obligation) and all other theories. He
does this before he has the scientific means to determine the value system. So
this is really a shell game. He’s going to give us the means to determine
what’s best for us but we have to determine it within a framework he’s already
picked out that excludes alternatives. Not that we all wouldn’t agree that we
should do “what’s best” but the issue is how we know what’s best. He’s already
decided the supreme issue is the outcome in terms of physical comfort and
avoidance of physical pain. He doesn’t recognize that this a value that he’s
put in place as a philosophical underpinning, so we don’t get a answer to
weather or not we embrace that as a value.
He deals
with the issue of the subjective nature of ethics, which is the basis of
relativism. He distinguishes between subjective/objective in two senses,
practice and principle. He’s opposed to ideals of good, such as Platnoic forms.
He’s only speaking in terms of a diminished naturalistic sort of good that
comes as a side effect of the way we do things. That’s good in terms of our
value system, he assumes we all value outcome as a moral goal. His distinction
between experience (practice) and ideal (principle) allows him to say that we
can do things better without trying to establish the moral good, but then
that’s supposed to give us a moral good.
[23]
When he brings religious views into it he thinks that ideas of heaven and hell
prove that religious views are really based upon pleasure and pain too. They
are not really concerned with the good for its own sake but with avoiding hell.
[24]
In this manner he seems to be attempting to reduce all value systems to his
own. One of the major problems with his handling of value systems is the basis
for adopting one. It’s obviously simplistic and self serving to just assume
everyone is about the same value system I want. It’s also delusion to assume
that there are not hidden subtexts in one’s value system.
One of the major problems in determining a
value system is in assuming that the “ought” or “one should” aspect of a
valuation of actions can be determined by factually ascertaining the nature of
things. We see this assumption in Harris’s statement about science as coming to
understand what’s going on in the universe. What do we mean by “going on?”
There are multiple aspects to what’s going on, how we determine which of those
is crucial? What if we decide that what’s going on is going on spiritually? We
are not supposed to think that because that’s not what science tells us.
Science isn’t going to tell us what’s “going on” in any but a materliasitc
framework. So the reductionist view has so truncated reality that it dictates
the disappearance of a whole aspect of reality embraced by the vast majority of
people to suit the ideological framework put in place by a tiny elite who want
us to accept their values as facts. This is the bias we set in place just by
reducing the field of ethics to scientific proof.
There is another
troubling aspect to Harris’s take on science and ethics. Brain Earp, Research
Associate, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics tells us that Harris tries to subsume
ethics under the banner of science.[25]
We can see that in the wording of Harris’s argument. In saying that science is
about finding “what’s going on in the universe” that pretty much subsumes
everything that isn’t excluded form existence. Earp talks about a lecture that
Harris gave at Oxford, hosted by Richard Dawkins, called ““Who says science has nothing to
say about morality?” When prompted by Dawkins interview that he was going up
against questions with which moral philosophers had grappled for centuries
Harris said: “Well, I actually think that the frontier between science and
philosophy actually doesn’t exist… Philosophy is the womb of the sciences. The
moment something becomes experimentally tractable, then the sciences bud off
from philosophy. And every science has philosophy built into it. So there is no
partition in my mind.”[26]
If there is no ground between philosophy and science then he’s subsuming ethics
under the banner of science and there need be no difficulty. The problem is
he’s not content to just allow philosophy to continue doing it’s thing, he
wants to take over its ground but then impose his reduction and re-label
everything and replace real moral philosophy with ideology (see the C.D. Board
quote fn 4). He takes out moral reasoning and replaces it with reduction to
numbers. Imposes a surreptitious value system in the guise of “facts,” and
replaces duty and obligation with teleological thinking. This view is supposed
to carry the assurance of being factual proof of what’s “going on in the
universe” yet this just transgresses one of the basic concepts of modern
thought. This is a problem sometimes referred to as “Hume’s Fork”[27]
but more commonly called ‘the is-ought
part 2
[3] find Dorothy Emmett,
morality is contestable.
[4] C.D. Broad quoted in Rachels, Op cit., 2. Original quotation by Broad,
C. D.: “Some of the Main Problems of Ethics,” Philosophy, 31 (1946) 99-117
[7] E.O. Wilson,
Consilience,
New York: Knopf, Inc., 1998, p.240
[8] Patrcia S. Churchland,
Braintrust:
What Nueroscience tells us about Morality. Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton
University Press. 2011, 12.
[18] Sam Harris, The Moral
Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values.” New
York: Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster,
Inc., 2010, 28.
[19] Ibid. 28 (emphasis his).
[21] One difference in being
a utilitarian as opposed to a general consequendtilsit would be that the
utilitarian. would be that the utilitarian has the dictum of “greatest good for
the greatest number.” Whereas a consequentialist who is not a utilitarian my
try to forgo that idea.
[27] “Hume’s fork” really
refers to several things that all fall under the general category of “synthetic
and a pripori.” The is-ought dichotomy falls under this rue brick in the sense
that it’s a juxtaposition of a practical empirical sate of affairs “the is” vs
a an ideal transcendent concept (the ought). The “is/ought” problem originally
appears Hume’s
Treatise on Human Nature, book III, part I, section 1.
