Is science amoral? So I was taught in school, lo these many years ago, and so many atheists and skeptics keep telling us. However, the more I think about this, the less certain I become that it's really so. First let's summarize.
When we say science is amoral, what we mean is something like this. The act of science, i.e. of using the scientific method, of doing the process of science, carries no moral implications. You can't say that observing, forming a hypothesis, testing it experimentally, revising it, testing it, and so on, hopefully eventually netting a theory is moral or immoral, it simply is. It's a method and that set of steps is morally neutral. Fair enough. For the sake of argument, let's go with this.
However, I find a curious thing. Several people, I'm certainly not the first, have suggested that the atheist concern for religion as violence is somewhat narrow, since science has given us some pretty messed up things as well, the typical example is the atomic bomb though others could certainly be educed, e.g. chemical warfare agents and so on. To this atheists typically respond that you can't blame science, because science is amoral. I think however that this response ignores something very important. Namely, people do science. It as though we were saying, he killed a man with that gun!, and somebody responds yeah, but you can't blame that, the gun is amoral, it's just the bullet responding to forces and all.
This is true but I hope my objection becomes readily apparent. We may not blame the gun, as it were, but we can indeed, and do, blame the person for using that gun to kill. Now let's take a look at science. What do we say of a person who is told by their employer, make me a nerve gas that will do painful things X Y and Z to people and eventually kill them? Do we say, oh, don't blame him, he was just fascinated by the scientific puzzle of it all, the interesting chemistry involved in how to get a molecule to behave in that manner, how to get it to interact with a nervous system just so? I should certainly hope not!
So two related things seem to be going on here. Because the method of science is amoral, its products seem to be considered amoral. Why? Because they are produced with an amoral method. It's almost as though we're saying, well, unfortunately it just so happens that this particular chemical compound kills humans in a horribly painful manner. Similarly, the potential victims of that compound become moral blanks. It is not a father, a wife, a child, a family which will be affected by this compound, it is "the human nervous system", as though the human nervous system were some abstract thing floating in ethereal space. Since we only have moral issues when dealing with living beings, I assume here that living means conscious also, and the human nervous system is not "living" as such, our putative chemical neurotoxin can have no moral implications whatsoever.
To an extent this is true, were our putative nerve gas found in nature it would just so happen to be deadly to humans. However, what's being missed here is that all of this involves people. Recall that a scientist is developing this gas. So, a scientist, a person, must decide, yeah, this sounds like a perfectly fine idea. In other words, by removing people from the equation, we attempt to remove moral culpibility. Science, however, cannot exist without people. It is a thing practiced and implemented by people. People came up with the scientific method. It is not a thing found in the universe, like a chunk of rock or a star or something. To be sure ideas are part of the universe. However, let's examine the implications of this.
People often say, to those horrified by nuclear weapons something trite like, well you can't put the genie back in its bottle. Then they may further tell you something about science and its supposed amorality, implying that hey, this nuclear force stuff is just there, you can help or harm with it, and gosh golly, sooner or later, somebody would figure out how to harm with it. To my mind, this entirely misses the point. Yes the force is there. Yes it may be directed to any end to which we are capable of directing it. That isn't the question. The question is, should we direct it to that end in the first place?
Some may object at this point. Our putative nerve gas, if altered, may cure neurological diseases. The atomic bomb, so far as I know, gave birth to nuclear power, and so on. This seems to assume, at worst, that the destructive applications must precede the constructive ones, or at best, that the destructive ones are somehow mitigated by the later constructive applications. In any case we preserve the supposed amorality of science, again a chemical was "discovered", a use of a force of nature was "discovered", as though it was just lying around rather than being a unique compound made by us, or as though we didn't make the machine that directed the force to kill, and because of that discovery we've cured some neurological diseases or gained nuclear energy. Except of course these are really new discoveries, alterations of the original deadly ones.
Again this seems to simply be avoiding the question. If you know, as a scientist, that your creation will be used exclusively to kill, or nearly so, shouldn't you be asking yourself whether it's a good idea, dare I say whether it is moral?, to make it in the first place? Could we not have discovered nuclear power without making bombs first? Thus I must conclude: the scientific method is amoral ... science, however, is intimately bound up with morality. The sooner we recognize this, the better off we'll be. The sooner we quit objecting to the idea that, as one person put it, science is more likely to bring about the apocalypse than religion, with the notion of science's supposed amorality, the more likely we'll be to recognize the dangers involved with our uses of science.
