Duhemian and Augustinian Science and the Crisis in Non-Empirical Knowledge

Duhemian and Augustinian Science and the Crisis in Non-Empirical Knowledge J. P. Moreland A SALIENT FEATURE of the success of any social, religious, or moral movement is the degree to which its advocates understand, shape, and employ the flow of ideas that forms the intellectual backdrop against which those advocates carry out their work. Setting aside Marxist and other self-refuting materialist forms of social determinism, it seems clear that ideas are among the primary things that impede or facilitate revolutionary movements. Nowhere is this more evident than the pro-life cause. But just exactly what ideas constitute the core components of the milieu in which pro-life advocates live and move and have their being? I am not a sociologist nor the son of one, and I am no expert in the sociology of knowledge. However, I am a philosopher and, as such, I have a take on this question upon which I believe it is important for us to reflect. In 1981 Daniel Callahan, who at that time served as director of The Hastings Center, published an important article entitled “Minimalist Ethics.”i Callahan’s central thesis was that contemporary American culture had come to stress the transcendence of the individual over the community, the importance of tolerating all moral viewpoints, the autonomy of the individual as the highest human good, and the voluntary, informed consent contract as the model of human relationships. These diverse moral positions, argued Callahan, are not part of a list of isolated ideas; rather, they constitute different aspects of a widely accepted moral axiom–minimalist ethics–that can be expressed in a single proposition: One may morally act in any way one chooses so long as one does not do harm to others. Sadly, Callahan provided no analysis of the connection between this 185 1 86 Life and Learning XII axiom and other ideas extant in the culture at that time. Indeed, this lack of analysis blunted the force of Callahan’s own solution to the problem, which essentially amounted to the claim that we need to set aside the assumption of minimalist ethics in favor of richer moral convictions because a minimalist ethic will not sustain us over the long haul. What are those ideas that Callahan failed to weave into his analysis? Among a small handful of worthy candidates, I want to focus on one that I take to be the primary hindrance to persuading people to adopt a richer ethical stance than minimalist ethics and a fortiori to adopting a pro-life perspective. One might think that it is the loss of belief in moral truth to which I refer. This is, indeed, a serious problem and worthy of analysis, but it is not, in my view, the foundational culprit. After all, if pressed, most moral philosophers and theologians would eschew ethical relativism in is various forms. I think the main intellectual factor that is left out of Callahan’s analysis and that hinders the pro-life movement is a loss of belief among cultural elites in particular, and the broader public in general, in the existence of non-empirical, non-scientific knowledge, especially of moral and religious knowledge. Interestingly, Callahan himself seemed to accept the absence of moral knowledge in his article. He makes reference to the fact than when John Stuart Mill first advanced his harm principle in 1859, he could “assume a relatively stable body of moral conviction below the surface.”ii Later, he advises that we bring “all the public and private opinion we can” against a minimalist ethic.iii Note carefully Callahan’s selection of terms: moral conviction and public/private opinion. These are hardly robust cognitive labels. There are several examples in the literature of this ubiquitous denial of ethical knowledge. Here is one, selected almost at random. In a widely used text in ethics, utilitarian Tom L. Beauchamp considers and rejects a pluralistic theory of value because, among other things, it seems to many to be futile and presumptuous to attempt to develop a general theory of value.iv As a replacement, Beauchamp proffers subjective preference utilitarianism, according to which the value of an act lies in its maximization of the satisfaction of desires and wants which express individual preferences. J. P. Moreland 187 He recognizes that, so defined, this theory suffers from some fairly obvious counter-examples, for example, in a possible world where most prefer child molestation, it would justify such an act under certain conditions. So Beauchamp supplements the principle of subject preference such that the justification of an act is spelled out in terms of the maximization of those subjective preferences that it is rational to have. Now just exactly how is “rationality” functioning here? To answer this, let us distinguish prescriptive and descriptive rationality. Prescrip- tive rationality is the ability to have insights into or form justified beliefs with respect to