Race, Reason and Reality
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Facts versus Values and the Role of Science
The study of race differences alarms some people. This chapter lays the philosophical groundwork for scientific study of this incendiary subject by differentiating between scientific facts, and the emotions that they sometimes arouse. The separation between facts, on the one hand, and beliefs and values on the other, is essential if we are to understand sensitive cultural issues.
Not everyone agrees. Some postmodern writers think that “to state the fact and to ring the bell is one and the same thing”, that fact and value are inseparable. Some scientists think that values can in fact be derived from science: “One by one, the great questions of philosophy, including ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Where did we come from?’ are being answered to different degrees of solidity. So, gradually, science is simply taking over the big questions created by philosophy. Philosophy consists largely of the history of failed models of the brain.” Thus spake eminent biologist and chronicler of sociobiology E. O. Wilson, in a 2009 interview. Wilson later softened his position a little, urging scientists and humanists to cooperate.[1]
Both these views are mistaken: Facts must be kept separate from values if science is to advance; and no, values cannot themselves be derived from scientific facts. The rest of this chapter defends both these propositions.
David Hume’s Conclusion
Philosopher David Hume, perhaps the most perceptive figure of the 18th century Enlightenment, famously separated “ought”, the dictates of morality, from “is”, the facts of science. Reason is value-neutral, Hume argued:
It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me[2].
He goes on to point out that,
Since a passion [motive, desire] can never, in any sense, be called unreasonable, but when founded on a false supposition, or when it chuses means insufficient for the designed end, it is impossible, that reason and passion can ever oppose each other, or dispute for the government of the will and actions. The moment we perceive the falshood of any supposition, or the insufficiency of any means, our passions yield to our reason without any opposition. I may desire any fruit as of an excellent relish; but whenever you convince me of my mistake, my longing ceases. I may will the performance of certain actions as means of obtaining any desired good; but as my willing of these actions is only secondary, and founded on the supposition, that they are causes of the proposed effect; as soon as I discover the falshood of that supposition, they must become indifferent to me [emphasis added].
In other words, reason is just the link between passion (will, motivation), facts — premises — and action: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Without passion, the facts established by reason are impotent. The findings of science, which are based on reasoning about empirical facts, are neither moral nor immoral, according to Hume. Hume’s distinction between “is” and “ought” is not a distinction between doing science and doing religion. It is a distinction between fact and volition, between existing and acting.
New atheist Sam Harris defines a misleading point about relation between science and values[3]: “The very idea of “objective” knowledge (i.e., knowledge acquired through honest observation and reasoning) has values built into it, as every effort we make to discuss facts depends upon principles that we must first value (e.g., logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.).”
Yes, that the pursuit of science involves values, is of course, correct. The reason is that, as Hume argued, any action requires some kind of motivation, some kind of value. Hence, the fact that doing science requires scientists to believe in “logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.”, not to mention honesty and curiosity, does not invalidate Hume[4]. Neither does the fact that pursuing science requires faith in a fixed, hence discoverable, nature. The stability of natural law is not self-evident, like a syllogism or simple arithmetic. In order to seek, a scientist must believe there is something to be found.
Yes, to do science requires values; but the facts thus obtained are not themselves values. Nevertheless, some facts cause some people to react emotionally. The facts that men are on average taller than women, or that African-Americans have lower average IQ than white Americans, are equally value-neutral. But, human nature being what it is, the second fact is likely to elicit much stronger emotions than the first, even though both are just facts. Neither one impels us to action, unless we feel, as a value, that some race differences are a bad thing.
‘Science-based’ ethics: Human flourishing
If science cannot provide us with an ethics, how about secular ethical systems that pretend to be science-based? How should we judge them?
There are at least two supposedly science-based ethical systems on offer. One is Sam Harris’s “human flourishing” idea, which rests on the well-being of individuals. The other is based on evolution. I’ve already alluded to some problems with Harris’s proposal. Here are a couple more. “Values are a certain kind of fact” says Harris in a 2010 TED talk. Perhaps, but values are not scientific facts, because they cannot be tested. We can show that one course of action leads to better results than another. But “better” is always a judgment of value not a provable fact. Harris provides a number of apparent counter-examples, but solves them all by resorting to his well-being idea. But, as scientist-commentator Sean Carroll points out[5], who says that personal well-being is the highest good anyway? Many great men (Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, not to mention Darwin himself who once wrote “happiness, I fear is not good for work.”) were pretty miserable: should their unhappiness outweigh their accomplishments?
The other alternative is evolution and natural selection. Wilson and radical behaviorist B. F. Skinner have both suggested[6] that evolutionary epistemology in some form allows “is” to be transformed into “ought”. In his provocatively titled 1971 bestseller Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner simply ignores Hume, writing:
Questions of this sort…are said. . .to involve ‘value judgments’—to raise questions…not about what man can do but about what he ought to do. It is usually implied that the answers are out of the reach of science…It would be a mistake for the behavioral scientist to agree.