Note: When I say "living" and "conscious" above, as an animist I likely have wider definitions of such terms than the average person. I am not suggesting of course that we cease to, say, use trees if we deem them conscious, and no animist society has done so, considering it to be an immoral act. In general dead trees are used or protocols are used to attempt to assure that the spirit of the tree approves of its body being killed and used. I offer this not as a starting point for a debate on animism, nor as a conversion attempt, but simply to suggest that even if we accept a wider definition of living beings and thus have more issues of morality arise from this acceptance, there are still perfectly moral ways to do the things we as humans do on a regular basis. It is not necessary to suggest that since trees are alive we quit killing them damn it!, and go live in caves or something. We would still be perfectly capable of building houses and the like.
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7 comments:
I just had to pounce on this one (you KNOW I did!) :)
1. First, I doubt that there was any real exploration of the "scientific method" or "process of doing science" in your school. I certainly know there wasn't in mine. Most of our "science" classes pretty much consisted of "Tell the teachers what they want to hear, or they flunk you". There was, at any rate, no actual substantive inquiry into the moral implications of the "process of science".
My point being: Your school must have ruled. Or are you referring to college experiences here. You have to be WAY more specific than just saying "school told me science was amoral". Elucidate please.
2. "This is true but I hope my objection becomes readily apparent. We may not blame the gun, as it were, but we can indeed, and do, blame the person for using that gun to kill."
Well at least you get THAT distinction. Too many people don't. "blaming the tools" is extremely trendy on all sides of the sociopolitical spectrum, and it's usually tied in with the idea that if people didn't HAVE "tools", things would be better. I beg to differ. Assuming that humans DO have "animalistic drives" (which is also a very trendy notion) have you seen how animals interact? Violence is by no means a human invention. Moreover, bare-knuckle fighting is not only possible, but occurs really frequently. So we can dispense with the idea that a lack of "tools" will create a nonviolent world.
(Not saying that you were making that argument, just pre-empting it from square one.)
3. "Now let's take a look at science. What do we say of a person who is told by their employer, make me a nerve gas that will do painful things X Y and Z to people and eventually kill them? Do we say, oh, don't blame him, he was just fascinated by the scientific puzzle of it all, the interesting chemistry involved in how to get a molecule to behave in that manner, how to get it to interact with a nervous system just so? I should certainly hope not!"
But then, why (to take the stereotypical atheist response to this), do we NOT apply the same standards of moral culpability to religion?
I find many of the aggressive atheists shortsighted and genuinely sloppy, but they do have a point here: Why is it that when (to take a rather fresh example) Muslims blow up subway trains or hijack aircraft and fly them into buildings, to we NOT get the same level of questioning directed toward them, and/or the content of the religion which justifies their actions?
This entire post hinges on a single error: failure to differentiate between "science" -- a method used to examine reality, the TOOLS produced by that method, and the actions TAKEN by people USING those tools.
Let's take a step backward here:
What we now think of as the "scientific method" is merely a more formalized subset of the type of thing that has been going on in all civilizations throughout history. Metallurgy, for example: Blacksmiths figured out how to do stuff with metal. Would anyone (other than a complete psychopath) argue that blacksmiths were morally culpable for what people did with swords?
So no, neurotoxins, guns, swords, rocks-chipped-into-arrowheads do NOT have "moral implications". The knowledge-base which allows people to MAKE neurotoxins, guns, swords, and stone arrowheads does not have "moral implications' either.
Morality pertains ONLY to the actions of individuals and, arguably, to those "directing" them to take those actions.
Josef Mengele and the Nazi leadership were responsible for the atrocities perpetrated at the camps. the Scalpel manufacturer was NOT.
Now, there is a fundamental difference between science and religion: religion is EXPLICITLY about moral policy, in that one of it's primary ingredients is prescriptive and proscriptive rules -- taboos and commandments and that sort of thing.
So, if you think about it, religion IS NOT analagous to science to any degree whatsoever -- rather, it is analogous to the policy directives to which the knowledgebase of science is being put.
