The Ethics of Science and A Science of Ethics

Presented at the MCH Weekend of Ideas Science and Ethics, March 2003.

Given the scope of the topic science and ethics, and my ignorance about the science part, in the next 25 minutes, I’m not going to even try to discuss any of the things that you might have thought I might discuss. I’m not going to give you my views on the ethics of stem-cell research. I’m not going to give you my views on the ethics of animal experimentation. I’m not going to give you my views on the ethics of global warming, or doctor-assisted suicide, or whatever. Discussing our views about these things is what the next three days are for. And fortunately, over the next three days, we’ll actually be hearing from people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to matters scientific, rather than people like me who for whom the more exotic elements on the periodic table sound like eighties rock bands.

What I am going to do is confine myself to just two sets of issues that come up when we’re talking about science and ethics – two sets of issues that a moral philosopher-cum scientific ignoramus can hopefully say something vaguely intelligible about; two sets of issues which, more seriously, I feel are well worth getting on the table at the beginning of an event such as this.

First, I’m going to ask you to consider with me the very possibility and desirability of the whole business of doing the ethics of science: that is, the very possibility and desirability of making science and scientists ethically accountable and, if necessary, censuring or banning particular instances of scientific practice insofar as they depart from relevant ethical standards. Second, I’m going to say something briefly about the development of what I’ll call a science of ethics.

To give you the merest foretaste of what is to come: With respect to the first issue, I’m going to try and convince you that you ought in fact to be profoundly sceptical of, worried by, and suspicious about, the whole business of doing the ethics of science. With respect to the second issue, I’m going to try and convince you of the absolute necessity of developing a science of ethics. For paradoxically, to engage in the ethics of science with impunity, we need a science of ethics.

Against the Ethics of Science

Okay, the possibility and desirability of doing the ethics of science. I take it that you all have a pretty reasonable grasp of what science is. I take it that you’ve also got a pretty reasonable grasp of what ethics is. And by implication, I take it that you’ve got a pretty reasonable grasp of what the ethics of science is. So I’m not going to bore you too much with tedious definitions here. However, I am going to bore you just a little bit by mentioning in passing two points that hopefully will prevent misunderstandings later down the track.

First point: I’m going to be talking quite a bit about “doing the ethics of science”. In fact I’m going to be arguing quite strongly against “doing the ethics of science”. I want to be clear, then, that by this I don’t just mean the abstract contemplation of the ethical status of scientific practice. From my perspective, this seems a pretty innocuous, indeed commendable sort of activity and I have no interest in arguing against it. Rather, by “doing the ethics of science”, I mean actually trying to make scientists ethically accountable, and potentially working to circumscribe their behaviour insofar as it’s unethical. This more meaty kind of activity is an essential part of what I mean by the ethics of science.

The second point is about what I mean when I use the words “ethical” and “moral” (which I’ll use pretty much interchangeably by the way). The legal philosopher HLA noted that the terms “ethics” and “morality” are kind of ambiguous inasmuch as they can refer either to a particular ethics or morality in a particular place at a particular time, or to ethics or morality proper. So, for instance, take the stoning of women in Nigeria. And suppose that the morality of the Nigerians is such that at least the majority of them think that stoning women is completely ethically justified. Then we would have to say that stoning women is morally right in the sense of according with the particular morality of the Nigerians. Nonetheless, many of us would be tempted to say that stoning women in Nigeria remains completely ethically unjustified where we mean not the morality of the Nigerians as such but morality proper. Now, the relationship between these two senses of “ethical” or “moral” is incredibly complex and controversial (and really interesting I reckon). But I want to be clear that I’m only going to be talking about ethics in the second sense of the term: about ethics proper.

Okay, so why might anyone be against doing the ethics of science? Here’s one reason that I personally don’t endorse: You are, what we call, an “ethical nihilist”. You think that all this “ethical talk” that we engage in is, to use the technical term, “a load of crap”. You think that there is, in fact, no such thing as right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. Or to put it in more loaded philosophical language, you think that there are no such things as ethical properties: rightness and wrongness, goodness and badness, justice and injustice. So when Irish Catholic parents say to their children “You know, Betty, you really ought not to tell lies”, or when American fundamentalists scream out at an anti-abortion rallies, “abortion is morally wrong”, or when I say in response to my right-wing friend “George Bush’s invading Iraq is completely ethically unjustified”, we are all talking unadulterated codswallop. These moral properties that we make reference to when we utter such sentences – rightness, wrongness, goodness, badness – just simply don’t exist. Moral talk is like talk of witches, or magic, or astrology. When I utter the sentence “George Bush’s invading Iraq is completely ethically unjustified”, I am no better than Abigail when she accuses Goody Procter of being a witch.

