Science, Society, and the Value of Good Philosophy

I have always been skeptical about futurology, but even more so since the CIA satellite cameras, capable of reading a cigarette pack in a Russian soldier’s blouse, failed totally to detect the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. One would thus be stupid to essay any prophecy in the Nostradamus sense of the word.

There is, however, a not-quite-so sexy view of prophecy which is sometimes neglected, though it was in fact the primary modality for the Old Testament prophets. This is the prophet as operating in a hypothetical mode: “If things continue as they are…thus and thus is likely to occur.” It was after all, no great prognostication for Jeremiah to affirm (17:4-8) that any small nation opposing the military might of Babylon would be destroyed!

I am far more comfortable with this latter sense of prophecy, and have in fact deployed it. Back in 1978, I was hired by the CSU veterinary school to develop the world’s first course in veterinary medical ethics. Pursuant to that goal, I felt I needed to develop an ethic articulating the ethical/conceptual basis for emerging but inchoate social stirrings evidencing increasing concern for animal welfare. Realizing that ethics comes from pre-existing ethics, and recalling Plato’s dictum about reminding rather than teaching. I proceeded to reason out in what direction society was most likely to move if it was indeed growing more concerned about animal treatment, and inevitably moving beyond the traditional societal ethic of anti-cruelty, as the vast majority of animal suffering subsequent to the mid-twentieth century was not the result of deliberate, sadistic, willful, purposeless, deviant, intentional infliction of pain and suffering or outrageous neglect proscribed by the anti-cruelty ethic, but in fact was attendant on new forms of animal use—animal research and testing and industrialized animal agriculture—aimed respectively at augmenting scientific knowledge, toxicity testing, and producing cheap and plentiful food for a burgeoning population in the face of precipitous loss of agricultural land and labor. The anti-cruelty ethic had shown itself to be ill-formed for dealing with research issues or agricultural issues, and I reasoned that if society was indeed seeking a new ethic appropriate to new animal uses, it would look to our ethic for humans and apply it, mutatis mutandis, to animal treatment.

Whereas for example proper treatment of animals in traditional agriculture was assured by the fact that agricultural success was based in animal husbandry, with a producer being successful if and only if animals were well treated and put into optimal environments which suited their biological natures, with the producers argumenting the animals’ natural ability to survive and thrive with provision of food during famine, water during drought, protection from predation, medical help, and so on, thus creating an ancient and symbiotic contract with animals, modern agriculture didn’t need to put square pegs in square holes, but could force animals into uncongenial environments, to where they were productive but miserable by virtue of possessing “technological sanders” such as antibiotics and vaccines. With husbandry no longer automatic, I guessed that society would look to our protection of humans from extremes of utilitarianism, human rights based in human nature, and use the legal system to create legal protections for animals functionally equivalent to rights.

Thus, I was not only able to “prophesy” such a movement (there were in fact 2200 state and some 50 federal bills pertaining to animal welfare proposed two years ago), I was able to both ride it and accelerate it by writing successful federal law governing the treatment of animals in research. Thus, when our law passed in 1985, federal officials charged with enforcing it told me we had codified the right for animals used in painful research to have that pain controlled. Over the past 25 years, I have addressed hundreds of audiences in 28 countries in part to explain precisely what is the new ethic for animals.

For our subject today, I will essay a similar move. I will try to lay out what philosophy could be called upon to do, and even what I believe it ought to do, if things continue as they are academically and societally. I have in fact just articulated one such role—the midwifery of nascent ethical ideas and will discuss others in the field of ethics. I will focus closely on one such area desperately in need of philosophy and briefly mention some others.