So let's rephrase the question (and put the bullet to this whole discussion):
If various "pens of God" command that infidels be burned at the stake, one can -- and must -- morally judge that, no?
But that's never what happens.
Every time something horrifying happens with difinitively religious overtones, we have this pathetic ass-scramble in an attempt to prove that whatever happened wasn't "true" whatever-it-was.
Thus, Al Quaida weren't "true Muslims", etc.
My point here is that "I was just following orders" and/or "just doing my job" is NEVER a valid response -- EVEN WHEN those "orders" supposedly originate from a "supernatural" source.
But yeah, knowledge, and the implimentations OF that knowledge, have no moral import as such.
"If you know, as a scientist, that your creation will be used exclusively to kill, or nearly so, shouldn't you be asking yourself whether it's a good idea?"
This is probably the most specious part of your whole argument, here.
First, this presumes complete open-ness on the channels of communication between scientists/functionaries and the "authorities" giving them orders. This is NEVER the case.
Secondly, you can NEVER know that a given scientific discovery, machine, whatever, "will exclusively be used for bad purposes". Things, quite simply, do NOT "only have negative purposes". Let's look at guns, for example.
What about an armed woman preventing herself from being raped? The gun, in this case, offsets the so-called "natural" brute-strength which would allow the man to rape her.
But this example brings up the other sticky point that even WITHOUT tools or the knowledge-base to create them, brutality will probably still happen. Look at the animal kingdom.
To sum up:
1. Knowledge itself has no moral implications whatsoever.
2. "Products" of said knowledge have no moral impications whatsoever.
3. ACTIONS have moral implications (irrespective of knowledge or toolset used to take such actions.)
4. POLICY ALWAYS has moral implications.
Should we blame Allah for the 9/11 Attacks? After all, there IS stuff in the Koran about what to do to "infidels" -- and most of it isn't very pretty.
Good post, though.
There's a lot of stuff to get to here, and I have to figure out a better posting platform. In any case, let me get to the first thing, and then sort of explain a bit more about what I'm getting at.
We did talk about this in school, late elementary or what a lot of people would call middle school, so say grades 5-8. We got the standard summary of the scientific method, observe, hypothesize, etc., and were told in no uncertain terms that science was amoral. I remember this because they took great pains to distinguish amoral from immoral.
Now let me sort of summarize my whole thing, with a fun example. Remember the Flintstones? Remember the Great Gazoo? He got exiled from his planet and only Fred and Barney could see him, and he helped them. One time Fred asked him why he got exiled. He replied that all he had done was make a simple little button. Fred said that seemed pretty harsh, but well, what did it do? Well, if you pushed it it blew up the entire planet.
Now is the button evil? Is his making the button evil? I don't know, we could probably argue about that. But I see no good use that such a button could be put to, and that's what I'm getting at when I say science has moral implications and it's done by people. You can't just go "oh well I wanted to, you know, see if I could make a button to blow up the entire planet, think of the scientific challenge, harnessing and directing all of those forces and ..." You can't just say, hey, I just followed the scientific method, I observed, I hypothesized, and what do you know, I was right, I could make a button that blows up the entire planet.
To come to one last point, I don't think my point about scientists was the most specious part of my argument. You offer that, for one thing, the chain of communication is never as clear as "make me a nerve gas to painfully killa bunch of people". That may be. But these are scientists. Unless you want to claim that most if not all chemical and biological weapons, for instance, came about as, how shall I say, happy accidents, the scientists who developed them had to know what they'd do. I find it particularly difficult to imagine a situation where chemical and biological weapons are used in a good manner. So the chemicals and germs might be neutral, sure. My point is, some tools are pretty much guaranteed to be put to bad ends.
Unlike say, a hunting knife iwth which you can kill or get food, a tool that can be put to good or ill purposes, something like nerve gas seems to only have one purpose, kill and kill in a horrible manner. Now again, we can say the nerve gas has no purpose, it simply is and it just so happens that it does this to humans. That's fine. But saying that isn't an excuse for making it, oops, it just "so happens" that we made a chemical that's not only deadly to humans, but kills them in an incredibly painful and gruesome manner. But hey, we're science, and we're amoral!
