The Scientism of Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker has an interesting and revealing essay in The New Republic dismissing the charges of “scientism” that are often leveled by the philosophically, artistically and religiously-minded against certain authors, polemicists and science popularizers. “The term,” he writes, “is anything but clear, more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine,” which inspires him to try to reappropriate “scientism” as a positive descriptor — denoting, he suggests, a belief in the intelligibility of the world and a commitment to the difficult-but-necessary quest for real objectivity about its workings, both of which which should inform our understanding of non-scientific spheres as well.
If this is scientism then obviously no sensible person should have a problem with it. But the “boo-word” version of the phenomenon — the scientism that makes entirely unwarranted claims about what the scientific method can tell us, wraps “is” in the mantle of “ought” and vice versa, and reduces culture to biology at every opportunity — is much easier to pin down than Pinker suggests. Indeed, he helpfully supplies a perfect example of in his own essay, in his discussion of what modern science has allegedly meant for our understanding of personal and political morality:
… 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 … 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.
So here we have a defensible-if-tendentious account of how the progress of science has undercut the world-pictures bequeathed to us by tradition, intuition and religion. Now an innocent reader might assume that the crack-up of these world pictures, with their tight link between cosmic design and human purposes, might make moral consensus more difficult to realistically achieve. After all, if our universe’s testable laws and empirical realities have no experimentally-verifiable connection to human ends and values, then one would expect rival ideas of the good to have difficulty engaging with one another fruitfully, escaping from the pull of relativism or nihilism, and/or grounding their appeals in anything stronger than aesthetic preference.
But obviously that isn’t where Pinker is going:
In other words, the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. 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.
This is an impressively swift march from allowing, grudgingly, that scientific discoveries do not “dictate” values to asserting that they “militate” very strongly in favor of … why, of Steven Pinker’s very own moral worldview! You see, because we do not try witches, we must be utilitarians! Because we know the universe has no purpose, we must imbue it with the purposes of a (non-species-ist) liberal cosmopolitanism! Because of science, we know that modern civilization has no dialectic or destiny … so we must pursue its “unfulfilled promises” and accept its “moral imperatives” instead!
Since Pinker’s last book was an extended rehabilitation of the Whig interpretation of history, it’s not surprising to see him make this kind of case. But it’s intellectually parochial and logically slipshod, and it’s also depends on a kind of present-ist chauvinism: His argument seems vaguely plausible only if you regard the paradigmatic shaped-by-science era as the post-Cold War Pax Americana rather than, say, the chaos of 1914-45, when instead of a humanist consensus the scientifically-advanced West featured radically-incommensurate moral worldviews basically settling their differences by force of arms.
Like Sam Harris, who wrote an entire book claiming that “science” somehow vindicates his preferred form of philosophical utilitarianism (when what he really meant was that if you assume utilitarian goals, science can help you pursue them), Pinker seems to have trouble imagining any reasoning person disagreeing about either the moral necessity of “maximizing human flourishing” or the content of what “flourishing” actually means — even though recent history furnishes plenty of examples and a decent imagination can furnish many more. Like his whiggish antecedents, he mistakes a real-but-complicated historical relationship between science and humanism for a necessary intellectual line in which the latter vindicates the former, or at least militates strongly in its favor. And his invocation of “the scientific facts” to justify what is, at bottom, a philosophical preference for Mill over Nietzsche is the pretty much the essence of what critics mean by scientism: Empirically overconfident, intellectually unsubtle, and deeply incurious about the ways in which human beings can rationally disagree.
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Sam Harris and Scientism
Since I took a passing swipe at his work in my recent post on Steven Pinker and scientism, it seems worth noting that Sam Harris, the noted “new atheist” polemicist, has issued a public challenge to anyone interested in refuting his recent book on “how science can determine human values,” offering $2,000 to the best rebuttal essay and $20,000 to any writer who can persuade him to recant his central argument outright. That argument he distills as follows:
Here it is: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, fully constrained by the laws of the universe (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, questions of morality and values must have right and wrong answers that fall within the purview of science (in principle, if not in practice). Consequently, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.
