> In their cloistered and ancient buildings, academics are in the middle of a war.
I don’t think they are. They might be in a struggle for power, or involved in a serious argument, but academics tend to avoid war fighting, let alone be “in the middle” of one. Unscientific people, the ones you say aren’t well equipped to be ethical, are generally the ones who find themselves put in that particular position of directly taking and saving lives. I think the conflicts academics are currently involved in are more centered around ideas.
> And so, ethics is, in fact, an empirically informed way of doing philosophy in that if you don’t understand what a human being is or what human nature is or how we work, then on what basis are you going to do ethics?
I don’t know. Do you own a dog? I love dogs. Some of the finest most honorable beings I’ve ever known have been dogs. If I were standing with one of the world’s top scientists in one end of my home, and say we heard a burglar break in the other end, I think there’s a decent chance the scientist says “run!” and without a thought slips out a window. I know for certain my dog would run directly at the burglar and defend me and my home with his life. Of course this same kind of moral dedication can be seen in service dogs of all kinds, and can take the form of gentle compassion just as easily. And they are far less prone to abandon their moral duty under duress than most people, particularly academics.
The job of caregiver is one of the most common, and low paying, in the U.S. and is associated with minimal education. I’ve known many of them through their care of a loved one with severe dementia. Most of them demonstrate a far more moral approach to other people than myself or any scientist I’ve ever known. They have gained their moral insights through firsthand observation of suffering and it appears to have given them greater perspective in this regard than many people who study texts on the subject.
There is a certain amount of courage, kindness, resilience, selflessness and grit that moral action necessitates, and I have never noticed that scientists have more of these attributes than the unscientific and in fact, it’s my impression that simpler people often exceed academics in this respect.
Nice article, but I think a shade on the utilitarian side. That is, your discussion of the usefulness of science looks absolutely right - but it doesn't, as you acknowledge, really even touch the most important questions in life - why we are here, how we should live, etc.
I wondered, as I so often do nowadays, if you have read Iain McGilchrist's books such as "The Master and his Emissary". Because your article looks to me a bit left-brained. Unimpeachable on the "what" and the "how", but a bit stranded when it comes to the "why". For instance, mysticism is soppy, inefficient thinking. It's an attempt to stop thinking, open up to the world, and feel one's relationships to people, things, and the whole. Almost impossible to put into words, which is why it gets so little attention.
Actually it does but we don’t like the answers. We are here for no particular reason, neither the universe in general nor you in particular have a purpose, and when you die its lights out. I don’t like it either but here we are, enjoy the ride
Alternatively, we are here for the reasons we bring to this existence, both individually and collectively. That is how people actually behave. We desire purpose and meaning, and so we seek these out. Som people operate individualistically, others altruistically. Many of us enjoy a sense of collective wellbeing, and so we find ways to join with others to help cultivate that. Etc etc
That’s a starting point but not a final answer to the question. We are not here for any reason that exists outside of us, but our minds are as real as anything in nature. We need philosophy to answer these questions
Oh, I have many purposes! To enjoy a walk in the pleasant Spring weather, to write an essay about... well, I haven't decided yet, but I have over 50 topics lined up. To sip a wee dram this evening. To understand what the hell "entropy" means. To get an intuitive grasp of Maxwell's equations and relativity. To lose a stone or two. To see a government consisting of honest, intelligent, educated people. (OK, that one's probably not going to happen, but I can hope). To ramble around Skye like Iain McGilchrist, and see if maybe I can grasp some of his insights.
Of course, those are just MY purposes - not God's or the universe or whatever. Why should that matter?
Well if you lived a few centuries ago in Western Europe you’d say your purpose in life is to love and serve god and be obedient to the holy Catholic Church or go to hell. If you were born in India you’d say your purpose in life is to be good in whatever caste you were born into so you get off the endless cycle of reincarnation. In both examples you would see your purpose in life as being externally imposed by god or those who speak for god. Thanks to science we know (yes we know) both these world views are incorrect and now you get to choose your purpose. That to me is a major difference. How many generations of people didn’t have access to the knowledge that they could choose their own purpose with going to hell or whatever? I don’t think we really appreciate the freedom we have by not having an externally imposed purpose
I am afraid I fail to see the causal connection between being a good person and being logical and scientific. I may have impeccable academic credentials and I still may be an evil person. Of course, the article justifies this by saying that being a scientist does not mean being scientistic.
