Science, Virtue, and the Future of Humanity by Peter Augustine Lawler and Marc D. Guerra

Author:Peter Augustine Lawler and Marc D. Guerra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: undefined
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

But he is equally critical of the “moralistic fallacy”—the claim that because an action is deemed good or right based on some independent standard, then it must be natural, in the sense of being in accordance with nature’s benevolent intentions. For example, environmentalism tends to see only virtuous traits in nature, or to see only nature’s wisdom in various forms of disease and destruction. The implication is that Pinker is avoiding both the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy by separating nature from moral or human values. In contrast, Pinker claims he is merely performing the modest task of the scientist in showing what human nature is in an objective, rational way, and describing based on this the trade-offs that must occur if one wishes to pursue a certain policy or conception of justice.

Yet it is also apparent that Pinker is doing much more than showing what human nature is and then letting us decide on a value system, as if he himself were value-free. On the contrary, Pinker is not value-free, since he is clearly dedicated to promoting modern liberal democracy and its commitment to respecting the rights, dignity, and autonomy of persons in a social order of equal justice and compassion. Indeed, he is eager to reassure his liberal academic friends that knowledge of universal human nature strengthens the case for feminism and non-discrimination: “The specter of eugenics can be disposed of as easily as the specters of discrimination and Social Darwinism.... The key is to distinguish biological facts from human values.”

But where does he derive his own set of “human values” that he repeatedly asserts to be good and just? Here Pinker is evasive. He offers no independent or systematic derivation of his values; they have to be teased out of his many statements of moral opinion in order to see where they come from. One striking example is his discussion of rape:

Suppose rape is rooted in a feature of human nature, such as that men want sex across a wider range of circumstances than women do. It is also a feature of human nature, just as deeply rooted in our evolution, that women want control over when and with whom they have sex. It is inherent to our value system that the interests of women should not be subordinated to those of men, and that control over one’s body is a fundamental right that trumps other people’s desires. [Emphasis added.] So rape is not tolerated, regardless of any possible connection to the nature of men’s sexuality. Note how this calculus requires a “deterministic” and “essentialist” claim about human nature: that women abhor being raped. Without that claim we would have no way to choose between trying to deter rape and trying to socialize women to accept it, which would be perfectly compatible with the supposedly progressive doctrine that we are malleable raw material.

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