• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 735 0

with or without the benefit of psychotropic drugs, scientism is not completely surprised. After all, what has been changed—reprogrammed—are the input/output circuits in the brain. Talk alone probably won’t change much. Still less will any change come from introspection’s awareness of the “meaning” of the noises coming out of the therapist’s mouth. When changes in brain circuitry and behavior do come, they may be accompanied by changes in conscious experience, even the feeling of willpower exercised. But they won’t be caused by these experiences. (Remember your Libet.)

The play of silent markers across your conscious mind as you listen to the noises the therapist makes can’t be thoughts about how the therapist wants you to modify your behavior. That’s because thoughts can’t be about anything. Your neural circuits, and so your behavior, may get modified as a result of the therapy, but it is an illusion that the change results from thinking about what the therapist said and consciously buying into his or her diagnosis. In therapy, as in everything else in life, the illusory content of introspective thoughts is just along for the ride.

SCIENTISM COOLS OFF THE

HOT-BUTTON MORAL DISPUTES

Nice nihilism has two take-home messages: the nihilism part—there are no facts of the matter about what is morally right or wrong, good or bad—and the niceness part—fortunately for us, most people naturally buy into the same core morality that makes us tolerably nice to one another.

Understanding the second point is crucial. Like everything else subject to Darwinian natural selection, there is a wide range of variation in the degree of individual attachment to core morality. In every generation, a few people are so nice you can trust them always to do the right thing, and a few people are murderous sociopaths. It can’t be helped. That’s just how genes and environments fall out. But most of us are within two standard deviations of the mean. There is enough niceness around to make social life possible for almost all of us and agreeable for many.

So why is there so much disagreement about morality? Just think about the moral issues about reproduction and sex that have spilled out into the public sphere of the Western nations in the last 50 years: abortion, stem-cell research, in vitro fertilization, gender screening, cloning, germ-line gene therapy, designer babies, gay rights, same-sex marriage. It’s no surprise that so many of the moral issues of contemporary life involve sex. As we have seen, that is a great deal of what morality is really about. But there are other issues as well that people insist need to be resolved: euthanasia, capital punishment, animal welfare, genetically modified organisms, human rights, affirmative action or positive discrimination. Yet they all seem subject to intractable disagreement.

Since there is no fact of the matter about right and wrong, good and bad, none of the questions people spend so much time arguing about have any correct answers. Scientism doesn’t take sides in these arguments. But even after we adopt scientism, we’ll inevitably take sides anyway. Because each of us, to a greater or lesser extent, embraces core morality, each of us will always make a lot of strong moral judgments. As Chapter 5 showed, disagreements about ethics and values, even between us and Nazis (if there are any left after we exclude the psychopaths), are mostly the result of harnessing the same core morality to vastly different factual beliefs about human beings. Most of the moral disagreements people have can be traced to differences about factual matters. Since disagreements about matters of fact can at least in theory be settled by science, and only by science, scientism has an important role in moral disputes after all.

Norms of core morality get harnessed with a lot of different factual beliefs, most of them shown by science to be wrong. Together, beliefs and norms produce the moral judgments most people can’t stop making. Scientism gives us an advantage over most people when it comes to the moral judgments we are fated