OTOH I may be a farmer who is barely literate, has no idea about the scientific world and yet may be a kind hearted soul. How can one explain that?
Let’s use the farmer example. I am a farmer living 3000 years ago. I have a bad crop, my village has a bad crop, what to do? Well he sacrifices a child to appease the gods, demons, angels, whatever. Farmer is still kind hearted and acting in the best interest of his family and village based on their understanding of the way the world works, which is completely erroneous, so a child dies and people starve. Modern day farmer buys fertilizer. Or pesticide. No one dies. That’s why science is needed to be a good person, because it really is a matter of life and death.
In my example I never mentioned if the farmer was religious or not so religion does not enter the picture as far as my example was concerned. The main point is you can be a good person even if you are not well versed in science.
OTOH, plenrty of examples of evil scientists. It is convenient to say that they are not scientistic but the causality between good nature and being scientific still remains dubious.
The issue isn’t whether a person has scientific knowledge. It’s about whether a person operates empirically versus, say, intuitively or in unquestioning obedience to some authority. You can lack scientific knowledge, but still operate “scientistically” to use the word from the article itself. It’s about having, or making an effort to have, a sound basis for your decisions that’s rooted in objective reality and demonstrable facts.
My point had nothing to do with religion but the fact that if you do not understand reality you are far more likely to make harmful decisions regardless of your innate goodness, whatever that means. So the loving farmer kills a daughter to save his family and village because he does not understand how agriculture really works. Human sacrifice to help crops grow is not something I made up for this post, you know. Unless you believe you can sacrifice humans to increase crop production I don’t get your point.
I think the difference between you and I is I don’t believe in good or evil people. I believe that people are basically rational and our actions are driven by our level of wisdom or ignorance. As science adds to our wisdom more than any other human activity it is essential to acting morally.
Not sure why you are bringing sacrifices in this discussion. That example is so antiquated it is not even relevant in today's world. And to imply that I belive in it is even more absurd.
> I believe that people are basically rational and our actions are driven by >our level of wisdom or ignorance.
Human beings are far more complex. Too many parameters affect their decision making.
Thanks to Johnny and Big Think for this thoughtful and provocative article, which only got served up by the algorithm. My reflections follow.
> In their cloistered and ancient buildings, academics are in the middle of a war.
Something of a one-sided war, since it's the humanities seeking to reassert relevance through social influence, while STEM seeks relevance through improved capability and accurate prediction. Notwithstanding the humanities' periodic academic gaslighting, STEM routinely shrugs that off with the likes of the Sokal hoax. However what's happening in the communications sector now is *also* informed by the humanities, and that's more precarious as it's about popular opinion rather than academic spats.
> Being “scientistic” is different from being a scientist.
I don't love this term because it smells of the 'scientism' gaslights produced by both the humanities and the religious right in the 1990s. Both exploit a false dichotomy from Hume's is-ought fallacy: that science can say how, but never why. That was a fair point in the 18th century, but is more an argument from ignorance today: "we the commentariat still aren't sure ourselves what morality is, and therefore we know that science can't comment on it."
Except that science is quite good at studying morality, which frames fine today as an empirical study. We're a social species that cooperates for protection, shelter-building, food-gathering and child-rearing, but competes for social influence and sex. Some social norms have to keep that tension to a dull roar to keep our societies viable -- hey, let's call it 'morality'. The norms that we share as a species are likely evolved; the norms we develop culturally are likely adapted. We can measure the strengths and weaknesses of each, and engage both primatology and anthropology to see how it might have been developing. So what's the issue?
The success of moral norms can be measured in multiple ways, but for self-evident reasons, resilience to challenge, adaptability to change and inter-generational transmissibility will all be among the minimum criteria. Meanwhile the way that ideas, norms and patterns become dominant can be studied fine as political science while the behavioural impacts can be studied as economics. Furthermore, an empirical study of morality can take adequate account of environmental, demographic and economic pressures, since moral decisions often come with costs, paid against surpluses and what people decide in a famine isn't what they'll decide when the granaries are full.