Such a view might strike you as implausible and repugnant – at least at first. It certainly does me. It might even make you quite angry that anyone would dare to espouse it. For one thing, you might say, ethical talk is something we engage in all the time. For another thing, you might say that you simply “know” when things are right and wrong. You “feel” their rightness or wrongness. When you see an innocent person being killed, you “know in your heart” that a moral wrong is being done.

But now, let’s think about it some more. As for the claim that ethical talk is something we engage in all the time, that’s certainly true. But at this point the nihilist is just going to say “So what? Humans are sometimes stupid and irrational. It is human all too human to engage in stupid and irrational practices. After all, we used to engage in witch talk too. Everybody believed in witches. Even people who were in other respects sensible and reasonable. But that didn’t show that witches existed.”

Even if you don’t buy that one, note that the ethical nihilist has still another trick up her sleave, namely the trick she has learnt from anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. This is to push the line that there is strong evidence that morality or ethical talk is merely a necessity of human survival – a bit like eating and drinking. That is to say there is a fairly strong case for thinking that societies that didn’t develop moral obligations and requirements – that didn’t act as if there really was a morally right and a morally wrong – simply didn’t survive. It’s not hard to see why. Imagine a society in which everyone lied to one another, and murdered one another, and in every way showed no respect for one another. So now, the nihilist doesn’t have to say that ethical talk is stupid and irrational at all. On the contrary, it is eminently sensible to engage in such talk. Because, if you don’t, you’re not going to survive. However, let’s not kid ourselves. What is advantageous from an evolutionary point of view is going around espousing something that is, strictly speaking, codswallop while pretending that it is perfectly kosher.

What about the claim that we just know intuitively when things are right or wrong? A view like was popular in the first half of the twentieth century. The problem with it was that appealing to intuitions is really very dodgy. For one thing, people’s intuitions appear to differ considerably. Let me give you an example on which I’m pretty sure your intuitions will differ. Suppose that you are a constable within the police force. You capture a member of a paedophile gang. The paedophile admits freely that no less than a hundred children under the age of ten have been kidnapped by fellow members of his gang and held in some secret location. However, he refuses to give any information about where that location is. Unless you find out about where the children are being held, they will be raped and murdered. But suddenly it occurs to you that you might torture the paedophile until he reveals the location to you. What is the morally right thing to do?

Even more problematically though, people’s ethical intuitions appear to differ systematically. That is that they differ depending on what socio-economic group they come from, what their ethnicity is, and so on. Let me give you one somewhat unpleasant example that is due to an American philosopher Stephen Stich. Apparently a recent experiment was performed where a large sample of individuals were asked to consider the following case: A certain man regularly visits his local supermarket where he always buys a frozen chicken. He then takes the chicken home whereupon he performs certain sexual acts with the chicken before putting it in the oven, cooking and eating it. The individuals in the experiment were then asked to say whether they thought what the man did was (a) repugnant and/or (b) morally reprehensible. Unsurprisingly, everyone agreed that it was repugnant. However, it turned out that people from lower socio-economic backgrounds almost invariably thought that it was also morally reprehensible, whereas people from higher socio-economic backgrounds thought that there was nothing morally reprehensible about it: it was just plain disgusting. If this is right, it seems to lend support to the idea that “just knowing that something is wrong” is really a matter of simply reiterating what has been indoctrinated into one.

If the ethical nihilist is right (there are no moral properties; all ethical talk is false since it makes reference to things that don’t exist, etc, etc), then trying to temper scientific advances (in stem-cell research, or in research on diseases that involves animal experimentation, or whatever) by appealing to ethics looks pretty ludicrous. It looks a bit like trying to temper scientific progress by appealing to one’s horoscope.

As it happens, I’m not an ethical nihilist. I continue to think that we can give good answers to the ethical nihilist for thinking that ethics does matter; and that it cannot be so easily ditched. If you want to know what my own answers are, it’s a simple matter of waiting until the next ice-age by which time my Ph.D might perhaps be finished. Anyway I’m not going to say anything more about that here. Rather, I’m going to say something about a second, quite different and I think much more credible argument against doing the ethics of science. This is to advance an ethical case against doing the ethics of science to the effect that it is morally wrong to make science and scientists excessively susceptible to ethical criticism and circumscription; to the effect that letting scientists pursue their work with reference more or less only to the norms of science and more or less unencumbered by the norms of morality is morally required. But isn’t this a ludicrous position? “Yes!” I hear you scream. Personally, I think that, with one proviso that I’ll come to below, it’s actually a pretty plausible position, as I’ll now try and show.

