In a happy coincidence, I came across this incisive article in
The New Atlantis just after posting about science, philosophy and morality. The writer, biologist Austin L. Hughes, is another critic of science’s
overreaching in matters that are outside of its purview, a trend known as
scientism. A lot of the arguments that Hughes makes are familiar to critics of
scientism: the philosophical ignorance and naivety of its boosters, the complacent
assumption that science is uniquely resistant to human foibles and error, the
failure to recognise the limitations of science in areas like ethics, and the
inappropriate application of scientific ideas to matters that aren’t easily
reducible to facts and experiments.
The section on science and morality (‘The Eclipse of Ethics’)
is pertinent to the debates going on between Sam Harris, Michael Shermer,
Massimo Pigliucci and others. Unsurprisingly, Hughes dedicates a fair amount of
space to critiquing Harris’s arguments in The Moral Landscape,
a book that has become a punching bag for the anti-scientism crowd. In the
following passage, Hughes captures the general sentiment of those who oppose
the idea that science should be the final arbiter of truth and morality:
Advocates of scientism today claim the sole mantle of rationality, frequently equating science with reason itself. Yet it seems the very antithesis of reason to insist that science can do what it cannot, or even that it has done what it demonstrably has not. As a scientist, I would never deny that scientific discoveries can have important implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and that everyone interested in these topics needs to be scientifically literate. But the claim that science and science alone can answer longstanding questions in these fields gives rise to countless problems.
And since philosophy
can help clarify the nature of these problems, scientists shouldn’t be so quick
to dismiss its relevance.
HT:
Philosophy Monkey
25.1.13
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