All of which can get us a lot further, with more accountability and more robustly than moral philosophy has managed over millennia.
So how should we change the way that we do moral commentary?
Note that we license advisors in virtually every significant knowledge industry because we want them to be competent, engaged to the public interest, accountable and transparent with their methods.
I'd offer that today, nobody can credibly offer moral advice without an adequate understanding of cause and consequence engaged through diligent methods of empirical exploration. So while it's not necessarily true that empiricism produces better moral decisions, it *is* true that moral decisions without empirical accountability are full of cruelty, injustice, ignorance and risk.
So what is a potential role for humanities in this?
I'd offer: consensus-building.
Science uses an approach to consensus-building that nobody outside STEM wants to use. It's slow, painful and requires a high level of education and professional discipline. If 'scientistic' means that every moral discussion can only be resolved within STEM-research timeframes, then we'll fall into paralysis.
We need an approach to consensus-building on real-time decisions that's visible, active, committed to the public good *and* accountably informed by the evidence to date. (By the way -- it's not new. Public policy advisors do this routinely; it's just new to the civic domain.)
That relies on STEM, but is more than just STEM. So there's a role for the humanities in that.
What there's no role for today are humanities disciplines ignorant of STEM. And the most pressing reason that the humanities sporadically launch ideological terror attacks on STEM seems to be that they still feel entitled to the trivium without the quadrivium: the rhetoric without the math.
Is physics philosophical? examining matter and proclaiming it to be the truth for all lives is absurd.. It says that physicality is all there is to life. It is part of investigating the world and life in general but not the whole story. It is like listing the senses that we have and denying the existence of telepathy. A skill which many have developed.. It's not rare, and is eminently possible.. Well how does science account for long range communication between sentient beings? It does not have the tools to measure it.. So does telepathy belong in the dustbin because science says that is so? Is physics to be the arbiter of human consciousness? People should stick to what they have studied and know about for certain before making proclamations or dismissing something as irrelevant something that they know very little or absolutely nothing about.. You cannot debate the existence of a neutrino, it is measurable, forecastable, and science has ways to detect them. Machines exist for that purpose. The human complex is a machine that was designed to detect other matters and when trained can do so.. And those matters when detected and experienced can profoundly affect a persons philosophical views and outlook upon life.. if...
You do realize that to Some people who view science as you do that science is actually a Religion. Such as people who are convince that Darwin was Totally correct and that No Higher Power was involved.
Great article. The problem as I see it is if you don’t know how reality works you can’t make good decisions, but reality doesn’t work the way we want it to work so we retreat to the fantasy worlds of religion and faith. Our current predicament reminds me of a Lovecraft quote that “some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age”. Apparently we chose both
Here is how I understood this essay: that to live a good (moral) life we need to know what's going on around us, we need to understand what is real and what is not real. And science is the best way to gather that understanding of what is going on. I agree with this. But I am left wondering about the contributions non-scientists make –– specifically, the contributions of artists, poets, and others bathed in "the humanities" into the nature of what is going on, what is happening, what is.
For example, here is a 1964 poem, "The Sky is Blue," by David Ignatow:
The Sky is Blue
Put things in their place,
my mother shouts. I am looking
out the window, my plastic soldier
at my feet.
The sky is blue
and empty. In it floats
the roof across the street.
What place, I ask her.
(from Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934-1994)
I think David Ignatow is effectively capturing an early-life developmental state of being here, accurately rendering a fragment of "what is going on" in the life of a small boy. I am sure there are explanatory facts from, say, cognitive neuroscience, that would explain the mental processing at work in the boy's mind as he listens to his mother. But is this poem non-scientific? Is the boy's understanding non-factual? Is subjectivity non-scientific? Is the boy's thinking reducible to "intuitive" thinking? Is something else going on here?
I'm not saying I know the answer to these questions. Plus, it is entirely possible (speaking of subjectivity) that I misread the essay, that "my" reading of it strays far from some consensus-reality reading of it. That said, the binary categories of science/non-science seem limiting.
Thanks for the piece.
> In their cloistered and ancient buildings, academics are in the middle of a war.
