The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [132]
Abortion, pro and con, provides a good example of the role scientism plays in our moral disputes. Some people think that abortion is impermissible because the fetus already has an immortal soul. It will be easy for scientism to refute this argument. No soul, immortal or otherwise, so no argument against abortion here. Some people think that abortion is permissible because the mother has a natural right—not just a legal right—to make final decisions about her own body. This argument, too, is one that scientism cannot take seriously. There are no natural rights—rights one has just by virtue of being human. To put it crudely, clumps of matter (and that’s all we are) can’t have natural rights just by virtue of their composition, shape, origin, and so forth, any more than one clump of matter (our brain) can be about some other clump of matter. So, no argument in favor of permitting abortion from the mother’s natural rights.
Surprisingly, once you buy into scientism, settling the abortion problem turns out to be morally easy. Eventually, when all the relevant facts are in, we will be able to evaluate all the arguments in favor of or against abortion. It will be possible to figure out if any of the arguments pro and con are left standing—that is, whether any are supported by a combination of the facts and core morality. Consider how vast is the number of facts about abortions, with all their various causes and effects. Any one of them could be relevant to the question of whether abortion is or is not permissible. Almost certainly, when all these facts are decided, it will turn out that core morality doesn’t contain any blanket prohibition or permission of abortion as such. Rather, together with the facts that science can at least in principle uncover, core morality will provide arguments in favor of some abortions and against other abortions, depending on the circumstances.
Of course, the antiabortion crowd won’t like this conclusion. What they demand is a blanket prohibition of all abortion. As far as they’re concerned, scientism has already sided with the pro-choice agenda. Not quite. Scientism allows that sometimes the facts of a case will combine with core morality to prohibit abortion, even when the woman demands it as a natural right.
Pretty much the same goes for most of the moral issues raised by scientific and technological change over the last generation, especially in the biomedical sciences. Stem-cell research involves destroying fertilized embryos, while in vitro fertilization requires that more embryos be created than are used. Both raise moral questions about whether potential human embryos have moral standing. No one is about to clone a human being, but lots of imaginative people have identified moral problems that this is supposed to raise; for example, does anyone have a right not to be genetically duplicated? Germ-line gene therapy could endanger future generations. Genetic enhancement and other costly innovations raise problems about equality of opportunity that never before existed. These problems don’t have single-answer solutions dictated by core morality. Almost always, however, in specific cases where individuals have to make decisions for themselves, science and core morality together could in principle answer the moral questions they face. The trouble is that in most cases, the science is not yet in. Even worse, the rate of technological advance keeps raising new ethical problems even faster than science can settle the facts relevant to the old ones. For example, even before guidelines could be written governing the permissibility of experiments inserting genes in organs to correct malfunction, scientists were already inserting genes in sperm and eggs and switching whole genomes out