Scientific morality: an example

One of the dangers of science is that sometimes individuals get so captivated by that heady feeling of success and progress — and let’s not get carried away too far in the other direction, science definitely works and is a far better tool for understanding than any other process — that they forget the limitations, and assume that there every thought is pure and vindicated by scientific triumphalism. Francis Galton seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word humility. Your every opinion is not the same as scientifically-evaluated fact.

Speaking of arrogance and bias:

I may here speak of some attempts by myself, made hitherto in too desultory a way, to obtain materials for a “Beauty-Map” of the British Isles. Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, “good, medium, bad,” I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper, torn rudely into a cross With a long leg. I use its upper end for “good,” the cross-arm for “medium,” the lower end for “bad.” The prick-holes keep distinct, and are easily read off at leisure. The object, place, and date are written On the paper. I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. Of course this was a purely individual estimate, bat it was consistent, judging from the conformity of different attempts in the same population. I found London to rank highest for beauty; Aberdeen lowest.

I should like to see a complementary set of prick-holes made by the women he so judged, who were then given the opportunity to evaluate the beauty of Francis Galton. Further, I’d like to see a pair of assessments, the first made before the women were told what he’d been doing, and the second after. I think it would be apparent that far from being objective scientific measurement, this was an appalling exercise in subjectivity.

There’s also the bias of the chosen parameters: women were judged for beauty, their most salient characteristic, while Great Men were judged by the size of their guts.

And here’s the dangerous part: that a person can then claim that their views are blessed by Science and Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection. You can’t argue with me; I have the authority of Science, no matter how racist or sexist my views might be.

I venture to offer an explanation of this apparent anomaly which seems perfectly satisfactory from a scientific point of view. It is neither more nor less than that the development of our nature, under Darwin’s law of Natural Selection, has not yet overtaken the development of our religious civilisation. Man was barbarous but yesterday, and therefore it is not to be expected that the natural aptitudes of his race should already have become moulded into accordance with his very recent advance. We men of the present centuries are like animals suddenly transplanted among new conditions of climate and of food; our instincts fail us under the altered circumstances.

My theory is confirmed by the fact that the members of old civilisations are far less sensible than those newly converted from barbarism, of their nature being inadequate to their moral needs. The conscience of a Negro is aghast at his own wild impulsive nature, and is easily stirred by a preacher; but it is scarcely possible to ruffle the self-complacency of a steady-going Chinaman.

Now if you accept these prejudices as true, we cannot avoid Galton’s rational conclusion.

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