And that seems to be the typical line of atheist argument. If you say something like "religion is violent, but as a counterpoint, science gave us the nuclear bomb" or even something like "theists may be violent but scientists gave us the nuclear bomb", you get "hey, science is amoral". Bullshit it's amoral. Yes, it's amoral in its methodology. How that methodology is put into practice, e.g. Nazi medical experiments since you brought them up, or to what ends it is put, developing nerve gas and such, those things are not only part and parsel of science, but are very intimately tied up with moral issues. Why do I say they are part and parsel of science? Because science, as I've said, is practiced by people. The "scientific method" isn't a thing out there in the universe doing itself. It's used by people. I take "science" to mean all of that, not just the scientific method but the whole practice of science, what kind of experiments are you doing, how are you doing them, what are you trying to develop with them, and so on.
P.S.
If this is horribly unreadable I apologize, due to the way comments display now I can't go back and edit. Hence my need for a better method of posting them. I'm working on it.
Wow, man, you DO raise some very good points (and, why does it NOT suprise me that we're on the same page here?)
1. Let's be very honest here: your Flintstones example is pretty shaky, in that it was a one-off gag to patch a plot-point, in what was arguably a very poorly plotted knockoff of the Honeymooners. As such, to pull that example out of context and attempt to make it into some kind of "profound statement" is, at best, a hell of a stretch.
Just sayin'.
2. Second, nobody just does stuf "because they felt like it", at random, especially not something systematic like building "a simple little button to blow up the world". Perfect example of this: Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: he did not just sit down one day and go "wow, I can build explosives, and mail them to corporate presidents and stuff! That'll be a hoot!"
Instead, he had a very definite sociopolitical agenda behind what he did. And, yes, building explosives or weapons IS amoral in and of itself -- as are the weapons themselves. (This is also why I think people should thwart censorship by FLOODING the world with "bomb-making instructions" and stuff on principle, but we can talk about that more later.)
You're clarifications would have been good, if they had actually answered my questions. You admitted that science IS amoral (as a methodology) -- which is exactly what you say your school taught you. So, having conceeded their point, you then proceed to split hairs over how SCIENCE may be amoral, but scientists aren't.
As I said in my reply, "I was just following orders" is NEVER a valid excuse.
But you dodged my counter-question totally. My question was that, if we are to hold scientists morally culpable for the uses to which their discoveries are put, why are we supposedly NOT to hold "Allah" or "Islam" as at least "a contributing factor" in the stuff that happened on 9/11 or suchlike?
This is a point where I am in substantive agreement with the atheist scene -- somehow, supposedly "supernatural" events are not held to the same standard as "natural" events, or human interactions.
So, for example, Muhammad gets a "revelation" from Allah telling him to go do nasty things to "unbelievers". (There are several suras related to this, and I can provide you with links to webpages about this, if we want to go that way, but I digress.)
So, my point here is: does Muhammad have any sort of justification for "just following orders", in this regard? To my way of thinking, anything powerful enough to give me the "revelations" -- ESPECIALLY if it was an entity that had created the entire world and was "omnipotent" -- wouldn't particularly need any kind of assistance like that. At the very least, you'd think such an entity could "smite the unbelievers" itself. Any halfway sane (and morally responsible) person would be morally obliged to tell such an entity to go fuck itself with a hair-dryer. (Think about how we react to people who kill somebody's husband for money, or because they were "asked" to do it, etc.)
But no. When it comes to "religious" experieces (at least those originating from the Abrahamic paradigm), you get this presumption that such "revelations" shoudl be obeyed unflinchingly and that even QUESTIONING them is tantamount to a moral lapse.
classic example of this is Abrham and Isaac. Yahweh "miracles up" Sarai so she can get pregnant at an old age. Then, a while later, Yahweh orders Abraham to kill Isaac and offer him up as "a burnt offering".
Sorry, dude, but I am solidly in agreement with Dawkins (for example) when he says that this is morally repugnant, and calls the entire ethical basis of the whole Abrahamic tradition into question.
You'd think Abrahaham would have at least a few minutes pause to ask "wait, you magicked things up so Isaac could be born. If you want him killed,do it yourself." Or maybe "why would an entity capable of creating an entire world and everything that lived in it still be so insecure as to need "sacrifices" and/or adulation from it's creatures --- and punish them when they failed to do so?
it boggles the mind. But somehow, this -- and other such incidents are shrugged off by many religious authorities as some kind of "sacred mystery" which is neither to be questioned or denounced.