I don’t think they are. They might be in a struggle for power, or involved in a serious argument, but academics tend to avoid war fighting, let alone be “in the middle” of one. Unscientific people, the ones you say aren’t well equipped to be ethical, are generally the ones who find themselves put in that particular position of directly taking and saving lives. I think the conflicts academics are currently involved in are more centered around ideas.
> And so, ethics is, in fact, an empirically informed way of doing philosophy in that if you don’t understand what a human being is or what human nature is or how we work, then on what basis are you going to do ethics?
I don’t know. Do you own a dog? I love dogs. Some of the finest most honorable beings I’ve ever known have been dogs. If I were standing with one of the world’s top scientists in one end of my home, and say we heard a burglar break in the other end, I think there’s a decent chance the scientist says “run!” and without a thought slips out a window. I know for certain my dog would run directly at the burglar and defend me and my home with his life. Of course this same kind of moral dedication can be seen in service dogs of all kinds, and can take the form of gentle compassion just as easily. And they are far less prone to abandon their moral duty under duress than most people, particularly academics.
The job of caregiver is one of the most common, and low paying, in the U.S. and is associated with minimal education. I’ve known many of them through their care of a loved one with severe dementia. Most of them demonstrate a far more moral approach to other people than myself or any scientist I’ve ever known. They have gained their moral insights through firsthand observation of suffering and it appears to have given them greater perspective in this regard than many people who study texts on the subject.
There is a certain amount of courage, kindness, resilience, selflessness and grit that moral action necessitates, and I have never noticed that scientists have more of these attributes than the unscientific and in fact, it’s my impression that simpler people often exceed academics in this respect.
Nice article, but I think a shade on the utilitarian side. That is, your discussion of the usefulness of science looks absolutely right - but it doesn't, as you acknowledge, really even touch the most important questions in life - why we are here, how we should live, etc.
I wondered, as I so often do nowadays, if you have read Iain McGilchrist's books such as "The Master and his Emissary". Because your article looks to me a bit left-brained. Unimpeachable on the "what" and the "how", but a bit stranded when it comes to the "why". For instance, mysticism is soppy, inefficient thinking. It's an attempt to stop thinking, open up to the world, and feel one's relationships to people, things, and the whole. Almost impossible to put into words, which is why it gets so little attention.
Actually it does but we don’t like the answers. We are here for no particular reason, neither the universe in general nor you in particular have a purpose, and when you die its lights out. I don’t like it either but here we are, enjoy the ride
Alternatively, we are here for the reasons we bring to this existence, both individually and collectively. That is how people actually behave. We desire purpose and meaning, and so we seek these out. Som people operate individualistically, others altruistically. Many of us enjoy a sense of collective wellbeing, and so we find ways to join with others to help cultivate that. Etc etc
That’s a starting point but not a final answer to the question. We are not here for any reason that exists outside of us, but our minds are as real as anything in nature. We need philosophy to answer these questions
Oh, I have many purposes! To enjoy a walk in the pleasant Spring weather, to write an essay about... well, I haven't decided yet, but I have over 50 topics lined up. To sip a wee dram this evening. To understand what the hell "entropy" means. To get an intuitive grasp of Maxwell's equations and relativity. To lose a stone or two. To see a government consisting of honest, intelligent, educated people. (OK, that one's probably not going to happen, but I can hope). To ramble around Skye like Iain McGilchrist, and see if maybe I can grasp some of his insights.
Of course, those are just MY purposes - not God's or the universe or whatever. Why should that matter?
Well if you lived a few centuries ago in Western Europe you’d say your purpose in life is to love and serve god and be obedient to the holy Catholic Church or go to hell. If you were born in India you’d say your purpose in life is to be good in whatever caste you were born into so you get off the endless cycle of reincarnation. In both examples you would see your purpose in life as being externally imposed by god or those who speak for god. Thanks to science we know (yes we know) both these world views are incorrect and now you get to choose your purpose. That to me is a major difference. How many generations of people didn’t have access to the knowledge that they could choose their own purpose with going to hell or whatever? I don’t think we really appreciate the freedom we have by not having an externally imposed purpose
Good read
I am afraid I fail to see the causal connection between being a good person and being logical and scientific. I may have impeccable academic credentials and I still may be an evil person. Of course, the article justifies this by saying that being a scientist does not mean being scientistic.