what is intrinsically valuable. This cannot be what Beauchamp means since, if it were, his theory would be circular. Clearly, he means descriptive rationality: the ability to select efficient means to accomplish arbitrarily preferred ends and the formation of only those desires that normal people desire, which in turn would be cashed out statistically or in terms of evolutionary advantage, or in some similar sort of way. My purpose here is not to evaluate Beachamp’s subjective preference theory as a theory of value, though it is clearly deficient on this score. Rather, I want to call attention to the impact on the availabil- ity of moral knowledge that Beachamp’s analysis has. In a way similar to anti-realists in philosophy of science such as Larry Laudan, by defining rationality in the descriptive and instrumental way he does, Beachamp severs the connection between rationality and moral truth and thus implicitly denies the possibility of moral knowledge. The assault on or ignorance of moral knowledge could be illustrated over and over again. Rawls’s decision-makers in the original position are denied access to moral information, Kai Nielsen advances a contructivist form of reflective equilibrium in which moral truth and moral knowledge are simply irrelevant, and J. L. Mackie argues that, given the truth of naturalistic atheism, irreducible moral facts are too queer to quantify over and, thus, Mackie denies moral knowledge.v What is going on here and how can pro-life advocates qua academics change the situation? These are complicated and difficult questions, but in what follows I will try to offer my own insights on them. While far from exhaustive, I trust they 1 88 Life and Learning XII will be helpful to my pro-life colleagues. I shall (1) locate the rejection of moral knowledge against the backdrop of the central world view struggle now dominant on Western university campuses and (2) distinguish Duhemian and Augustinian science and show how the distinction can be useful to restoring confidence in moral knowledge. In this second section, I shall also define and locate the emerging Intelligent Design movement in an overall pro-life strategy. 1. MORAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE THREE-WAY WORLD VIEW STRUGGLE I begin this section with the story of a prominent individual. Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam is one current intellectual leader who has embodied the broader cultural malaise to which I am referring. Around 1980 Putnam attended a dinner party at which the hostess remarked that science has taught us that the universe was an uncaring, purposeless, valueless machine.vi The statement stuck with Putnam and, in my view, it played a role in the development of his thought, which moved from strict scientific naturalism to a form of creative neo-Kantian constructiv- ism regarding truth, reality, reference, reason, and value.vii To be sure, postmodernism is a variegated movement with many stripes. But if we take postmodernism to include a rejection of (1) a language independent reality, (2) a correspondence theory of truth, (3) the referential use of language, (4) the epistemic objectivity of reason, (5) the self’s ability to exemplify intentionality so as to contact reality directly, unmediated by “conceptual schemes” or their surrogates; then Putnam’s move is postmodern despite its analytic philosophical trimmings. Curiously, truth is a casualty in both scientific naturalism and postmodernism and along with it authority, in this case knowledge, especially the non-empirical sort. The Baconian/Cartesian identification of power over nature as the goal of science is still with us, and the postmodern preoccupation with the power dynamics of language is well known. Putnam’s way out is sad at many levels. At one level it reminds me of the supposed virtues of Buddhist justifications for ecology heralded in the late sixties. The claim was that Buddhism replaces the Judeo-Christ- ian chauvinism of humans vis-à-vis nature and levels the playing field. J. P. Moreland 189 What escaped notice, however, was that the field was no longer worth playing on. Similarly, it is small comfort to those suffering from real evil to be told not to worry about the meaningless of it all because we now know that value, every bit as much as “reality,” is constructed. But what concerns me more is that Putnam could not see a more satisfying third option right in front of him. He should have added a non-naturalist ontology of value and self to scientific realism and pondered what sort of universe has room for them. I think such a move would have led him to theism. In any case, Putnam’s journey is precisely what has happened to the Western intellectual scene. As with Putnam, the emergence of scientific naturalism as the dominant world view in Western culture is the chief reason why there is widespread disregard for non-empirical knowledge.

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