There is an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” From the point of social ethics, we do indeed live in bewildering and rapidly changing times. It is very likely that there has been more and deeper social-ethical change since the middle of the twentieth century than occurred during centuries of an ethically monolithic period such as the Middle Ages. Anyone over 50 has lived through a variety of major moral earthquakes: the sexual revolution, the end of socially sanctioned racism, the banishing of IQ differentiation, the rise of homosexual militancy, the end of “loco parentis” in universities, the advent of consumer advocacy, the end of mandatory retirement age, the mass acceptance of environmentalism, the growth of a “Sue the bastards” mind-set, the implementation of affirmative action programs, the rise of massive drug use, the designation of alcoholism and child abuse as diseases rather than moral vices, the rise of militant feminism, the emergence of sexual harassment as a major social concern, the demands by the handicapped for equal access, the rise of political correctness, crusades for gay rights, student rights, children’s rights—all provide patent examples of the magnitude of ethical change during this brief period.

With such rapid change come instability and bewilderment. Do I hold doors and pull out chairs for women? (I was brought up to do so out of politeness, but is such an act patronizing and demeaning?) Do I support black student demands for black dormitories (after I marched in the 1960’s to end segregation)? Am I a bad person if I do not wish to hire a transsexual? Can I criticize the people of Rwanda and Bosnia for the bloodbaths they conduct without being accused of insensitivity to cultural diversity? Do I obey the old rules or the new rules? Paradoxically, the appeal to ethics, and the demand for ethical accountability, have probably never been stronger and more prominent—witness the forceful assertion of rights by and for people, animals and nature—yet an understanding of ethics has never been more tentative, and violations of ethics and their attendant scandals in business, science government, and the professions have never been more prominent. There is probably more talk of ethics than ever—more endowed chairs, seminars, conferences, college courses, books, media coverage, journals devoted to ethical matters than ever before—and yet, ironically, most people probably believe that they understand ethics far less than their progenitors did. Commonality of values has given way to plurality and diversity; traditions are being eroded; even the church is no longer the staunch defender of traditional ethical norms.

Clearly in such a world, there is ample room for the philosophical examination of ethics, the clarification of ethical issues, and the systematic study of these issues wherever they arise, in short for philosophy.

Again, the animal issues provide an instructive example. Historically, of course, there was virtually no animal ethics before 1970. But as social stirrings about animals arose (for a variety of reasons I have discussed elsewhere) both those who advocated for animals and those who utilized animals needed help, guidance and midwifery in negotiating what was terra incognita. In the mid 1970’s, I was made vividly aware of this need by two colleagues:

[1.Tell re Dave Neil-couldn’t find a philosopher to help with law. Tell re our altercation-writing laws and paying some of my salary.]

[2. Neil Jotham]

In addition, my role in the veterinary school became ever increasingly interventionist i.e. concerned with practical and pressing issues, as exemplified by the multiple surgery issue. [Explain]

This work led to my current unique role as CSU ombudsman for animals and bioethics—what one attorney called being an “efficacious meddler” and led to CSU’s being called the best campus in the world for animal welfare. There is room for such a position on every campus using animals. Yet philosophers have refused to step up to the plate [Tell re my trying to create such positions]. Such a role requires not only philosophical ability, but knowledge of the field you operate with.

It is not just the animal area that calls forth such a demand for philosophy, but all of biomedical research, by virtue of the ubiquitousness of what I have called scientific ideology. Ideologies operate in many different areas—religious, political, sociological, economic, ethnic. Thus it is not surprising that an ideology would emerge with regard to science, which is, after all, the dominant way of knowing about the world in Western societies since the Renaissance.

Indeed, knowing has had a special place in the world since antiquity. Among the pre-Socratics—or physikoi as Aristotle called them—one sometimes needed to subordinate one’s life unquestioningly to the precepts of a society of knowers, as was the case with the Pythagoreans. And the very first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics – or First Philosophy- is “All men by nature desire to know.” Thus the very telos of humanity, the “humanness” of humans, consists in exercising the cognitive functions that separate humans from all creation. Inevitably, the great knowers, such as Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, and Einstein, felt it necessary to articulate what separated legitimate empirical knowledge from spurious knowledge, to guard and defend that methodology from encroachment by false pretenders to knowledge.