OTOH I may be a farmer who is barely literate, has no idea about the scientific world and yet may be a kind hearted soul. How can one explain that?
Let’s use the farmer example. I am a farmer living 3000 years ago. I have a bad crop, my village has a bad crop, what to do? Well he sacrifices a child to appease the gods, demons, angels, whatever. Farmer is still kind hearted and acting in the best interest of his family and village based on their understanding of the way the world works, which is completely erroneous, so a child dies and people starve. Modern day farmer buys fertilizer. Or pesticide. No one dies. That’s why science is needed to be a good person, because it really is a matter of life and death.
In my example I never mentioned if the farmer was religious or not so religion does not enter the picture as far as my example was concerned. The main point is you can be a good person even if you are not well versed in science.
OTOH, plenrty of examples of evil scientists. It is convenient to say that they are not scientistic but the causality between good nature and being scientific still remains dubious.
The issue isn’t whether a person has scientific knowledge. It’s about whether a person operates empirically versus, say, intuitively or in unquestioning obedience to some authority. You can lack scientific knowledge, but still operate “scientistically” to use the word from the article itself. It’s about having, or making an effort to have, a sound basis for your decisions that’s rooted in objective reality and demonstrable facts.
My point had nothing to do with religion but the fact that if you do not understand reality you are far more likely to make harmful decisions regardless of your innate goodness, whatever that means. So the loving farmer kills a daughter to save his family and village because he does not understand how agriculture really works. Human sacrifice to help crops grow is not something I made up for this post, you know. Unless you believe you can sacrifice humans to increase crop production I don’t get your point.
I think the difference between you and I is I don’t believe in good or evil people. I believe that people are basically rational and our actions are driven by our level of wisdom or ignorance. As science adds to our wisdom more than any other human activity it is essential to acting morally.
Not sure why you are bringing sacrifices in this discussion. That example is so antiquated it is not even relevant in today's world. And to imply that I belive in it is even more absurd.
> I believe that people are basically rational and our actions are driven by >our level of wisdom or ignorance.
Human beings are far more complex. Too many parameters affect their decision making.
Thanks to Johnny and Big Think for this thoughtful and provocative article, which only got served up by the algorithm. My reflections follow.
> In their cloistered and ancient buildings, academics are in the middle of a war.
Something of a one-sided war, since it's the humanities seeking to reassert relevance through social influence, while STEM seeks relevance through improved capability and accurate prediction. Notwithstanding the humanities' periodic academic gaslighting, STEM routinely shrugs that off with the likes of the Sokal hoax. However what's happening in the communications sector now is *also* informed by the humanities, and that's more precarious as it's about popular opinion rather than academic spats.
> Being “scientistic” is different from being a scientist.
I don't love this term because it smells of the 'scientism' gaslights produced by both the humanities and the religious right in the 1990s. Both exploit a false dichotomy from Hume's is-ought fallacy: that science can say how, but never why. That was a fair point in the 18th century, but is more an argument from ignorance today: "we the commentariat still aren't sure ourselves what morality is, and therefore we know that science can't comment on it."
Except that science is quite good at studying morality, which frames fine today as an empirical study. We're a social species that cooperates for protection, shelter-building, food-gathering and child-rearing, but competes for social influence and sex. Some social norms have to keep that tension to a dull roar to keep our societies viable -- hey, let's call it 'morality'. The norms that we share as a species are likely evolved; the norms we develop culturally are likely adapted. We can measure the strengths and weaknesses of each, and engage both primatology and anthropology to see how it might have been developing. So what's the issue?
The success of moral norms can be measured in multiple ways, but for self-evident reasons, resilience to challenge, adaptability to change and inter-generational transmissibility will all be among the minimum criteria. Meanwhile the way that ideas, norms and patterns become dominant can be studied fine as political science while the behavioural impacts can be studied as economics. Furthermore, an empirical study of morality can take adequate account of environmental, demographic and economic pressures, since moral decisions often come with costs, paid against surpluses and what people decide in a famine isn't what they'll decide when the granaries are full.
