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Can science make you good?

#1
C C Offline
The Virtue of Scientific Thinking
https://bostonreview.net/steven-shapin-scientism-virtue

EXCERPT: [...] So natural science without the capacity of moral uplift, and grown-up scientists, so to speak, without moral authority, are—in historical terms—recent creations. Both the disenchantment of the world and the supposed invalidity of inferring ought from is derive from the historical development of a conception of nature stripped of the moral powers it once possessed. That development reached its culmination in the science and metaphysics of Darwin and the scientific naturalists of the late nineteenth century. Their modern conception of nature could not make those who studied it more moral than anyone else because no sermons in stones were to be discerned. Nature, said the great nineteenth-century biologist T. H. Huxley, “is no school of virtue.”

The insistence that science cannot make you good, or make the scientist into a moral authority, flowed from a natural philosophical position: there are no spiritual forces operating in nature and there is no divine meaning to be discerned in nature. That is to say, Weber was making a sociological statement about what belongs to certain social roles, but he was doing so by way of historical changes in science and metaphysics.

This attitude had significant ramifications. Sometime between the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century—especially in America but in other settings too—the idea of the scientist shed its remaining priestly associations, and a presumption of moral specialness gave way to moral ordinariness.

There was no single cause of this change; shifting conceptions of the world that scientists interpreted had much to do with it. But it was accompanied by notable developments in the nature of the scientific career, in the social relations and cultural standing of the scientific community, and in changing academic and lay ideas about what sort of thing science was and what it was for.

[...] There are still many millions of [Max] Weber’s “big children” around who think that nature is a divine creation and that its study yields moral lessons, but few of them are now to be found in university physics and chemistry departments. (The disenchantment of the world looks more plausible within the confines of research universities than it does off campus.) So accepting that science, of course, cannot make you good is just an acknowledgment of the world’s disenchantment and of the massive achievements of amoral modern science. With the existentialists, “grown-ups” now recognize that solutions to problems of meaning and morality can come only from us and not from above—and certainly not from scientists. Morality cannot be outsourced.

Writing after World War II, Oppenheimer warned against thinking of scientists as having the answers to all questions or the power to solve them. If scientists were indeed the stewards of a unique, coherent, and powerful method, that stewardship showed, at most, in a certain modesty of manner and judgment, notably including humility about the scope of their knowledge. “Science is not all of the life of reason; it is a part of it,” he wrote. Scientism—the tendency to think one could extend scientific method everywhere and thereby solve problems of morality, value, aesthetics, and social order—was just sloppy thinking.

The scientism Oppenheimer warned against had a history. It traces back to nineteenth-century social Darwinism and the advertised reduction of morality to biology. This was exactly the sort of reasoning the naturalistic fallacy targeted—the notion that what was moral could be rendered in terms of what biological evolution had formed us to do or to feel.

[...] 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.

According to this newly confident scientism, science is the only bit of culture that can make you good because it trumps all the others—religion, traditional ethical codes, common sense. Or it shows them to be nonsense. Or—with or without awareness of the irony—it brands them immoral: religion is a “God delusion,” licensing prejudice, servility, and slaughter, all of which are morally wrong.

But there are several reasons why the ambitions of the new scientism may be self-limiting. Those who speak in the name of nature must face the fact that nature has never spoken with one voice.

[...] The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

Nor does the new scientism solve the long-standing problem of whom to trust. Just like every modern scientist, the advocates of the new scientism do what they can to sell their wares in the marketplace of credibility. And here the new scientism, for all its claims that there is a way science can make you good, shares one crucial sensibility with its opponents: having secularized nature, and sharing in the vocational circumstances of late modern science, the proponents of the new scientism can make no plausible claims to moral superiority, nor even moral specialness.

Resurgent scientism is less an effective solution to problems posed by the relationship between is and ought than a symptom of the malaise accompanying their separation. So there is a price to be paid for the of-courseness of the view that scientists are morally no better than anyone else, and among those paying it are scientists themselves. The idea that scientists are priests of nature, that they are morally uplifted by the study of God’s Book of Nature, may be dead—as Weber suggested, that is central to what modernity means—but the question of whether scientists are selflessly dedicated to truth remains alive and is central to contemporary tensions surrounding scientific expertise and public policy.

If the disinterestedness and selflessness of scientists can be no more relied on than that of bankers, then scientific conclusions should be no more trusted than financial derivatives, and science should be policed in the same way as the banking industry. Regimes of surveillance and control are a modern indication of distrust. Yet science, like the financial system, works on credit, and, while there is excellent sense in subjecting both scientific and financial conduct to a degree of regulation, there is no sense at all in thinking that surveillance can ever eliminate the need for trust. If you don’t find scientists trustworthy, if you think of them as mere servants of power and profit, then the ultimate price to be paid is that you’ll have to do the science yourself—and good luck to you in making your findings credible.

So the cost of modern skepticism about scientific virtue is paid not just by scientists but by all of us. The complex problems once belonging solely to the spheres of prudence and political action are now increasingly conceived as scientific problems: if the global climate is indeed warming, and if the cause is human activity, then policies to restrict carbon emissions are warranted; if hepatitis C follows an epidemiological trajectory resulting in widespread liver failure, then the high price of new drugs may be justified. The success of modern is-expertise has propelled it powerfully into the world of ought-judgment.

That is why there can be no glib “of course” about discarding the idea of scientific virtue. We need to trust scientists, but we need scientists to be trustworthy....
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
I doubt that scientists are any more virtuous than anyone else. The ones who don't take science as some value system are probably only in it for the money anyway. The ones who DO take science to be some grand enterprise are otoh snotty elitists who look down on humanity as ignorant and in desperate need of their guidance. Such is the cost of making out of your values some absolute program for world betterment. A totalitarian utopia where all are educated in the "truth" and all dissent has been crushed forever.
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