The hypothesis that what ought to be (in the moral sense) can be inferred from what is, i.e., science, was termed the naturalistic fallacy by English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873-1958). Obviously, Skinner did not believe it to be fallacy, and neither does E. O. Wilson: “I find it hard to believe that had Kant, Moore, and [John] Rawls known modern biology and experimental psychology they would have reasoned as they did…. Moral reasoning, I believe, is at every level intrinsically consilient with the natural sciences[7]” and “The empiricist argument, then, is that by exploring the biological roots of moral behavior, and explaining their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wiser and more enduring ethical consensus than has gone before.” In sum: “Ought is the product of a material process.” Note the reference to “material origins and biases”, which again points to a confusion between process and outcome: Understanding the historical process that led to a belief can justify a scientific claim, but not a moral one.
So, what lesson does Wilson draw from science? Unlike Harris and (as we will see) Skinner, Wilson is not specific. His view is consequentialist, we judge “moral instincts…according to their consequences.” There are three problems with this. First, over what time period should we look? Should we judge the consequences today, this week, a hundred years from now? How should a good consequence now be weighed against a bad sequel 10 years down the road? Second, how well can we predict remote consequences? Well, for a day or two ahead, perhaps, not so well for a decade or centuries. And third, how do we tell good consequences from bad; in other words, what is “the good”? Wilson does not answer this question directly. We can infer what he thinks is good from the things he calls bad: he dislikes xenophobia and what he calls “paleolithic egalitarian and tribalistic instincts”. He advocates more research, assuming that the better we understand what human moral sentiments are, the better we will know what they should be.
B. F. Skinner defines “the good” in two ways. One is merely descriptive: “good” is just whatever society “reinforces” — rewards — or punishes. His more fundamental definition goes to the heart of evolution, survival of the culture and the species. “The ultimate sources [of values] are to be found in the evolution of the species and the evolution of the culture.” Perhaps “survival” is a value everyone can agree on. The problem is deciding just what will promote survival and what will endanger it. If “survival” is to be our guide we must be able to predict, at least in broad outline, the course of biological and cultural evolution.
Survival as the ultimate value
The assumption that evolutionary history is predictable is closely related to the doctrine of historicism, espoused most famously by Karl Marx. It was devastatingly criticized by Karl Popper, who wrote: “Marx may be excused for holding the mistaken belief that there is a ‘natural law of historical development’; for some of the best scientists of his time…believed in the possibility of discovering a law of evolution. But there can be no empirical ‘law of evolution.[8]” On this there is general agreement: evolution is not predictable.
There are also practical difficulties. First, looking to “survival” for answers to ethical questions will often point to conclusions that conflict with values that are now deeply held. Are we to abandon them? Second, there are very many cultural and genetic “fitness” questions that simply cannot be decided at all: the problem with “survival” as a value is that it provides little or no practical guidance in difficult cases.
A few examples should suffice to show that deciding on evolutionary “good” and “bad” is at essentially impossible. For example, alcohol is a poison. Hence, cultures that use alcohol must be less “fit” (in the Darwinian sense) than cultures that do not. But are they? There might be hidden benefits to one or the other that we cannot now foresee. The Puritan consensus was that alcohol was an unmitigated evil; Islam agrees. The social benefits associated with moderate drinking were assumed to be outweighed by its bad effects. Yet drinking alcohol is a custom common to the majority of cultures, and there might even be health benefits to moderate drinking, so the evolutionary balance sheet on alcohol is not yet closed.
Another example: alcohol might be controversial, but smoking is certainly bad — isn’t it? This is not so clear either. Some smokers die from lung cancer and emphysema, usually in unpleasant ways, which is unquestionably bad for “human flourishing” as well as individual survival. However, smoking-induced illnesses generally do not kill until their victims reach their sixties and seventies, after their productive life is almost over and before they become a burden to their children and to society. It is an evolutionary truism that life history is determined by adaptive considerations, and a short but productive life is often “fitter,” in a natural-selection sense, than a longer and less productive one. And many smokers, writers particularly, insist that smoking helps them to work.
Perhaps a society that encourages smoking — which may yield a shortened but productive life—will be more successful in the long run than one that discourages smoking and has to put up with a lot of unproductive old people? Should we perhaps encourage smoking? There are data to support the idea. Several studies have shown that the lifetime health-care costs for smokers are actually lower than for non-smokers (public-health rhetoric to the contrary)[9]. Whether or not reduced financial cost corresponds to evolutionary advantage is of course not known, but an inverse relation between cost and “fitness” is perhaps more likely than not.
The so-called “greatest generation,” born from 1901 to 1927 or so, were much more likely to smoke than people born from, say 1960 on, yet few would deem them less productive. There is no clear evidence that smoking exerts a social cost[10].