Which brings me back by my comparison with scientists: okay, let's concede that Mengele was an evil fuck who experimented on unwilling victims, either because he wanted to do it, or because he was "just following orders" -- which is arguably worse, in my opinion.
The comparison with Abraham's situation, or Muhammad's response to "unbelievers" should be obvious: why are these two not regarded as either evil scumbags? I mean, come one now -- offering one's own child up as a "burnt sacrifice" to appease the narcisistic "jealousy" of a supposedly "omnipotent" entity that still has temper-tantrums like a five year old child? This is a case where, arguably, the "creatures" are morally superior to their supposed "creator" to the extent that they question -- or even disobey -- such orders.
If "I was just following orders" is evil in the "mundane" world, then it is at LEAST as evil in a "religious" setting.
Sorry for the polemic, but this is one aspect of the Abrahamic paradigm that I find to e really goddamn dangerous. I'll send you an email about a particular villainous version of this that happened really recently. Some woman cut off her infant daughters arms and bled her empty as "an offering to God", while singing religious songs. Sorry, dude, but you gotta at least admit that the Abraham/Isaac thing -- where Abraham is deemed morally praiseworthy for his willingness to slaughter and burn his own son alive, has worrisome similarities.
But yeah, I do think that scientists -- and everybody else -- is morally culpable for their actions (barring some very infrequent judgement calls.)
Yes, I am in agreement with Dawkins et al. that the violent are wrong. I didn't mean to not get to that question, it just deserved a longer treatment. Many Jewish authorities, BTW, read that story as Abraham failing, the test was in other words not whether he'd obey, but whether he'd go "now hang on a minute here ..." It's weird because he did it in other places, e.g. saving his brother Lot, so it's clear that he was willing to uestion Yahweh, and Jewish tradition seems to support this questioning, e.g. the entire book of Job.
What I disagree with is Dawkins' and Harris' insistance on viewing religions in thesame way fundamentalists do. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, if you follow their arguments. If you obey your religious texts and kill, you're insane. If you say yes those parts are in there but they don't apply to us for .. insert reason(s), you're ignoring what your scripture says, and why the hell do you even have a religion at all? Then we come to the heart of the matter which suggests to me that Dawkins and Harris are simply prejudiced against religion and looking for examples to support them.
Harris' big argument is that moderates, although they don't seem dangerous on theface of it, are just as much a problem as the whackos who do terrorism or chop off their baby's arms while singing hymns. Why? Because moderates make religion seem reasonable and so they deflect the ability of Harris and Dawkins and such to criticize religion. Seriously, I'm not making this up, you should be able to find interviews and such if you google for Sam Harris. This is his big thesis.
Now, on to your other question, why don't we analyze religion like this? We do, some of us, and again we get damned for it, and you've done it in your previous comment. People will say, that's not "true Islam", or what have you. OK, so how are we, as religious persons participating within whatever tradition, supposed to criticize it? Here's how I look at it. Peoplewant to look at Islam, and they go, ah see, look at those crazy terrorists, ah see, look at these passages in the Quhran, that's violence right there! Then they often do the Harris/Dawkins trick, oh well you're just a wishy washy believer for ignoring that stuff.
But here's my point, two of them actually. There are a billion Muslims in the world, roughly. Let's say that a million of them are terrorists, hell bent on the destruction of America and Israel. Do you know what that means? That means that .01% of Muslims are terrorists. That's one out of a thousand. Now tell me why in the hell I should dismiss an entire religion as violent insanity, as many do, based on that?
And the second point is this. Let's accept for the moment that Harris is absolutely, 100% correct. These texts tell us, in no uncertain terms, to kill unbelievers, and if we really, truly, genuinely believed and were committed to our religion, we'd be doing that right now. The moderates are just pussy bastards who've smuggled things in from the outside to make their religion more reasonable. Now I ask you a question. What kind of world do you want to live in? Me, I'll take a world full of religious moderates, personally. So when a Muslim friend of mine in college saw the whole Palestinian thing on the news and said "I don't understand that. I'm Muslim, and I wasn't raised to hate people like that", that is what I choose to focus on. Are there Muslims who aren't like that? Sure. Should we be concerned with them? Absolutely. But as you've pointed out, there are Christians like that, there are atheists like that, hell there are probably nutty Buddhists somewhere.
