10.20.08
Wilson’s crypto-fanatic The Biological Basis Of Morality
I cited this essay in the previous post, and wanted to let hilzoy at Obsidian Wings have his say, Wilson essay now online: The Biological Basis Of Morality.
This essay, or the version of it in Wilson’s Consilience, has been the object ol multiple forum discussions on my part on the net, several years ago, and one thing I learned is that picking up rattlesnacks can be dangerous: you can deflate from hoof and mouth disease. I am genuinely fatigued at writing about it.
This essay is crypto-fanaticism in disguise, and we are watching a whole generation being educated in this kind of scientific fundamentalism. They are impossible to argue with save by the mutual exchange of vituperative pseudo-reasoning on both sides.
Never underestimate an idiot, he can kick up the dust of ‘foundational issues’ without much effort, and provoke ranting in response. One is also an idiot, as the basis of metaphysical debates is forever a stalemate. The essay is full of tweaked metaphysical dilemmas that are not easily answered, but given exceptionally weak treatments by Wilson.
All that said, one should have to advise scientists to spare humanity indoctrination in this kind of tepid science, and post-ethical reasoning.
Wilson is disconcerting because his way of doing this is such a skewed piece or rank scientism that you may get overconfident. The bottom line seems to be that such a sloppy and wilfully ignorant piece of work, while it might ask questions that seem relevant but are metaphysically difficult to answer, should be rejected on the grounds of its general narrowness, and appeal, apparently, to a nearly violent culture war:
The choice between transcendentalism and empiricism will be the coming century’s version of the struggle for men’s souls. Moral reasoning will either remain centered in idioms of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or shift toward science-based material analysis. Where it settles will depend on which world view is proved correct, or at least which is more widely perceived to be correct.
Mr. Wilson, give me a f-king break. No we should not get melodramatically violent and spout nonsense about the ‘coming’ struggle. Darwinism has produced enough idiocy. Maybe at least we can cancel the ‘struggle’ on solid Kantian grounds of the undecidability of metaphysical questions. We will, and should, continue in the obscurity of metaphysical questions that have endured for millennia, and won’t go away because of pastiche from the successsors to Charles Darwin.
Meanwhile, it always seemed to me that it was Kant who staged the question of ethics in a form better adapted to evolutionary reasoning, better in its strange way than anyone else, strange as that might seem. That point is not obvious at first sight, in the strange (to some) format of his thinking. His ethical work is not, so to speak, about his own system, but ‘common ordinary morality’, which he says he will attempt to explicate. Beyond his ethical reasoning lies the foundation he lays in terms of the question of ‘freedom’. We must address that issue in evolutionary terms.
So one issue for biologists is, what is this ‘common ordinary morality’, Kant’s effort (which, btw, he humbly declares in any case impossible to fully arrive at) is an attempt to probe the immense complexity of this ordinary evolutionary consciousness, evolving by a process that is entirely unknown to us. Kant reminds us of the immense complexity of that aspect of our selves that we process everyday, just as we use language, without understanding it.
That’s the catch 22 for scientific reductionism: we can’t say how ethics evolved, until we can explain the ‘ethical behavior module’ present in man, next to his ‘linguistic module’.
Kant has been challenged, harangued, ‘refuted’, book thrown against the wall, so many times, yet he forever stands up again like Bugs Bunny after falling over a cliff.
Beyond that there are dozens of objections to Wilson’s viewpoint, but before engaging those issues, it is important to point to the one decisive issue: the weakness in Darwin’s theory of natural selection, inherited by Neo-Darwinian population genetics. Why argue all these questions if the basis for Darwin’s theory, thence Wilson’s oddball yet consistent conclusions (which most scientists are too smart to discuss in public), is incorrect?
The claims, indicated in Wilson’s reference to the Prisoner’s Dilemma (that piece of cleverness produced by the Rand Corporation), that kin/group selection have resolved the issue of the evolution of ethical behavior, and not only that but that they allow us to ‘materialize’ (?) the value domain itself is so disconterting as to be unnerving. Maybe this madman will shoot first, one should slip away from proximity to a madman.
Still Wilson is logically consistent in a way, and naively reveals the weakness lurking in most scientific thinking. What of the value domain?
Wilson’s animus toward Kant is puzzling, arising perhaps because Kant (apart from being infuriatingly, to some, difficult) goes ninety-nine percent of the way to undermining religion, and then stops short of the last mile. That’s life, I guess.
Note: one should be aware of the related work of Schopenhauer, which is critical of Kantian ethics, and produces a version of the Kantian framework that was moving rapidly toward an evolutionary, if not Darwinian, perspective.