![](/web/20100627183923im_/http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/nov06/page4a.jpg)
The Science of
Morality, the
Morality of Science
A friend recently remarked that she had been obliged to take her
cat to the vet for the third time this year. When asked if the animal
had contracted some nasty virus she replied: "Oh, it's nothing like
that. My cat suffers from depression." If the cat had been present to
witness the ensuing howls of laughter from the assembled throng, he
would no doubt have gone into terminal decline. And, strange as it may
seem, he would be right to deplore such a display of callous human
ignorance. For feline depression, as it turns out, is nothing unusual,
with eight out of ten vets in one survey reporting cases of stress and
depression in animals left alone at home while their
owners go out to work (BBC Online, 25 August 05).
But it's not just a case of yowling dogs or sulking moggies
hungry for bigger portions of human interaction and a side order of
self-validation. The social consensus has moved a long way from the
days when medieval farmers were told by priests to cut the feet off
their runaway pigs since, not having souls, they wouldn't feel
anything. The centuries-long debate about animal
sentience, more recently informed by a respectable body of research
into animal behaviour, has culminated in zoologists and ethologists
concluding that not only do many animals feel, they can think. "The
whole climate over whether to accept sentience has changed hugely in
the last 15 years", Joyce D'Silva of Compassion in World Farming told
the BBC back in 2003 (BBC
Online, 9 May 03). And thinking is only the beginning, argues the CIWF,
since there is evidence among social vertebrate species of altruistic
behaviour and even a crude understanding of morality.
And if humans respond to these concepts with a milk bowl full of
scepticism, it is not surprising, since many scientists are also
fighting a rearguard action against them. "Just a couple of decades
ago, the words 'animal' and 'cognition' couldn't be mentioned in the
same sentence", says primatologist Frans de
Waal, "With this fight behind us, emotions have become the new taboo'
(New Scientist, 14 Oct. In a world where per capita meat production and
consumption are probably higher than at any time in recorded history,
talk of emotionally aware animals feeling mean or loving or jealous is
likely to be
greeted with cold disdain. Yet field studies of primates report
displays of sympathy, compassion, a clear understanding of what is fair
and what is not
fair, and instances of group punishment of individuals who disobey
rules and inconvenience others. One recent study at Montreal University
suggested that even mice may be capable of empathic responses.
The difficulty which
this sort of behaviour poses is that modern secular society tends to
assume that morality is something which comes from the outside, an
abstract intellectual construct established by articulate beings who
are capable of imagining all the dire consequences of not knowing right
from wrong. At its extreme, among religious groups, morality is located
so far outside the species that it does not reside in any known place
but in the imaginary mind of an imaginary being in an imaginary
universe. But what if morality actually comes from the inside,
hard-wired into us? And what if it's not just us? What if other animals
share some of the moral and emotional characteristics that we imagine
are exclusive to humans, where does that leave our moral justification
of ourselves, especially in relation to how we treat them?
It isn't just burger bingers who will start looking guiltily at
their Monster Mac. There is a larger philosophical question at stake
which affects even scientists, and socialists. What is the point of
striving for a value-free science, if we know that in practice it never
has existed and in theory never really could anyway? Many have argued
vociferously, over issues like the Bomb, genetics,
or even stem-cell research, that science without morality is a
dangerous and unhinged form of knowledge, yet the problem with the
argument is that it is moral in itself.
Thus morality argues in defence of morality. But if we recognise
that forms of proto-morality are built-in to higher mammals and
primates, perhaps the argument in favour of the moral dimension begins
to look less circular and more solidly based.
And what of socialist politics, which is in the habit of highlighting
the socio-economic forces which drive changes in society, often to the
extent of regarding personal 'lapses' into moral outrage as a form of
intellectual flabbiness? Does the case against capitalism and for
common ownership and production for use do better with or without a
moral dimension? Is it valid to say that capitalism is not only an
inefficient and downright destructive
social system, it is also plain wrong?
Of course, knowledge would not have progressed as far as it has if
moralists still held sway, as they have for most of human history.
Morality means different things to different societies, and to base
one's strategy for the future upon whatever concept of morality is
fashionable today would clearly be a big mistake. Yet if a chimpanzee
can show the instinctive compassion of one
sentient creature towards the suffering of another sentient creature,
perhaps it is not for us to attempt to rise above our basic animal
instincts as if they were not really ours but, literally, given by the
hand of gods. Perhaps it is just as important to oppose capitalism
because it is evil, and not merely because it is 'incorrect'.
No planes,no brains.
Another conversation, another friend. This one was on that increasingly
tedious subject: did the Americans blow up the Twin Towers themselves?
Some people, such as UFOlogists, numerologists, and readers of Nexus
magazine, foreswear the genuine wonder of scientific discovery and
evidence-based knowledge in favour of fantasies, rumours and conspiracy
theories conjured up by dedicated charlatans who from time immemorial
have always preferred the tall story to the telling fact.
The 'no-planers' believe that American missiles crashed into the World
Trade Center in 2001, and to explain what we all saw with our own eyes
they offer the amazing suggestion that thesemissiles were cloaked in
holographic images of passenger jets. In an article in the New
Statesman (quoted in the New York Times, 7 Sept), Brendan O'Neill
describes an interview with two noplaners,
ex-secret service agents David Shayler and Annie Machon, as they
enthusiastically describe, following the French journalist Thierry
Meyssan, author of 9/11: the big lie (2002),how it definitely couldn't
have been a plane that hit the Pentagon.
"Just look at the news footage," says Shayler. "You won't see any plane
debris on the Pentagon lawn." O'Neill almost chides himself for feeling
obliged to print the web address of a site which features photographs
of plane wreckage inside the Pentagon, at [http://www.rense.com/general32/phot.htm]).
The no-planers, like the no-landers, by which term Pathfinders
herewith dubs those obsessed cranks who insist that the Americans never
landed on the moon, are in sore need of a certain cheap and easily
available piece of scientific equipment. This invaluable device, known
as Occam's Razor, is in fact more of an old saw, which asserts that if
several different theories fit all the known facts, then the correct
theory is probably the simplest. To answer the no-planers, the simplest
explanation for something that looked exactly like a plane flying into
the North Tower is that it was a plane flying into the North Tower, and
for the no-landers, the difficulty and complexity of an operation to
get humans onto the moon would be as nothing to the difficulty and
complexity of pretending to do so and then getting away with the
pretence for the last thirty-five years. Perhaps the conclusion to draw
from all this is that, just as some animals are more thinking and moral
than we care to admit,
thus overlapping with us, we humans retain the capacity to be dumb as
ducks, thus overlapping with them.
Postscript: Unable
to resist,
Pathfinders finally succumbed to
the primal impulse and clicked
on the above link to view the
wreckage. The link didn't work.
Now that is suspicious…
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