Problems in deriving an ethical system  from science.

If it can be done, why should it not be? The risks will be  taken; one hopes that we will get away with  them.

- Professor Steve Jones on new biological techniques.¹

The public perception of science includes a concerning lack of trust  regarding scientists’ abilities to regulate their research and openly to submit  to ethical limits and discussion about what should or should not be done with  regard to both future research and current application of science and  technology. Obviously the main focus of the interaction of science and ethics  must be biology, where impacts directly affect human life and health. Medical ethics is important, but here I shall focus on the rapidly growing and changing  area of importance found in what has been dubbed ‘bioethics’, or more specifically of late, ‘genethics’. With the public frustrated and worried about  lack of consultation and ignorance about what scientists can and should be investigating, it is troubling to read a prominent genetics professor rejecting  claims that science should answer to claims of higher moral  authority:

[Interviewer] You have said that ethics is to science what pornography is to sex. You’re none too keen on it.

Well, no, I’m not. It is vaguely interesting, but I don’t know much about it. If you ask who has gained most from the Human Genome  Project, the answer is clearly the ethics industry. There are now great glass  towers of ethicists scattered across US campuses that were not there before,  that are being funded by genetics. The Human Genome Project is spending 1 per  cent of its income on ethics. That strikes me as really weird. And it’s simply a  matter of observational fact that ethics always follows science. And it’s going  to continue to do so. [The reverse is] a Dark-Age attitude... [that] doesn’t  work.

I find the whole ethical argument in genetics so peculiar. I  just don’t understand what these people are banging on about.²

These remarks are worrying for several reasons. Firstly, a ‘spokesman’ for  science who writes a regular column in a broadsheet appears either not to  understand the ethical questions the public is concerned with in regard to  genetics, or else he does not care. He regards the Human Genome Project’s investment in the ethical considerations of its work, which other scientists are  keen to draw attention to in defence of science, to be a waste of time - certainly directly against the tide of public opinion.

But more importantly he believes that ‘ethics always follows science’ - both trying to draw a distinction between science and technology, and also implying that ethical systems should only deal with relating human behaviour to what  science has already discovered, not how it practises discovery.

This first distinction is not easily made in practice, however. If ethical  considerations are only to be brought to bear on technological applications of  science, then one is left with the problem of how to judge the use of technology  in scientific research. For instance, GM crops grown for research purposes might  still pose a threat to other crops by the uncontrollable spread of pollen; to  research genetic benefits for reproduction might mean the experimentation on and  death of many embryos. The use of technology is bound up in the practice of  science, and no general delineation can be drawn. Jones argues, ‘You can put  ethical limits on the application of science, but that, I think, is quite a  different thing [to ethical interaction with science]. I think you have to differentiate science from technology.’³ But such a differentiation cannot be made in practice.

The second issue raised here - ethics is subordinate or irrelevant to science - is typical of the school of scientific thought known as (though usually they deny the categorisation) ontological reductionism, or ‘nothing-buttery’. Its representatives, such ambassadors of science as Richard Dawkins and Daniel  Dennett, promote the primacy of the scientific explanation and often its  fundamental exclusivity as a source of truth. I will flesh out here what Jones means by ‘ethics follows science’. Jones considers the opposite (science following ethics) to be, ‘a Dark-Age attitude. I mean the Dark Ages were a situation when ethics led and everything else had to follow.’⁴ By ‘ethics follows science’ he is not arguing that  moral philosophers should be on hand to be involved with constructing the ethical implications of each scientific innovation - he has already expressed  his amazement that the HGP should want to involve ethicists in its research.  Rather, Jones denies that science and ethics have any interface at all (‘I can’t see how it [science] could have any responsibilities’; he has been quoted as saying that ethics is to science what pornography is to sex.⁵) and argues that science should be functioning independent of ethical controls because, ‘if it can be done, why  should it not be?’⁶

If science exclusively tells us ‘how things are’ and provides the only reliable insight into the world, then we must either say that our moral  inclinations are fictions produced by the epiphenomenon of mind, or that they are somehow based in biological phenomena. The first of these cases regards  ethics as meaningless; the second looks to science to provide any basis we seek  for what we should do in a situation. We cannot consider here the philosophy of  mind and its place in scientific explanation, but the second case is to be  addressed in more detail.

