The Eclipse of Ethics
[Part V of The Folly of Scientism by Austin L. Hughes
Perhaps no area of philosophy has seen a
greater effort at appropriation by advocates of scientism than ethics.
Many of them tend toward a position of moral relativism. According to
this position, science deals with the objective and the factual, whereas
statements of ethics merely represent people’s subjective feelings;
there can be no universal right or wrong. Not surprisingly, there are
philosophers who have codified this opinion. The positivist tradition
made much of a “fact-value distinction,” in which science was said to
deal with facts, leaving fields like ethics (and aesthetics) to deal
with the more nebulous and utterly disparate world of values. In his
influential book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong
(1977), the philosopher J. L. Mackie went even further, arguing that
ethics is fundamentally based on a false theory about reality.
Evolutionary biology has often been seen as highly relevant to
ethics, beginning in the nineteenth century. Social Darwinism — at least
as it came to be explained and understood by later generations — was an
ideology that justified laissez-faire capitalism with reference to the
natural “struggle for existence.” In the writings of authors such as
Herbert Spencer, the accumulation of wealth with little regard for those
less fortunate was justified as “nature’s way.” Of course, the
“struggle” involved in natural selection is not a struggle to accumulate
a stock portfolio but a struggle to reproduce — and ironically, Social
Darwinism arose at the very time that the affluent classes of Western
nations were beginning to limit their reproduction (the so-called
“demographic transition”) with the result that the economic struggle and
the Darwinian struggle were at cross-purposes.
Partly in response to this contradiction, the eugenics movement
arose, with its battle cry, “The unfit are reproducing like rabbits; we
must do something to stop them!”
Although plenty of prominent Darwinians
endorsed such sentiments in their day, no more incoherent a plea can be
imagined from a Darwinian point of view: If the great unwashed are
out-reproducing the genteel classes, that can only imply that it is the
great unwashed who are the fittest — not the supposed “winners” in the
economic struggle. It is the genteel classes, with their restrained
reproduction, who are the unfit. So the foundations of eugenics are
complete nonsense from a Darwinian point of view.
The unsavory nature of Social Darwinism and associated ideas such as
eugenics caused a marked eclipse in the enterprise of evolutionary
ethics. But since the 1970s, with the rise of sociobiology and its more
recent offspring evolutionary psychology, there has been a huge
resurgence of interest in evolutionary ethics on the part of
philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and popular writers.
It should be emphasized that there is such a thing as a genuinely
scientific human sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. In this field,
falsifiable hypotheses are proposed and tested with real data on human
behavior. The basic methods are akin to those of behavioral ecology,
which have been applied with some success to understanding the
behavioral adaptations of nonhuman animals, and can shed similar light
on aspects of human behavior — although these efforts are complicated by
human cultural variability. On the other hand, there is also a large
literature devoted to a kind of pop sociobiology that deals in untested —
and often untestable — speculations, and it is the pop sociobiologists
who are most likely to tout the ethical relevance of their ostensible
discoveries.
When evolutionary psychology emerged, its practitioners were
generally quick to repudiate Social Darwinism and eugenics, labeling
them as “misuses” of evolutionary ideas. It is true that both were based
on incoherent reasoning that is inconsistent with the basic concepts of
biological evolution; but it is also worth remembering that some very
important figures in the history of evolutionary biology did not see
these inconsistencies, being blinded, it seems, by their social and
ideological prejudices. The history of these ideas is another cautionary
tale of the fallibility of institutional science when it comes to
getting even its own theories straight.
Just the same, what evolutionary psychology was about, we were told,
was something quite different than Social Darwinism. It avoided the
political and focused on the personal. One area of human life to which
the field has devoted considerable attention is sex, spinning out
just-so stories to explain the “adaptive” nature of every sort of
behavior, from infidelity to rape. As with the epistemological
explanations, since natural selection “should” have favored this or that
behavior, it is often simply concluded that it must have done
so.
The tacit assumption seems to be that merely reciting the story
somehow renders it factual. (There often even seems to be a sort of
relish with which these stories are elaborated — the more so the more
thoroughly caddish the behavior.) The typical next move is to deplore
the very behaviors the evolutionary psychologist has just designated as
part of our evolutionary heritage, and perhaps our instinct: To be sure,
we don’t approve of such things today, lest anyone get the wrong idea.