Thus the ideology underlying modern (i.e., post-medieval) science has grown and evolved along with science itself. And a major—perhaps the major—component of that ideology is a strong positivistic tendency, still regnant today, of believing that real science must be based in experience, since the tribunal of experience is the objective, universal judge of what is really happening in the world.

If one asks most working scientists what separates science from religion, speculative metaphysics, or shamanistic world views, they would unhesitatingly reply that it is an emphasis on validating all claims through sense experience, observation, or experimental manipulation. This component of scientific ideology can be traced directly back to Newton who proclaimed that he did not “feign hypotheses” (“hypotheses non fingo”) but operated directly from experiences. (The fact that Newton in fact did operate with non-observable notions such as gravity or more generally, action at a distance, did not stop him from ideological proclamations affirming that one should not do so.) The Royal Society members apparently took him literally, went around gathering data for their commonplace books, and fully expected major scientific breakthroughs to emerge therefrom. (This idea of truth revealing itself through data gathering is prominent in Francis Bacon.)

The insistence on experience as the bedrock for science continues from Newton to the twentieth century, where it reaches its most philosophical articulation in the reductive movement known as logical positivism, a movement that was designed to excise the unverifiable from science and, in some of its forms, to axiomatize science so that its derivation from observations was transparent. A classic and profound example of the purpose of the excisive dimension of positivism can be found in Einstein’s rejection of Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time, on the grounds that such talk was untestable. Other examples of positivist targets were Bergson’s (and other biologist’s) talk of life force (élan vital) as separating the living from the non-living, or the embryologist Driesch’s postulation of “entelechies” to explain regeneration in starfish.

Although logical positivism took many subtly different and variegated forms, the message, as received by working scientists, and passed on to students (including myself) was that proper science ought not allow unverifiable statements. This was no doubt potentiated by the fact that one British logical positivist, A. J. Ayer, wrote a book relatively readable, vastly popular (for a philosophy book) and aggressively polemical, that defended logical positivism, entitled Language, Truth, and Logic; it first appeared in 1936 and has remained in print ever since. Easy to read, highly critical of wool-gathering, speculative metaphysics and other soft and ungrounded ways of knowing, the book was long used in introductory philosophy courses and, in many cases, represented the only contact with philosophy that aspiring young scientists—or even senior scientists—enjoyed.

Be that as it may, the positivist demand for empirical verification of all meaningful claims became a mainstay of scientific ideology from the time of Einstein to the present. Insofar as scientists thought at all in philosophical terms about what they were doing, they embraced the simple, but to them satisfying, positivism we have described. Through it, one could clearly, in good conscience, dismiss religious claims, metaphysical claims, or other speculative assertions not merely as false, and irrelevant to science, but as meaningless. Only what could be verified (or falsified) empirically was meaningful. “In principle” meant “someday,” given technological progress. Thus, though the statement “there are intelligent inhabitants on Mars” could not in fact be verified or falsified in1940, it was still meaningful, since we could see how it could be verified, i.e. that by building rocket ships and going to Mars to look. Such a statement stands in sharp contradiction to the statement “There are intelligent beings in Heaven,” because, however our technology is perfected, we don’t even know what it would be like to visit heaven, it not being a physical place.

What does all this have to do with ethics? Quite a bit, it turns out. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who greatly influenced the logical positivists, once remarked that, if you take an inventory of all the facts in the universe, you will not find it a fact that killing is wrong. In other words, ethics is not part of the furniture of the scientific universe. You cannot, in principle, test the proposition that “killing is wrong.” It can neither be verified nor falsified. So, empirically and scientifically, ethical judgments are meaningless. From this, it was concluded that ethics is outside of the scope of science, as are all judgments regarding values, rather than facts. The slogan that I in fact learned in my science courses in the1960’s, and which has persisted to the present, is that “science is value-free” in general, and “ethics-free” in particular.