To warm you up to the idea, let me start by noting just some of the many other contexts in which it makes sense to give ethical justifications for keeping ethics out of the picture. First, think of our attitudes to certain kinds of unsavoury associations or groups within civil society – for instance, associations that explicitly deny entry or membership to women (such as the so-called Adelaide Club), or extreme right-wing groups that explicitly engage in non-violent racial vilification (such as National Action). Forgive me for using two examples from my beloved erstwhile homeland. And suppose, as I think plausible, that it is morally wrong to deny women entry or membership, and to engage in any kind of (albeit non-violent) racial vilification. Still, many of us steeped in the western liberal democratic tradition think that such groups ought to be allowed to engage in such practices. Many of us think that the so-called liberal value of freedom of association imposes a moral or ethical obligation on us to refrain from interfering with such associations on ethical grounds. Of course, the claim is not that we ought to refrain from interference no matter what. If National Action started to engage in violent vilification, for instance, I take it that we’d think that the ethical requirement not to interfere would be outweighed by the ethical requirement to prevent the violence from taking place. However, to a very large extent, we think that there are strong ethical reasons to keep civil society and ethics separate.

Here is a second example. Think of governments or states. It is pretty obvious that states are going to fall foul of the dictates of morality, at best from time to time, at worst pretty much constantly. One conclusion you might draw from this is that the state is simply unjustified. This is indeed the conclusion that anarchists and libertarians tend to draw. But, unless you’re an anarchist or a libertarian, this just seems absurd. It is surely far more natural to make an ethical case for permitting the state to depart from what is strictly speaking ethically right at least in many circumstances. One version of this case that is due to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke claims that not having any state would be ethically disastrous. But, in order for the state to survive – to prevent it being overthrown from within, or destroyed from without – the state must sometimes engage in unethical behaviour. Therefore, it is ethically right for the state to sometimes perform actions that are ethically wrong. So, again, we have an ethical argument to the effect that we ought, at least to a sizeable extent, keep politics and ethics separate.

A final example, also from legal and political philosophy. This is the most controversial. Think of courts of law, in particular the Australian High Court say. Now I for one am a big fan of many of the decisions that the High Court has made in recent years. Take Mabo, for instance. I think I celebrated for about 12 hours straight after the Mabo decision was handed down. In fact, I think we were even drinking Cascade rather than VB that night…I am convinced that the Mabo decision was the morally right one. However, I am also convinced that it was morally wrong for the High Court to make such a decision. My reason for so thinking is that, in doing so, the High Court quite clearly appealed to moral (ie extra-legal) phenomena rather than purely legal phenomena and thus transcended its appropriate function within the political system as a whole. It became a legislative rather than a purely interpretative body. The claim I am making is this: There are ethical reasons to keep ethical considerations out of the High Court. There are ethical reasons to keep law and ethics separate.

None of the examples I have given are uncontroversial and we can talk more about them in discussion if you like. Nonetheless, I am going to argue that science looks like a pretty strong contender for one of these domains – like civil society, and politics, and law – from which we ought, on ethical grounds, to keep ethics largely separate – with the one proviso that I’ll come to below. Why do I think this?

There are quite a few reasons actually, but let me just mention the main ones. The first is an old reason that goes back to Plato: that scientists are the bearers of a distinctive kind of knowledge or expertise that the rest of us have to a much lesser extent. I admitted to you earlier just how far I am from possessing this knowledge or expertise. But, according to this argument, so are all of us non-scientists – albeit to varying degrees. But now, if there is a distinctive kind of scientific knowledge or expertise that is barred to the rest of us, then surely we should be very careful about telling scientists what they ought and ought not to do from outside. It’d be a bit like if we burst into the operating room where a neurosurgeon is performing some delicate operation and told him that he really ought to hold the scalpel this way rather than that way – or that he really ought to cut this nerve rather than that. A frightening thought no?