This deploring is often accompanied by a pious invocation of the
fact-value distinction (even though typically no facts at all have made
an appearance — merely speculations).
There seems to be a thirst for this kind of explanation, but the pop
evolutionary psychologists generally pay little attention to the
philosophical issues raised by their evolutionary scenarios. Most
obviously, if “we now know” that the selfish behavior attributed to our
ancestors is morally reprehensible, how have “we” come to know this?
What basis do we have for saying that anything is wrong at all if our
behaviors are no more than the consequence of past natural selection?
And if we desire to be morally better than our ancestors were, are we
even free to do so? Or are we programmed to behave in a certain way that
we now, for some reason, have come to deplore?
On the other hand, there is a more serious philosophical literature
that attempts to confront some of the issues in the foundations of
ethics that arise from reflections on human evolutionary biology — for
example, Richard Joyce’s 2006 book The Evolution of Morality.
Unfortunately, much of this literature consists of still more
storytelling — scenarios whereby natural selection might have favored a
generalized moral sense or the tendency to approve of certain behaviors
such as cooperation. There is nothing inherently implausible about such
scenarios, but they remain in the realm of pure speculation and are
essentially impossible to test in any rigorous way. Still, these ideas
have gained wide influence.
Part of this evolutionary approach to ethics tends toward a debunking
of morality. Since our standards of morality result from natural
selection for traits that were useful to our ancestors, the debunkers
argue, these moral standards must not refer to any objective ethical
truths. But just because certain beliefs about morality were useful for
our ancestors does not make them necessarily false. It would be hard to
make a similar case, for example, against the accuracy of our visual
perception based on its usefulness to our ancestors, or against the
truth of arithmetic based on the same.
True ethical statements — if indeed they exist — are of a very
different sort from true statements of arithmetic or observational
science. One might argue that our ancestors evolved the ability to
understand human nature and, therefore, they could derive true ethical
statements from an understanding of that nature. But this is hardly a
novel discovery of modern science: Aristotle made the latter point in
the Nicomachean Ethics. If human beings are the products of
evolution, then it is in some sense true that everything we do is the
result of an evolutionary process — but it is difficult to see what is
added to Aristotle’s understanding if we say that we are able to reason
as he did as the result of an evolutionary process. (A parallel argument
could be made about Kantian ethics.)
Not all advocates of scientism fall for the problems of reducing ethics to evolution. Sam Harris, in his 2010 book The Moral Landscape,
is one advocate of scientism who takes issue with the whole project of
evolutionary ethics. Yet he wishes to substitute an offshoot of
scientism that is perhaps even more problematic, and certainly more
well-worn: utilitarianism. Under Harris’s ethical framework, the central
criteria for judging if a behavior is moral is whether or not it
contributes to the “well-being of conscious creatures.” Harris’s ideas
have all of the problems that have plagued utilitarian philosophy from
the beginning. As utilitarians have for some time, Harris purports to
challenge the fact-value distinction, or rather, to sidestep the tricky
question of values entirely by just focusing on facts. But, as has also
been true of utilitarians for some time, this move ends up being a way
to advance certain values over others without arguing for them, and to
leave large questions about those values unresolved.
Harris does not, for example, address the time-bound nature of such
evaluations: Do we consider only the well-being of creatures that are
conscious at the precise moment of our analysis? If yes, why should we
accept such a bias? What of creatures that are going to possess
consciousness in the near future — or would without human intervention —
such as human embryos, whose destruction Harris staunchly advocates for
the purposes of stem cell research? What of comatose patients, whose
consciousness, and prospects for future consciousness, are uncertain?
Harris might respond that he is only concerned with the well-being of
creatures now experiencing consciousness, not any potentially future
conscious creatures. But if so, should he not, for example, advocate
expending all of the earth’s nonrenewable resources in one big
here-and-now blowout, enhancing the physical well-being of those now
living, and let future generations be damned? Yet Harris claims to be a
conservationist. Surely the best justification for resource conservation
on the basis of his ethics would be that it enhances the well-being of
future generations of conscious creatures. If those potential future
creatures merit our consideration, why should we not extend the same
consideration to creatures already in existence, whose potential future
involves consciousness?