The denial in particular of the relevance of ethics to science was taught both explicitly and implicitly. One could find it explicitly stated in science textbooks. For example, in the late 1980’s when I was researching a book on animal pain, I looked at basic biology texts, two of which a colleague and I actually used, ironically enough, in a honors biology course we team-taught for twenty-five years attempting to combine biology and the philosophical and ethical issues it presupposed and gave rise to. The widely used Keeton and Gould textbook, for example, in what one of my colleagues calls the “throat-clearing introduction,” wherein the authors pay lip service to scientific method, a bit of history and other “soft” issues before getting down to the parts of a cell and the Krebs cycle, loudly declares that “science cannot make value judgments…cannot make moral judgments.” In the same vein, Sylvia Mader in her popular biology text asserts that “science does not make ethical or moral decisions.” The standard line affirms that science at most provides society with facts relevant to making moral decisions, but never itself makes such decisions.

In addition to being explicitly affirmed, this component of scientific ideology was implicitly taught in countless ways. For example, student moral compunctions about killing or hurting an animal, whether in secondary school, college, graduate school or professional school, were never seriously addressed until the mid to late 1980’s, when the legal system began to entertain conscientious objections. One colleague of mine, in graduate school in the late 1950’s studying experimental psychology, tells of being taught to “euthanize” rats after experiments by swinging them around and dashing their heads on the edge of a bench to break their necks. When he objected to this practice, he was darkly told that “perhaps you are not suited to be a psychologist.” In 1980, the first laboratory exercise required of the students in the third week of their first year was to feed cream to a cat and then, using ketamine (which is not an effective analgesic for visceral pain but instead serves to restrain the animal), do exploratory abdominal surgery ostensibly to see the transport of the cream to the intestinal villi. The point of this horrifying experience (the animals vocalized and showed other signs of pain), supposedly was that it was designed to “teach the students that they are in veterinary school, and needed to be tough, and that if they were ‘soft’, to ‘get the hell out early.’”

As late as the mid 1980s, most veterinary and human medical schools required that the students participate in bleeding out a dog until it died of hemorrhagic shock. Although Colorado State University’s veterinary school abolished the lab in the early 1980s for ethical reasons, the department head who abolished it after moving to another university, was defending the same practice ten years later, and explained that if he didn’t, his faculty would force him out. As late as the mid 1990s, a medical school official claimed that his faculty was “firmly convinced” that one could not “be a good physician unless one first killed a dog.” In his autobiographical book Gentle Vengeance, which deals with an older student going through Harvard Medical School, the author remarks in passing that the only purpose he and his peers could see to the dog labs was to assure the students’ divestiture of any shred of compassion that might have survived their premedical studies.

Surgery teaching well into the 1980s was also designed to suppress compassionate and moral impulses. In most veterinary schools, animals were utilized repeatedly, from a minimum of eight successive survival surgeries over two weeks to over twenty times at some institutions. This was done to save money on animals, and the ethical dimensions of the practice were never discussed, nor did the students dare raise them.

At one veterinary school, a senior class provided each student with a dog, and the student was required to do a whole semester or surgery on the animal. One student anesthetized the animal, beat on it randomly with a sledgehammer, and spent the semester repairing the damage. He received an “A”.

The point is that these labs in part taught students not to raise ethical questions, and that ordinary ethical concerns were to be shunted aside, and ignored, in a scientific or medical context. So the explicit denial of ethics in science was buttressed and taught implicitly in practice. If one did raise ethical questions, they were met with threats or a curt, “This is not a matter of ethics, but of scientific necessity,” a claim that was repeated to justify questionable research on human beings.