This is not enough in itself to vindicate my claim. But now consider a second factor. This is that, not only are we ignorant about matters scientific, we are also breathtakingly ignorant about matters ethical. Even if there are ethical properties – rightness and wrongness, justified-ness and unjustified-ness – and I think there are, we simply don’t know what things possess them and when. It is impossible, or at least bloody difficult, to know when particular actions are right and wrong, justified or unjustified. And this too lends support to my claim that there are ethical reasons to leave scientists alone. Because even if there is a fact of the matter about whether stem-cell research and animal experimentation are ethically right, it looks as though we can’t know what it is. And just as we give criminals the legal benefit of the doubt when we don’t know for sure that they’re legally guilty, so too ought we, as it were, to give scientists the ethical benefits of the doubt since we don’t (and can’t) know for sure that they’re, as it were, ethically guilty.

So, my first reason for arguing that we ought to leave scientists alone is that scientists possess a distinctive kind of expertise. My second reason is that it’s not as though we know what’s right and wrong anyway. My third reason is this: Whenever a community has flourished over long periods of time, there are invariably subtle, complex and nuanced norms (codes of conduct as it were) by which the members of that community guide their actions and criticise other members of the community insofar as they deviate from those norms. These are norms that outsiders don’t necessarily understand or appreciate. Think of the very complex norms that constituted particular Aboriginal communities say. Where such norms exist, I think that we ought only to interfere with the utmost reluctance and carefulness. One of the problem with the early Australian colonists is that they didn’t, and we all know what resulted. But it’s not just cultural or ethnic communities in which these subtle norms exist. They exist in all sorts of communities. I guarantee that the community of Australian carpenters, for instance, has a whole set of norms that have arisen over time. And I guarantee that carpenters guide their actions to a very large extent by these norms, and when particular carpenters don’t, the other carpenters band together and impose various kinds of sanctions against the malefactor. Now, what I want to suggest to you is that the same is going to be true of the scientific community. Or, if you don’t like my somewhat monolithic way of talking, the same is going to be true of scientific communities. There are going to be norms that inhere in scientific communities. These norms will not just have arisen accidentally. Rather, they will be the product of complex historical processes; they will, in a sense, be distillers of all sorts of considerations that have arisen and been dealt with over time. And here is my claim: We override these norms at our peril!

Towards A Science of Ethics

Now I want to conclude by saying something very briefly about the second issue that I canvassed at the outset: the importance of developing a science of ethics. In fact, I’ve been saying things implicitly about a science of ethics almost since I began, so there’s going to be little new.

Take it from me: one of the things that tends to make moral philosophers drool with envy whenever we turn our minds to what scientists do is the methodological rigour, the certainty, the systematicity of what scientists do. (I’m aware that this is probably rather a naïve and Utopian view of science actually, but bear with me.) While the body of science is constantly growing, while more and more sophisticated theoretical and technical apparatus is being designed and used to great effect by scientists, we moral philosophers bumble along like blind, deaf mice – bumping into things as we go.

My hardly original point is just this: The extent of human progress, even just in the last fifty years say, has been breathtaking. It makes my brain hurt just to think of it. But the same just isn’t true of moral philosophy. We still don’t really know what moral rightness is. We still don’t even really know if there is such a thing! One explanation given by Derek Parfit for this, and reiterated by the Australian moral philosopher Michael Smith (whom I think I can see in the audience) is that moral philosophy is just breaking off the shackles of 2000 years of domination by a Christian worldview. Note that science had to do this too by the way. Just ask Galileo and Copernicus. But it did it quite a bit earlier than moral philosophy.

Yet what can be more important than what moral philosophy is supposed to be studying? What can be more important than trying to make sense of doing the morally right thing, of leading an ethical life? This is the paradox. I can’t think of anything more important than ethics. Yet it is surely the branch of human endeavour in which we have made the least progress.

You can doubtless see where I’m going. What I’m saying is that we need – all of us – to work on developing a science of ethics: We need a cogent method, we need a cogent aim. Oh yeah, and a whole heap of cash wouldn’t go astray either. So, if there are any politicians in the audience, here’s your next electoral platform on a silver platter. We also need plenty of students. So, if all you High School students haven’t decided what you’re going to study at uni, bear this is mind. And, of course, we need plenty more events like the MCH Weekend of Ideas.

I argued before that there seems to me to be a strong ethical case for keeping science and ethics relatively separate, but with one proviso. Let me now say what that proviso is. Suppose that we were to make the sort of progress in developing a science of ethics that we have made in developing a science of other things. Then in that case we might indeed justifiably tell scientists what they ought and ought not to do, at least within limits. But until we’ve got a passable science of ethics, we should tread very carefully amongst the various flower-beds that comprise the ethics of science. The ethics of science needs a science of ethics. Or so it seems to me. Thank you.