Brad Gregory on Science, Scientism, and Morality

Responding to my earlier post, criticizing Pres. Obama's stem-cell-research statement, Prof. Brad Gregory (history, Notre Dame), offers this:

Not all disagreements are of a piece and not all diversity is desirable, as a moment’s reflection makes clear.  No one calls for more racist discourse or incitements to violence at Yale—thank goodness—even though more of each would obviously increase the university’s diversity.  Racism and violence are bad things, so they are rejected.  Some things shouldn’t be tolerated.  But what is the basis for such moral judgments?  Assertions of “human rights” will hardly do in a society riven by disagreements about what a human being is, as the abortion debate shows so starkly.  Why should we treat other human beings with dignity and respect, if self-interest offers more attractive alternatives?  Appeals to “human nature” are stillborn in an academic culture dismissive of the very notion as an oppressive, essentialist chimera.  The natural sciences can offer no help—despite the strained efforts of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists—if Homo sapiens is merely an unusually adaptive hominid, no different in kind than other mammalian species with which it shares so much genetic material.  The natural sciences neither observe any persons nor discover any rights—for the simple reason that there are none to be found given the metaphysical postulates and empiricist assumptions of science.  So-called transhumanists such as Simon Young grasp the implications: their deliberately eugenicist ethical agenda literally seeks the evolutionary self-transcendence of Homo sapiens through genetic manipulation.   If morality is a matter of preference among options, why not opt to make human beings obsolete by improving them?  Transhumanists simply want to enact their choices. 

        Claiming that morality is a constructed, contingent matter of preference has a rather problematic corollary: it implies that opposition to racism and violence is merely arbitrary.  We might happen not to like racist or sadistic or murderous views and actions, but that’s just us.  They are not intrinsically wrong, because nothing is, or indeed can be if, as physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg claims, we are “inventing values for ourselves as we go along.”   Neither are genocide, rape, torture, or the selling of teenage girls into sexual slavery intrinsically wrong.  We simply happen to live in a culture in which the majority happens not to like such things.  But perhaps people could be gradually persuaded to change their minds, or progressively pressured to adapt to different practices, or incrementally compelled to tolerate what previously they would not, as human beings have shown themselves so capable of doing. 

 

        Depending on what we’re talking about, the sort of relativistic inference frequently drawn from the fact of hyperpluralism—when expressed, for example, in blithe rejections of the notion of truth—is a dangerous, not to mention incoherent, move.  (It is incoherent because the assertion that there are no non-subjective truths is itself a truth claim.)  I’m all in favor of diversity with respect to ethnicities, art, literature, cuisine, and so forth.  But I regard the relativizing inference frequently drawn from the sociological fact of moral pluralism as not only dangerous, but potentially catastrophic.  Unless, of course, one doesn’t mind some genocide or rape, or thinks that the line from a song of ’80s rock star Pat Benatar applies just fine to the ambitions of transhumanists: “No one can tell us we’re wrong.”  Her lyrics are simply a corollary of Nietzsche’s claim: “there are no moral facts whatever.”