That is the kind of world I'll fight for. Because, let's face it, you can't wave a magic wand and make religion go away. It's just not going to happen. It seems to fulfill some sort of psychological need, we can argue that but we've had it throughout our entire recorded history, and a hell of a lot of prehistory looks like it too. In any case, however we feel about that question, we can agree, we can't make it magically disappear. So, what do we want? Do we want people to go "gee Mr. Harris, you're absolutely right, the Bible does tell me to kill and I've been backsliding." Or do we want moderates who actually think about their religion, or at the very worst assume it wants them to do things like help people and charity and such? I dunno about anybody else, but I'll take the moderates, thanks. In fact, we should be trying tofigure out how to make more moderates, the most moderates we can. That's what I say. If we really consider religion to be this violent and dangerous force, but we know the moderates aren't really doing violence with it, then it would seem to make logical sense, in the absence of the ability to get rid of it, to figure out how to get as many moderates as you possibly can.
Damn,
I tried to leave a comment earlier, and something fucked up somewhere, and my comment dissapeared! It was a GOOD one too, goddamnit!
(grin)
1. It's easy to see why the Militant atheists are an exact "mirror image" of Fundie Christians (up to, and including, their disdain for what you call "moderates").
I have some familiarity with this (being as I've dabbled around the edges of the "Freethinker" scene -- or at least it's online variants. I'm also predominately "secularist"-leaning for various reasons, as you know.
One of the things you'll notice if you look at any "atheist" or "freethought"-oriented website is that the vast majority of them come from a Judeo-Christian background -- usually from one of the more "extreme" denominations (IE, the ones who really get into the whole "we're true Christians, and you're all heretics" type of thing. Lots of former Baptists, and a goodly swath of them are former preachers of some type.
The thing that sticks out most obviously for me, is a recurrent pattern that goes thusly:
A. They -- being really sincere and devout to whatever they come out of, start "digging deper" -- asking questions/expressing concerns that haven't already been covered.
B. Their inquiries are fluffed off out of hand, with some variant of "have faith! Your doubts are just Satan trying to tempt you! It's not important that you understand the thing - just believe in it." This is usually accompanied by some threat such as "If you don't you'll go to hell!"
C. This -- if they have any kind of self-confidence at all - sends them into a really severe bout of "Existential angst" -- in that they don't know "What to believe" anymore. They start questioning EVERYTHING from their former religious context, and/or becoming contemptuous of it, because they start to see it as a psycho-social straightjacket of some kind.
(The fact that they've been slapped down for even questioning it, damns the whole thing for them.)
C. Since their attempts at rationally inquiring into their religion have been rebuked, they come to see rationality, logic, and secularism as the "holy grail" -- a fitting antitode to the psychological poison of their former context.
Unfortunately, they still implicitly accept the Fundies views on things -- tehy respect (and fear) Fundies of vairous types, because they take their religion "seriously" -- swallowing stuff uncritically, etc. But they have only contempt for non-fundie types ("mainline" denominations, let's say -- or the type of "nominally Christian" folks who only go to church on Christmas, etc.)
So yeah, it makes perfect sense that this would eventually become the dominant view: Somebody who's atheist/secularist/freethinker because they just don't believe in a religion isn't going to have the kind of "world-saving zeal" it takes to become an atheist missionary like Dawkins, for example. (A lot of people "raised" atheist/freethinker by their parents tend to have the militancy of the ex-Fundies, coupled with a sneering contempt for all religions or religion-like phenomena. They're the people who create things like the "Invisible Pink Unicorn" or "Flying Spaghetti Monster" -- deliberate strawmen or parodies of religion, with the express purpose of making religion look stupid and psychotic.
Sam Harris sounds like a textbook example of this -- in that he completely dismisses "moderates" (IE, those who don't swallow whatever their trained to swallow uncritically, but actually try to think about stuff.) My guess is he either finds them "insufficiently religious" or insufficiently rational (in that if they were "more rational", they'd become aggressie secularists.
Ttyl.
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