Article Does morality precede reality?

[C C]

Indeological neutrality is vital to science (Jerry Coyne)
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/04/2...eral-bias/

EXCERPTS: It’s well known that most American academics lean towards the Left (I’m one), and that this trend is increasing over time. Here’s a plot of the political leaning of academics made by Sam Abrams (a politics and government prof at Sarah Lawrence) shown on the website of the Heterodox Academy. The trend is clear, and it’s the same among many surveys of American academics.

[...] It was originally stated by Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” I think that Colbert meant, and others mean, that reality itself has a tendency to buttress Left-wing views...

[...] what bothers me is that the quote implies that reality itself leads to liberalism. But reality has no ideology: it’s simply what’s true about the Universe. ... Actually, anyone studying reality—trying to find the truth—had best abandon any ideological slant beforehand, as ideology impedes the search for truth. The methodology of science itself—hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, double-blind testing, the use of math and statistics, publication and communication, and empirical observation—is not ideological, and does not lead one to either the Left or Right.

[...] This paper from BioScience, written by a philosopher and an evolutionary molecular biologist, shows that studying reality itself is best done in an atmosphere of ethnical neutrality. ... The upshot: neither morality or ideology can be derived from reality, but those of a certain ideological or moral bent may rely on reality more than those of other stripes... (MORE - details)

[Magical Realist]

Coyne must be an absolutist. Most scientific realists are. Which is itself an ideological or at least an epistemic bent in that it posits truth to be "out there" and absolute and totally objective, basically reifying it from a property of sentences to a property of the universe. I disagree. As Rorty puts it:

"To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own."

For the absolutist there is only one truth, which everyone must agree on and accept. Scientific realism thus gets elevated to the position that others elevated religion to--like a dogma or belief system instead of as a methodology. That to me justifies a political conservatism with an absolutist morality and an authoritarianism that all must conform to, leading ultimately to totalitarianism, fascism, and mind control.

Liberalism otoh is relativist and acknowledges that truth is a matter of perspective and pragmatic value--which agrees with the scientific instrumentalists. It also acknowledges that truth is a social and cultural phenomena, is relational and historically contextual, and isn't objectively real in itself. It's not that reality is inherently biased either way. It's just that how we interpret our thinking about it--our notion of truth-- IS biased.