Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality by James D. Hunter (review)

Chapter 1 of this book opens with the sentence, "Can science be the foundation of morality?" By chapter 2 it is clear that the book is less an attempt to answer that question than it is about contemporary discourse on the relationship between science and morality. Hunter and Nedelisky believe that the conversation about the science of morality has, in fact, taken on a life of its own and has become a discernable academic discipline.

Morality may be nothing but common sense. It is its justification that throws people off. Hunter and Nedelisky early on in their volume give Hume's dictum, "You can't go from what is to what ought to be," the status of an epistemic law. That is nonsense. There are laws of nature, which no physicist, chemist, or biologist is likely to deny, and there is a natural moral law, articulated time and again through the ages by the Hebrew prophets. But if you limit recognition of that law to description and prediction, you are not likely to find it. Hume in so limiting was right on that point. What is at issue is: are we so limited? Recognition of a natural moral law has much to do with recognition of God's existence and with what is held to be the good. Agnosticism is a willful position. There is evidence for the existence of God, and nature's order is evident to anyone who is not willfully blind. The American philosopher, logician, and mathematician acclaimed as the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, will say the existence of God is self-evident.

If one starts with the Greeks rather than the British empiricists, one is likely to have an entirely different attitude toward the moral order. Plato reasoned to a summum bonum responsible for the order in nature and worthy of veneration, Aristotle to a self-thinking intellect, to a first efficient cause, and to an ultimate final cause. These ideas were picked up and developed by the Stoics and philosophers who came later. Christians had no difficulty identifying these marks as attributes of the revealed God who created heaven and earth.

A significant portion of this volume is devoted to a second-hand account of scholasticism, supposedly superseded by the Enlightenment. What the authors call "scholasticism" is now called "realism," as distinct from idealism and positivism. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were realist, so too in the twentieth century were the physicists Lise Meitner, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. And in the philosophical orbit, so too George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey, just to name a few.

Clearly, Hunter and Nedelisky hope to find what they call "a worldly secular ethics grounded in a broadly naturalistic foundation replacing an other-worldly theological ethics." What they find instead is an endless discussion and debate on whether such is possible. In their words: "Despite all the optimism of the Enlightenment, none of the valiant efforts to find a scientific foundation for morality quelled the quiet, unsettling, yet growing plausibility of moral skepticism." Hume's skepticism about knowledge in general had the unintended effect of supporting moral skepticism. Eventually Hunter and Nedelisky are forced to admit that "empirical science has given us nothing remotely close to a foundation for morality."

An informative chapter is devoted to E. O. Wilson's sociobiology. In 1975, Wilson published a book under the title, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. In it he attempted to show how social behavior is tied to evolutionary or genetic factors. He was convinced that an evolutionary explanation of human behavior, if pursued, would in principle be more fruitful than any philosophical endeavor. With some obeisance to the then newly emerging brain science and neurobiology, Wilson's own study of animal behavior, by analogy, led him to believe that Darwin's theory of natural selection accounted for selfishness in individuals...