There is a tendency among followers of forms of scientism to attempt to draw  the answers to ethical questions from the explanations of science. The  philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett at least seems aware of the problems here in  leaning too heavily towards the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. This observation was a  development of G E Moore, drawing from Hume. Hume claimed it was not possible to  derive a deontological imperative from a statement of fact - that is, an ‘ought’  from an ‘is’. In Humeian eyes, moral judgments are formed from moral sentiments - feelings of approval or disgust are interpreted as feelings of intrinsic value or vice in an object.⁷

We must not however be so cautious as to conclude that the facts are entirely  irrelevant:

It does not follow... that facts have no bearing on values,  only that they do not logically entail them.⁸

For instance, simplistically, if use of a bacterial weapon results in death,  then its use can be condemned as wrong - but only if we first condemn as wrong  the action of murder. That is, the act of germ warfare can be categorised as  morally wrong by the combination of facts and a value system. The simple  consequence of people dying as a result of the weapon does not make the weapon wrong in itself - we must interpret the facts against an external system of  values which tells us how to make a judgement, knowing beforehand that murder is  wrong. An example of forming an identity from facts and normative values is the  conflation of the results of natural selection and what is morally correct: ‘The good is simply that which evolution through selection has led us to regard as  good.’⁹

Although Dennett rejects the naturalistic fallacy¹⁰ of simply deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’, he sees that we must draw our ‘oughts’ from somewhere; and, drawing on his form of  naturalism, he tries to ground that somewhere in ‘an appreciation of  human nature - on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a  human being might want to have or want to be.’¹¹  These vague conceptions of humanity he locates in both scientific and social  sources.

Yet even what explanatory potential Dawkins and Dennett allow to the social part of life, they also claim it to be under scientific explanation - as memes.¹² The idea of a meme is often still imprecise in definition. Dawkins describes the meme as ‘a unit of information  residing in a brain... [having] a definite structure... [and possessing] phenotypic effects, which are its consequences in the outside world.’¹³ These phenotypic effects include the identities of  such memes as ideas, pieces of music, religious beliefs and moral  conditionings. Sometimes memes are criticised in comparison with viruses -  religious ideas especially (from Dawkins) - sometimes they are admired, like emotive pieces of music. In the same way that memes’ development and  distribution can be compared to that of genes, this memetic ambiguity of virtue  mirrors the problem Dawkins and others have with genetic ambiguity. If the genes  they reveal to us are selfish, and genetics is normative as well as descriptive,  why do they encourage rebellion against the selfish gene? If the genes are not  normative, but are selected for because of advantage to the species, how can we  choose which genes to regard as good and bad, and which memes? If a person’s  genetic makeup shows a tendency towards a certain type of behaviour or state of  health, we are no more able to judge from the scientific data alone whether or  not the tendency is good, as we are able to judge whether a meme is good in  itself.

The Dawkins school appears to regard all altruism as really self-interest  beneficial for evolution, whether enlightened as such or unrealised. Dawkins  appears to contradict the selfish nature of the gene by stating, ‘Nice guys  finish first’¹⁴; the type of self-interest  required to satisfy such a denial of positive morality has developed  considerably from a simple concept of selfishness into a complex community-based  co-operation. Of course this is a difficult position to  maintain:

[Dawkins] has found genuine altruism, ideal if not yet as  real as he wishes. It is puzzling to say where he found this, since he has  dismissed all ethics prior to Darwin as worthless¹⁵, and all he can find in Darwinism is a  disposition to selfishness, which is the wrong answer.¹⁶

The meme may be a useful explanatory construct in some ways, but it is ill  equipped to answer the question of where our need for deontology comes  from.

