Assessing empirically based ethics
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Assessing empirically based ethics James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky: Science and the good: the tragic quest for the foundations of morality. New Haven: Templeton Press and Yale University Press, 312pp, $26 HB Marcus Arvan1 Published online: 18 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This is an interesting book well worth reading, albeit with a suitably critical eye. Although it is pitched toward a general audience and three early chapters outlining the history of moral philosophy will likely not appeal to specialists, some of the book’s central arguments deserve to be read by all. Indeed, I think the book offers devastating critiques of some influential empirical approaches to ethics, and I hope these critiques get uptake in the literature. On the other hand, while it correctly charges a number of theorists with dramatically overselling the moral implications of various scientific findings, this book—like many popular philosophy and science books—engages in overselling of its own. More exactly, it does not make good on its title. It in no way shows that a science-based approach for the foundations of ethics is a ‘tragic quest.’ At most, it shows that many theorists have approached this task improperly. This is an important conclusion in its own right, however, and for this reason I recommend that general audiences and specialists read the book critically. This book does not begin auspiciously. Part 1, the book’s introductory chapter, is conceptually sloppy and excessively polemical. For example, on page 12, the authors claim that their subject is ‘the discourse surrounding the relationship between science and morality.’ However, this is incorrect: the book’s subject is the relationship between science and morality itself. Similarly, on pages 16–17, the authors link ‘the new moral science’ to ‘the idiom and sensibilities of the managerial elite of the dominant technocratic regime’, claiming that a scientific approach to ethics is not only ‘of a fabric with this widespread ethos’ but ‘provides an intellectual legitimation’ of it. While I think some prominent empirical approaches to ethics are problematically technocratic, not all are, and the authors should know better than to engage in overgeneralizations. Finally, the opening pages of the book feature a number of frustratingly vague commentaries like this:
* Marcus Arvan [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA
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Metascience (2020) 29:511–514
The discourse and the discursive community that generates and propagates the new moral science, while certainly made up of moral scientists, philosophers, and polemicists, is certainly not reducible to any one of them. Some contribute a little and others contribute a lot. Some are closely aligned with the leading ideas of the discourse, and others distance themselves from it on this or that point. Among those who give voice to this discourse, some are exceedingly careful and circumspect while others tend toward bluff and bluster. (13–1
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