Argument from evolutionary survival very quickly comes up against many traditional beliefs. Even obvious virtues like safety and the emancipation of women, not to mention tolerance for anti-progenitive sexual abnormalities, might be questioned by a thoroughgoing evolutionary ethicist. Is it really adaptive to outfit 3-year-olds on tricycles with crash helmets and give them padded playgrounds so they grow up inexperienced, timid and unadventurous, or to fit our cars with air bags and seat belts so that the reckless and inept are protected from the consequences of their actions? And does it make evolutionary sense to encourage the brightest young women to delay, and thus limit, childbirth so they can spend the prime of their lives as office managers and investment bankers rather than mothers? Lee Kuan Yew, President of Singapore, thought a few years ago that it did not. He was called a eugenicist for providing maternal incentives to well-educated women. But surely a conscientious evolutionary ethicist should applaud him?
Reproductive rates in all Western countries are now below replacement, which does not look like long-term evolutionary success. But should we emulate Islamic practice, subjugate women, and encourage polygamy (which is itself, by some standards, eugenic), which seems to work better reproductively?
The problem of what really conduces to “fitness” — of a culture or a race — has become especially acute with advances in medicine. Should parents be allowed to control the sex and other characteristics of their children? Should human cloning be permitted? What extraordinary measures are justified to keep a sick person alive? Kidney transplants, yes. Heart transplants, yes, perhaps — but what if the patient is already old or has other ailments? When should a sick person be allowed to die[11]? What is the “optimal lifespan”? We know that lifespan is a subject to natural selection[12], so there must be an optimal—in the sense of most favorable to the continuation of the species—lifespan. What is it? What if it is shorter than the current average in the West?
Politics are not immune from evolutionary optimality. What is the best political system? Most Americans assume that hierarchy is bad, and the American Constitution enshrines democracy and the rights of the individual. However, the most long-lasting (i.e., evolutionarily successful) societies we know were not democratic and egalitarian but hierarchical and authoritarian. The ancient Egyptian culture survived substantially unchanged for thousands of years. The Greeks, the inventors of democracy, survived as a culture only for two or three centuries and were defeated by the undemocratic Romans, who lasted three or four times as long. The oldest extant democracy is less than 300 years old. In the animal kingdom, the termites, ants and bees, with built-in hierarchies, have outlasted countless more individualistic species[13].
The attempt to base values on evolutionary success very soon raises questions about traditional beliefs. The problem with “survival of the culture” as a value is that it requires reliable knowledge of the future. While some customs are clearly maladaptive under most imaginable circumstances, others are more contingent. The problem is that most of the prescriptions of traditional morality fall in the latter class. We simply do not know, belief by belief, custom by custom, rule by rule, whether or not our culture would, in the long run, be better off with or without them.
I argue that the facts, about the contentious issue of group differences, but especially differences in cognitive abilities, must come first before we let emotion intrude. When it does intrude and demand action, the action should respect the real diversity of human nature. Men[14] are not all equal and this is actually a good thing. The variety of human talents has allowed humanity to populate even the most inhospitable regions of the planet. The same diversity has produced geniuses as well as idiots: inequality is not all bad! But perfect equality is all bad. A population can be made uniformly ill-educated by bad government, but no social policy ever created geniuses. So total equality is a dismal prospect.
The fact-value issue should have been settled by David Hume in 1740. The facts of science provide no basis for values, but values are required for, or implied by action. The next few chapters are about fact and reason. The last chapter looks at values and their policy implications.
[1] Winter-Spring 2023: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-evolutionary-ethics-of-e-o-wilson
[2] David Hume Collection: A Treatise of Human Nature. (1738-40) Kindle Edition.
[3] Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values Free Press, 2010.
[4] See Staddon Scientific Method, 2024 Second edition, Chapter 1, for more on “the faith of science.”
[5] https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2010/05/04/126504492/you-can-t-derive-ought-from-is
[6] Staddon, J. E. R.(2004) Scientific imperialism and behaviorist epistemology. Behavior and Philosophy, 32, 231-242. http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/10161/3389
[7] Wilson, E. O. (1998). Consilience: The unity of knowledge. New York: Alfred Knopf.
[8] Popper, K. R. (1950). The open society and its enemies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Popper, K. R. (1962). Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. New York: Basic Books.
[9] For a review, see John Staddon Unlucky Strike: Private health and the science, law and politics of smoking. (second edition). (2022).
[10] 1955 Current Population Survey, 1955-1997, National Health Interview Survey. th (474×332) (bing.com); https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_10/sr10_059.pdf
[11] Several European countries have now approved, or are considering, proposals for assisted dying — at a time when their populations are breeding at below replacement rates: “Not enough young people? Just reduce the number of old.” https://www.euronews.com/health/2022/12/10/where-in-europe-is-assisted-dying-legal-
[12] Stearns S. C. The evolution of life histories. 1992, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
[13] Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) thought bees a fine model for a human utopia. Bee keeper Leo Tolstoy had similar ideas.
[14] I.e., mankind