All of which can get us a lot further, with more accountability and more robustly than moral philosophy has managed over millennia.
So how should we change the way that we do moral commentary?
Note that we license advisors in virtually every significant knowledge industry because we want them to be competent, engaged to the public interest, accountable and transparent with their methods.
I'd offer that today, nobody can credibly offer moral advice without an adequate understanding of cause and consequence engaged through diligent methods of empirical exploration. So while it's not necessarily true that empiricism produces better moral decisions, it *is* true that moral decisions without empirical accountability are full of cruelty, injustice, ignorance and risk.
So what is a potential role for humanities in this?
I'd offer: consensus-building.
Science uses an approach to consensus-building that nobody outside STEM wants to use. It's slow, painful and requires a high level of education and professional discipline. If 'scientistic' means that every moral discussion can only be resolved within STEM-research timeframes, then we'll fall into paralysis.
We need an approach to consensus-building on real-time decisions that's visible, active, committed to the public good *and* accountably informed by the evidence to date. (By the way -- it's not new. Public policy advisors do this routinely; it's just new to the civic domain.)
That relies on STEM, but is more than just STEM. So there's a role for the humanities in that.
What there's no role for today are humanities disciplines ignorant of STEM. And the most pressing reason that the humanities sporadically launch ideological terror attacks on STEM seems to be that they still feel entitled to the trivium without the quadrivium: the rhetoric without the math.
In my opinion, solid critique
Is physics philosophical? examining matter and proclaiming it to be the truth for all lives is absurd.. It says that physicality is all there is to life. It is part of investigating the world and life in general but not the whole story. It is like listing the senses that we have and denying the existence of telepathy. A skill which many have developed.. It's not rare, and is eminently possible.. Well how does science account for long range communication between sentient beings? It does not have the tools to measure it.. So does telepathy belong in the dustbin because science says that is so? Is physics to be the arbiter of human consciousness? People should stick to what they have studied and know about for certain before making proclamations or dismissing something as irrelevant something that they know very little or absolutely nothing about.. You cannot debate the existence of a neutrino, it is measurable, forecastable, and science has ways to detect them. Machines exist for that purpose. The human complex is a machine that was designed to detect other matters and when trained can do so.. And those matters when detected and experienced can profoundly affect a persons philosophical views and outlook upon life.. if...
You do realize that to Some people who view science as you do that science is actually a Religion. Such as people who are convince that Darwin was Totally correct and that No Higher Power was involved.
Great article. The problem as I see it is if you don’t know how reality works you can’t make good decisions, but reality doesn’t work the way we want it to work so we retreat to the fantasy worlds of religion and faith. Our current predicament reminds me of a Lovecraft quote that “some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age”. Apparently we chose both
I really liked the discourse on a complex topic. These arguments were great examples of why philosophy will be around for as long as man exists.
Here is how I understood this essay: that to live a good (moral) life we need to know what's going on around us, we need to understand what is real and what is not real. And science is the best way to gather that understanding of what is going on. I agree with this. But I am left wondering about the contributions non-scientists make –– specifically, the contributions of artists, poets, and others bathed in "the humanities" into the nature of what is going on, what is happening, what is.
For example, here is a 1964 poem, "The Sky is Blue," by David Ignatow:
The Sky is Blue
Put things in their place,
my mother shouts. I am looking
out the window, my plastic soldier
at my feet.
The sky is blue
and empty. In it floats
the roof across the street.
What place, I ask her.
(from Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934-1994)
I think David Ignatow is effectively capturing an early-life developmental state of being here, accurately rendering a fragment of "what is going on" in the life of a small boy. I am sure there are explanatory facts from, say, cognitive neuroscience, that would explain the mental processing at work in the boy's mind as he listens to his mother. But is this poem non-scientific? Is the boy's understanding non-factual? Is subjectivity non-scientific? Is the boy's thinking reducible to "intuitive" thinking? Is something else going on here?
I'm not saying I know the answer to these questions. Plus, it is entirely possible (speaking of subjectivity) that I misread the essay, that "my" reading of it strays far from some consensus-reality reading of it. That said, the binary categories of science/non-science seem limiting.