The reason he’s issuing this challenge, he says, is that most of his reviewers have insisted that he’s mistaken without supplying anything like persuasive evidence. Since I found many of those reviews quite persuasive in their criticisms, I turned with interest to his essay-length response to his critics. Here’s his summary of the existing rebuttals to his thesis:
… there are three, distinct challenges put forward thus far:
1) There is no scientific basis to say that we should value well-being, our own or anyone else’s. (The Value Problem)
2) Hence, if someone does not care about well-being, or cares only about his own and not about the well-being of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)
3) Even if we did agree to grant “well-being” primacy in any discussion of morality, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure well-being scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of morality. (The Measurement Problem)
This seems like a fair summary of what seem like compelling points. And how does Harris respond? By way of an analogy:
Let’s swap “morality” for “medicine” and “well-being” for “health” and see how things look:
1) There is no scientific basis to say that we should value health, our own or anyone else’s. (The Value Problem)
2) Hence, if someone does not care about health, or cares only about his own and not about the health of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)
3) Even if we did agree to grant “health” primacy in any discussion of medicine, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure health scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of medicine. (The Measurement Problem)
“While the analogy may not be perfect,” he concludes, “I maintain that it is good enough to obviate these three criticisms.” The concept of well-being is to morality as the concept of health is to medicine, and while people who deny that the pursuit of conscious creatures’ well-being is the proper end of any moral system may be entitled to their opinion, they are in the same position with respect to moral dialogue as “Christian Scientists, homeopaths, voodoo priests, and the legions of the confused” are with respect to medical conversations. They have “perverse and even self-destructive ideas about how to live,” and their position is rightly excluded from rational debate.
Except that Christian Scientists, homeopaths and voodoo priests do not actually exemplify problems 1, 2 and 3 in Harris’s medicine analogy. They do claim to value health, both for themselves and others, and indeed they generally claim to be driving at roughly the same goals as the doctors at Georgetown University Hospital: The extension of life, the normal functioning of bodily systems, the cessation of pain, and so on. And the reason that they are generally excluded from serious debates about medical science is not because they refuse to agree about what that science ought to be driving at; it’s because they do agree about what it should be driving at, and their preferred approaches can be empirically demonstrated not to work. Send one cancer patient to an oncologist and another to a witch doctor, and one of the two is much more likely to survive — and no matter how blurry the proper definition of “health” may be, the cemeteries are filled with clear examples what it doesn’t look like, offering a negative example that no rational person can deny.
But this is not remotely the case in debates about morality. If I say to Harris, the good is the beautiful and the beautiful the good, and therefore the best and most morally admirable society is the one that produces the most beautiful artifacts, the loveliest lyric poetry, and the most scintillating prose, and this remains the case no matter how low the inhabitants of that society score relative to our own on subjective measures of personal well-being, we are in disagreement on a much more fundamental point than the Christian Scientist and the surgeon. The latter two are aiming at the same goal with different methods, whereas I deny that Harris’s goal is necessarily the one we should be pursuing in the first place. And whereas the voodoo priest’s worldview is ultimately refuted scientifically by the corpses of his patient, there is no comparable scientific refutation that Harris can offer to someone who sides with Orson Welles’s Harry Lime:
Not that the Lime worldview cannot be refuted! But the methods of the microscope and laboratory do not suffice to do so — whereas, again, they do generally suffice, given even trial and error and a large enough sample size, to refute the arguments of witch doctors and pseudoscience-spouting gurus. In the latter case, there are sick people and dead people to back up one side’s assertion about what counts as medicine; in the former case, there is only the bare presupposition, hanging unsupported by anything dispositive.
Of course there is nothing necessarily wrong with starting from presuppositions. As Harris goes on to note, doing science requires as much:
… science is based on values that must be presupposed—like the desire to understand the universe, a respect for evidence and logical coherence, etc. One who doesn’t share these values cannot do science. But nor can he attack the presuppositions of science in a way that anyone should find compelling. Scientists need not apologize for presupposing the value of evidence, nor does this presupposition render science unscientific. In my book, I argue that the value of well-being—specifically the value of avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone—is on the same footing. There is no problem in presupposing that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding and that normative morality consists, at an absolute minimum, in acting so as to avoid it.
There is no “problem” is presupposing it, I agree. But there is also no necessary reason why one must presuppose it in order to pursue moral inquiry. And this is not the case, again, with the analogy to science’s presuppositions that he offers. The pursuit of knowledge about the universe is definitionally integral to science ( you can look it up!), and you are simply not a scientist if you don’t embrace the assumption that the universe is intelligible to reasoned, evidence-based investigation. But the aim of “avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone” is not definitionally integral to morality; it is one possible definition of the good that morality pursues. And, once again, the scientific method cannot settle the question of whether that definition is correct.
I have no problem, and nor should anyone, with Harris declaring that he favors a particular moral system, defining its terms to the best of his ability, and then explaining why he thinks scientific inquiry can help us maximize the end that system privileges. If you know what moral ends you’re driving at, then clearly science can be of assistance in your quest; the idea that the two spheres of inquiry never overlap is obscurantist and silly. But he would be much more persuasive on that narrower point if gave up on the broader one, and reconciled himself to the fact that his style of utilitarianism is not the self-evident and scientific foundation for all sensible moral inquiry that he believes it to be.
Though in that case he would also be out $20,000.
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