The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [133]
Of course, it’s possible that core morality contains components that are incompatible with one another. After all, the difficulty we have in expressing its norms may reflect deep inconsistencies between some of them. More likely, in addition to providing variation in the degree of commitment to core morality, natural selection has also provided a range of moral norms inherited from the different environmental filters we and our lineages passed through and which to some degree conflict. Such conflicts won’t be settled even when all the facts are in. These are the intractable conflicts of incommensurable moral differences that are among the strongest arguments for nihilism.
Under the circumstances of scientific ignorance, core morality together with people’s reluctance to take risks may dictate even to scientistic people temporary blanket prohibition of practices like germ-line gene therapy or growing genetically manipulated organisms. But these decisions should not be misrepresented as scientific ones. Science is always neutral on what we should do. In these cases, as elsewhere, it’s core morality that does the deciding.
Nice nihilism reveals that the apparently intractable debates about moral issues almost never really turn on moral disagreements. The two sides of a moral dispute usually fail to realize that they differ on factual issues. Often these differences are matters of church dogma, so they are treated by at least one side of the argument as things no scientific inquiry will decide on. Recall the role played by the immortal soul in the argument against abortion. No science is going to get religious people to give up the notion that there is a soul. And if you think there is one, then it’s not too difficult to convince yourself that it’s immortal (in fact, we sketched an argument for this in Chapter 10). Once you believe that there is such a thing as an immortal soul and you put that belief beyond the reach of science, you can harness it together with core morality. The result of this gambit is a conclusion that no amount of science will shake. That’s what really makes most moral disputes intractable.
In the face of an invincible refusal to allow one’s mind to be changed by the morally relevant facts, there is not much we can do. Scientism encourages us not to treat those who make moral judgments we disagree with as evil. They are probably not even morally wrong. They are just benighted individuals wrong about the facts and thus confused about what our shared morality requires. They might be so benighted, so wrong, hold their views so deeply, and act on them so forcefully that we need to protect ourselves from them. But so long as we are not interfered with, scientism counsels tolerance of moral differences. We should patronize those we disagree with, not demonize them, even as they demonize us.
Along with tolerance of moral disagreement, scientism counsels modesty about our own moral convictions. We may think we’ve got the relevant facts and so hold firmly the conclusions they support. But science is mostly fallible, and the science we need to guide particular moral judgments is not as certain as the second law of thermodynamics or even the theory of natural selection. We could be wrong, sometimes quite wrong, about what we think are the morally relevant facts that, together with core morality, dictate our moral judgments. Even though scientism allows us to hold quite extreme views, it also counsels us always to hold them lightly, not firmly.
SCIENTISM DECONSTRUCTS
THE (DE)MERITOCRACY
Scientism is nihilistic, but we are not. The Darwinian process that got us here included steps that selected for a pretty strong commitment to a core morality. Even scientism can’t shake our emotions or the moral judgments that they produce. Knowing that morality is only good for our reproductive fitness, and sometimes not so good for us, can’t make us give it up. We are