Nicole Gugliucci has a fine post up about a common discussion-killer: “Stick to the science!” Debates about ethics and social issues can be deftly silenced by declaring that they’re out-of-bounds for science, because as we all know, science is objective and cold and uncaring.
I always want to ask, when I encounter those attitudes, whether they’ve read Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values. Because they should. It’s one of those books that gives equal weight to poetry and physics, and quotes Coleridge and Goethe alongside Faraday and Newton, and his entire point is that science is a human enterprise driven by human values, just as much as literature is.
The subject of this book is the evolution of contemporary values. My theme is that the values which we accept today as permanent and often as self-evident have grown out of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. The arts and the sciences have changed the values of the Middle Ages; and this change has been an enrichment, moving towards what makes us more deeply human.
This theme plainly outrages a widely held view of what science does. If, as many science only compiles an endless dictionary of facts, then it must be neutral (and neuter) as a machine is, any more than literature is; both are served by, they do not serve, the makers of their dictionaries.
It always baffles me when human beings pretend to have a god-like perspective on the absolute truth, which allows them to ignore the petty concerns of other human beings. Religion has mastered that property, but science can run a pretty close second, often.
You know who is *really* objective and aloof?
Skynet!
My favorite passage from that book is where he destroys the positivist myth that science cannot enlighten us with regard to values, since values are not subject to verification. He points out that science is a human commitment that itself is a value (pg 58 in the edition you picture):
.. And “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t Ma Baby?” at the harbor in Nagasaki.
But, but if the Nazi scientists had talked about values and ethics instead of testing how fast concentration camp prisoners froze to death, we would not now know how long people can survive in the sea after a plane crash (sarcasm).
Jacob Bronowski is one of my favorite thinkers of the 20th Century. His “Ascent of Man” was a brilliant accomplishment of science and humanities. It made me proud to be human, but not too proud. He was a scholar’s scholar.
PZ, thanks for the book tip – I’m very keen to have a look.
In case anybody is interested, I made some very closely related remarks, a few months ago, when discussing the often misused term, ‘scientism.’ Here is the link:
http://maximum-entropy-blog.blogspot.jp/2014/12/scientism.html
Science is a wonderful tool, but it is a tool and just like a hammer or a knife or dynamite it can be used equally well to create or to destroy. If you ignore the moral implications of your actions, how can you tell if you are doing good or doing evil?
Thanks for the recommendation, I’d completely forgotten this and want to look it up.
O/T but part of what piqued my interest: When I was about 15, Bronowski came to my school and gave a fabulous lecture titled “Why Is the Sky Dark at Night?” He was brilliant without being condescending. I didn’t know then how rare that was.
moarscienceplz @ 6:
True enough, but if you accept along with Bronowski (and Jaques Monod in “Chance and Necessity” — another 20th century scientist/philosopher worth reading) that science is a commitment of a community to an ethic of truth-telling, how do you ignore the moral implications of your actions while still doing what you claim to believe to be science?
As with dictionary atheism, it’s possible to do science and to be a scientist, while ignoring its wider social implications (tempting as it is to invoke the “no true Scotsman” argument and reject the claim to the label). But those who do misuse the tool risk alienating their own community and descending into a solipsism, as with Nazi human experimentation, or even purging and rejecting that community, as in the case of the Soviet agricultural genetics of Lysenko.
It’s not an easy problem, but is worth the effort to be on guard against it. Feynman’s warning about science in general applies: The first rule is don’t fool yourself; and remember that you are the easiest person in the world to fool. That’s why PZ struggled with the idea of using the chocolate study as a lesson in his classes, as others have struggled with trying to salvage something from the many other bad or even horrific examples that would and do lay claim to the label of science.
Afterthought: It’s always “worth the effort” to remember to keep science in its proper ethical context.. or as Bronowski would say, “Crucial.”
The only thing that human endeavors can be for, is for human beings. There’s no such thing as science for its own sake, and the closest you can come to that is treating science like meaningless trivia. If it is meaningless trivia, there’s no reason to give a damn about science. So therefore we can fairly accuse the “stick to the science” folks of trivializing science.
I noticed a word missing in the second paragraph of the quoted section:
(restored word in bold)