E O Wilson also has trouble generating generosity from selfishness in his  sociobiology¹⁷, especially in the area of  environmental concern.¹⁸ He regards evolution as  the panacea for metaphysical problems:

They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological  statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not  epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths... The time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologicized.¹⁹

Both Wilson and Ruse agree that science exclusively explains (away) morality.  Wilson states, ‘Human behaviour... is the circuitous technique by which human  genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other  demonstrable ultimate function.’²⁰ Ruse claims, ‘Morality [or rather belief in it]... is merely an adaptation put in place to  further our reproductive ends... In an important sense, ethics... is an illusion  fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate.’²¹ But such explanations are neither satisfying or  compelling with the problem remaining of reconciliation between how our ‘genes  tell us to behave’ and what we generally agree to be the right way to  behave. Moreover, even if a strong moral sense is beneficial for evolution, it  might also possess another dimension besides, which might be its primary  function. Morality may indeed ‘further our reproductive ends’ but that need not  ‘merely’ be its function.

There are further dangers in using science as a basis for ethics: scientific  theories change over time, being rejected or replaced or developed; should our  ethics change with the developing scientific vision of the world? Questions of  realism become important here, as well as whether or not scientific descriptions  should be taken to be normative and, if so, why. Another issue concerns whether  or not there is or should be a boundary to scientific explanatory power? Dawkins  and others insist that everything of any significance can be explained in  scientific terms alone, but many have questioned their right to set science up  as the only reliable source of explanation.

In conclusion, it remains highly unlikely that genetics can provide a  workable reliable basis for a system of morality, despite the claims of some  prominent scientists. The rapid development of biological sciences and the  breadth of their application requires comprehensive guidelines to be enforced  for both research and application, but these guidelines must be drawn from  external standards with the knowledge input of science, rather than relying on  what is possible as a rule for what should be.

Footnotes

Interview in Third  Way, Vol. 22, No. 1 (February 1999), p. 19

Ibid., p 18

Ibid., p. 18

Ibid., p. 18

Ibid., p.  18

Ibid., p. 19

See David J Atkinson and  David H Field (eds.) (1995), New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral  Theology, (Leicester: IVP), p. 469

SeeIbid., p.  619

Michael Ruse (1984), Review of Peter Singer: The Expanding Circle, Environmental Ethics 6, p. 93; quoted in Holmes Rolston, III (1999), Genes, Genesis, and God,  (Cambridge: CUP), p. 263

e.g. Daniel Dennett (1995), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, (London: Penguin), p. 467

Dennett (1995), p.  476

Introduced in Richard  Dawkins (1976), The Selfish Gene, (Oxford: OUP)

Richard Dawkins (1982), The Extended Phenotype, (Oxford: OUP), p. 109

Richard Dawkins (1989), The Selfish Gene, new edition (Oxford: OUP) p. 202

See Dawkins (1989), p. 1,  ‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question [how  humans ought to live] before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off  if we ignore them completely.’

Rolston (1999), p.  265

Rolston (1999), p.  267

Wilson (1975, 1984)

Wilson (1975), pp. 3 and  562, quoted in Rolston (1999), p. 249

Wilson (1978), p.  167

Ruse and Wilson (1985), pp.  51-2

Bibliography

David J Atkinson and David H Field (eds.) (1995), New Dictionary of  Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology, (Leicester: IVP)

Richard Dawkins (1976), The Selfish Gene, (Oxford:  OUP)

Richard Dawkins (1982), The Extended Phenotype, (Oxford:  OUP)

Richard Dawkins (1989), The Selfish Gene, new edition (Oxford:  OUP)

Daniel Dennett (1995), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, (London:  Penguin)

Holmes Rolston, III (1999), Genes, Genesis, and God, (Cambridge:  CUP)

Michael Ruse (1984), Review of Peter Singer: The Expanding Circle,  Environmental Ethics 6, pp. 91-94

Michael Ruse and E O Wilson (1985), The Evolution of Ethics, in New  Scientist Vol. 108, No. 1478 (17 October), pp. 50-52

E O Wilson (1975), Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press)

E O Wilson (1984), Biophilia, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University  Press)

(c) Richard Dimery, June 1999
Last updated: July 11, 2001