Moreover, the factual analysis Harris touts cannot nearly bear the
weight of the ethical inquiry he claims it does. Harris argues that the
question of what factors contribute to the “well-being of conscious
creatures” is a factual one, and furthermore that science can provide
insights into these factors, and someday perhaps even give definitive
accounts of them. Harris himself has been involved in research that
examines the brain states of human subjects engaged in a variety of
tasks. Although there has been much overhyping of brain imaging, the
limitations of this sort of research are becoming increasingly obvious.
Even on their own terms, these studies at best provide evidence of
correlation, not of causation, and of correlations mixed in with the
unfathomably complex interplay of cause and effect that are the brain
and the mind. These studies inherently claim to get around the problems
of understanding subjective consciousness by examining the brain, but
the basic unlikeness of first-person qualitative experience and
third-person events that can be examined by anyone places fundamental
limits on the usual reductive techniques of empirical science.
We might still grant Harris’s assumption that neuroscience will
someday reveal, in great biochemical and physiological detail, a set of
factors highly associated with a sense of well-being. Even so, there
would be limitations on how much this knowledge would advance human
happiness. For comparison, we know a quite a lot about the physiology of
digestion, and we are able to describe in great detail the
physiological differences between the digestive system of a person who
is starving and that of a person who has just eaten a satisfying and
nutritionally balanced meal. But this knowledge contributes little to
solving world hunger. This is because the factor that makes the
difference — that is, the meal — comes from outside the person. Unless
the factors causing our well-being come primarily from within, and are
totally independent of what happens in our environment, Harris’s project
will not be the key to achieving universal well-being.
Harris is aware that external circumstances play a vital role in our
sense of well-being, and he summarizes some research that addresses
these factors. But most of this research is soft science of the very
softest sort — questionnaire surveys that ask people in a variety of
circumstances about their feelings of happiness. As Harris himself
notes, most of the results tell us nothing we did not already know.
(Unsurprisingly, Harris, an atheist polemicist, fails to acknowledge any
studies that have supported a spiritual or religious component in
happiness.) Moreover, there is reason for questioning to what extent the
self-reported “happiness” in population surveys relates to real
happiness. Recent data indicating
that both states and countries with high rates of reported “happiness”
also have high rates of suicide suggest that people’s answers to surveys
may not always provide a reliable indicator of societal well-being, or
even of happiness.
This, too, is a point as old as philosophy: As Aristotle noted in the Nicomachean Ethics,
there is much disagreement between people as to what happiness is, “and
often even the same man identifies it with different things, with
health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor.” Again,
understanding values requires philosophy, and cannot simply be
sidestepped by wrapping them in a numerical package. Harris is right
that new scientific information can guide our decisions by enlightening
our application of moral principles — a conclusion that would not have
been troubling to Kant or Aquinas. But this is a far cry from scientific
information shaping or determining our moral principles themselves, an
idea for which Harris is unable to make a case.
A striking inconsistency in Harris’s thought is his adherence to
determinism, which seems to go against his insistence that there are
right and wrong choices. This is a tension widely evident in pop
sociobiology. Harris seems to think that free will is an illusion but
also that our decisions are really driven by thoughts that arise
unbidden in our brains. He does not explain the origin of these thoughts
nor how their origin relates to moral choices.
Harris gives a hint of an answer to this question when, in speaking
of criminals, he attributes their actions to “some combination of bad
genes, bad parents, bad ideas, and bad luck.” Each of us, he says,
“could have been dealt a very different hand in life” and “it seems
immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality
itself.” Harris’s reference to “bad genes” puts him back closer to the
territory of eugenics and Social Darwinism than he seems to realize,
making morality the privilege of the lucky few. Although Harris admits
that we have a lot to learn about what makes for happiness, he does
advance his understanding that happy people have “careers that are
intellectually stimulating and financially rewarding” and “basic control
over their lives.”
This view undermines the possibility of happiness and moral behavior
for those who are dealt a bad hand, and so does more to degrade than
uplift at the individual level. But worse, it does little to advance the
well-being of society as a whole. The importance of good circumstances,
and guaranteeing these for as many as possible, is one that is already
widely understood and appreciated. But the question remains how to bring
about these circumstances for everyone, and no economic system has yet
been devised to ensure this. Short of this, difficult discussions of
philosophy, justice, politics, and all of the other fields concerned
with public life will be required to understand what the good life is
and how to provide it to many given the limitations and inequalities of
what circumstance brings to each of us.
On these points, as with so many
others, scientism tends to present as bold, novel solutions what are
really just the beginning terms of the problem as it is already widely
understood.
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