Shermer and Pinker on Science and Ethics

Do you believe that science, abetted by reason will naturally and inevitably benefit the human species? Do you believe that once enlightened reason supplants religious superstition the human species will enter a new age of flourishing?

Such are the arguments put forth by scientists like Steven Pinker and now Michael Shermer. Arguing that science is naturally a force for good, Shermer asserts that those who practice scientific disciplines should be charged with making up moral principles for the rest of us.

After all, as Pinker has cogently argued we have made such great progress that we no longer throw virgins into volcanoes—or, at least, most of us don’t. And we do not, as Shermer adds make executions a public spectacle.

One hastens to qualify these instances of happy talk by noting that public executions are coming back into favor, practiced for the most part by prescientific cults. One is happy to note that they are not broadcast on the nightly news, but it would be overly optimistic to claim that they will not eventually be all over the internet.

It’s true that ISIS is a pre-scientific cult, but their practice of public beheading seems to be based on their access to Youtube.

While we accept that there is less violence in the world than there used to be, nothing about science or about human reason suggests that it will always be thus.

Trends continue until they do not. To project a rosy future based on a rosy present or a rosy past has nothing to do with science. As Wittgenstein noted, there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow.

The most naïve student of the markets knows well that the more people believe in the inevitability of a bright tomorrow the more likely it is that tomorrow will bring gloom.

Most of us are old enough to remember the twentieth century, a century that was not short on violence, mass murder and starvation. All by itself, Communism killed over a hundred million people.

Those who want to make atheism our guiding light ought to have the decency to explain why all of the atheist governments and cultures that have heretofore been tried have produced unmitigated calamities.

Besides, declaring that religion is bad while science is good involves making a moral judgment, one that is, at the least, simpleminded.

Reviewing Michael Shermer’s new book, “The Moral Arc,” Sally Satel summarizes his arguments about extending the power of scientists:

Mr. Shermer is a buoyant culture warrior—and an eloquent one—who believes that our better angels will continue to soar. Although an atheist, he is respectful of religion’s role in individual well-being. Nonetheless, he concludes that science and reason, abetted by free markets and democracy, are the drivers of justice and freedom. Insisting that scientists should have a voice in determining values and morals, Mr. Shermer argues that “the goal of a science-based morality should be to construct a set of provisional moral precepts that are true for most people in most circumstances most of the time.”

But, Shermer is playing fast and loose with his concepts. How does science give us the concept of free will? Why does he ignore the place of reason in Western theology? And why does he not explain why science and the enlightenment—along with their more important offspring, the Industrial Revolution—arose in a specific place at a specific time within a specific culture.

Does he think that it was an accident that these wondrous discoveries arose within the culture of Western Judeo-Christianity?

It should be obvious that there is nothing about science, per se that forces us to use it to benefit ourselves and others. Science gives us nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. For the moment we have emphasized the former against the latter, but you cannot guarantee that one day someone will launch nuclear weapons and wipe out a large part of the human species.

Call it improbable and I would agree. Call it impossible and you are talking nonsense.

Last summer, we discovered that the Hamas authorities that rule Gaza had been using their development aid to buy rockets to shoot into Israel and to dig terror tunnels. They believed that these goals were more important than the good of their people.

Of course, they are religious fanatics, but how did it happen that other countries overcame religious fanaticism? Leaders of Hamas know the benefits that science and industry can confer. They reject them. How did it happen that the British and other Europeans pursued the Industrial Revolution without knowing the good that it would eventually bring?

If science has been used to benefit people, this practice is based on the moral principle of benevolence. The principle comes from our religious tradition. I discussed it extensively in my book, The Last Psychoanalyst.

The principle of benevolence exists in other moral universes, those of Aristotle and Confucius, but it drives the impulse to use science and reason and industry to benefit mankind.

It need not always be so.

We recall that when the King of England offered the Emperor of China, Qianlong, the wonders of the Industrial Revolution in 1793, the Emperor refused.

As it happened, the King of England was trying to open up new trading opportunities with China but he did benevolently give it advanced Western technology. Qianlong did not believe that benevolence was very important.

As for the uses (and abuses) of science reason, they were not invented by the Enlightenment. The Middle Ages saw a flourishing of rational deliberation and debate. Then, thinkers like Averroes, Avicenna, Maimonides and Aquinas—none being obscure figures—brought Aristotelian thought into the Judeo-Christian world and launched a new round of scientific and rational inquiry.

Admittedly, they did not know the experimental method but a major theologian named Albertus Magnus did write about botany, astronomy, minerology, zoology, and physiology.

Thinkers throughout the Middle Ages debated theological issues vigorously. Among the most impressive debaters was one Peter Abelard. They disagreed vigorously on major theological points. Abelard was eventually excommunicated for heresy by one of the other major theological figures of the time, Bernard of Clairvaux.

Reason did not sleep during the Middle Ages. It was alive and well in university faculties and Christian monasteries.

To appreciate this, one needs to understand what science is and what it is not. And one needs to understand what religion is and what it is not.

Steven Pinker, for example, seems to believe that astrophysics can disprove metaphysics, that the ethical precepts taught by the Bible can be discredited by scientific inquiry.

Examine his argument:

To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.

Evidently, Pinker is confused. If the laws that govern the physical world are not designed to produce human well-being, how does it happen that knowledge of those laws leads to progress?

And why does Pinker imagine that the belief systems of religions are based on fact, anyway. The story of Adam and Eve does not depend on fact. It is a moral fable, an effort to teach moral principles.

We might ask why we need stories to teach moral principles. If we do we would note that science is not in the business of storytelling. If science is going to establish a new morality, how will it communicate, teach it and induce people to follow it?

Pinker imagines that once religion has been discredited on matters of fact, it must be doubted on matters of morality.

In his words:

Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics. The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. For the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, struggles, or messianic ages. And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today.

An ethic of human flourishing is not the same as an ethic that promotes social harmony. What is more important, your personal flourishing—thus your wish to become like a potted plant—or the good of the community.

At times, these might coincide, but often they do not.

Humanism fails to accept that human beings only exist within social groups and that their duties as members of those groups supersede their duty to the philosophical abstraction called humanity or to their least common denominator, their membership in a species.

[Addendum: For the sake of clarity... if you are defined primarily as a member of the human species, thus by your biology, nothing you do can cause you not to belong to said species. If you are defined by your membership in a constituted group, you will always risk being expelled or ostracized from the group for egregiously bad behavior. Thus, seeing people as mere human beings, beyond being demeaning also consigns them to amorality.]