Even at the height of concern about animal use in the 1980s, scientific journals and conferences did not rationally engage the ethical issues occasioned by animal research. It was as if such issues, however much a matter of social concern, were invisible to scientists, which in a real sense they in fact were. One striking example is provided by a speech given by James Wyngaarden, Director of the National Institutes of Health in 1989. The NIH Director was arguably the chief biomedical scientist in the United States, and certainly is a symbol of the research establishment. Wyngaarden, an alumnus of Michigan State University, was speaking to a student group at his alma mater and was asked about ethical issues occasioned by genetic engineering. His response was astonishing to lay people, though perfectly understandable given what we have discussed about scientific ideology. While new areas of science are always controversial, he opined, “Science should not be hampered by ethical considerations.” Probably no other single incident shows as clearly the denial of ethics in science. When I read the unattributed quotation to my students and ask them to guess its author, they invariably respond “Adolf Hitler.”

Nor is this sort of response restricted to biomedicine. Some years ago, PBS ran a documentary special on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Scientists on the project were asked about the ethical dimensions of their work. They replied that the ethics was not their business; society makes ethical decisions, scientists simply provide technical expertise regarding the implementation of those decisions. In fact, every time I am interviewed by a reporter on ethical issues in science, my raising the “science is value-free” component of scientific ideology elicits a shock of recognition. “Oh, yeah,” they say, “scientists always say that when we ask them about controversial issues like weapons development.”

We have argued that the logical positivism that informed scientific ideology’s rejection of the legitimacy of ethics dismissed moral discussion as empirically meaningless. That is not, however, the whole story. Positivist thinkers felt compelled to explain why intelligent people continued to make moral judgments and continued to argue about them. They explained the former by saying that when people make assertions such as “killing is wrong,” which seem to be statements about reality, they are in fact describing nothing. Rather, they are “emoting,” expressing their own revulsion at killing. “Killing is wrong” really expresses “Killing, yuk!” rather than describing some state of affairs. And when we seem to debate about killing, we are not really arguing ethics (which one can’t do any more than you and I can debate whether we like or don’t like pepperoni), but rather disputing each other’s facts. So a debate over the alleged morality of capital punishment is my expressing revulsion at capital punishment while you express approval, and any debate we can engender is over such factual questions as whether or not capital punishment serves as a deterrent against murder.

It is therefore not surprising that when scientists are drawn into social discussions of ethical issues they are every bit as emotional as their untutored opponents. It is because their ideology dictates that these issues are nothing but emotional, that the notion of rational ethics is an oxymoron, and that he who generates the most effective emotional response “wins”. So, for example, in the 70s and 80s debate on the morality of animal research, scientists either totally ignored the issue, or countered criticisms with emotional appeals to the health of children. For example, in one film entitled “Will I be All Right, Doctor” (the questions asked by a frightened child of a pediatrician), the response was “Yes, if they leave us alone to do what we want with animals.” So appallingly and unabashedly emotional and mawkish was the film, that when it was premiered at the American Association for the Advancement of Laboratory Animal Science (AAALAS) meetings, a putatively sympathetic audience, the only comment forthcoming from the audience came from a veterinarian, who affirmed that he was “ashamed to be associated with a film that is pitched lower than the worst anti-vivisectionist clap-trap!”

Just how extraordinarily incapable scientists were of responding to rational ethical argument was driven home to me when I ran a long session on animal ethics and legislation at another AAALAS ( American Association for the Advancement of Laboratory Animal Science.) national meeting, where I carefully laid out the arguments for legislating protections for research animals. Though the audience of laboratory animal veterinarians expressed great frustration that researchers did not listen to them, particularly in human medical schools, and that their expertise, if attended to, would make for better animal care and better science, they steadfastly refused to support their own legislative empowerment, since they opposed the importation of ethics into science.

As irrational as that was, it paled in comparison to what occurred after my session. Reporters converged on the president of AAALAS asking him to comment on my demand for legislated protection for animals. “Oh that is clearly wrong,” he said. “Why?” they queried. “Because God said we could do whatever we wish with animals,” he affirmed. The reporters then turned to me and asked me to respond. Amazed that the head of a scientific organization could so invoke the Deity with a straight face (imagine the head of the American Physical Society responding to budget cuts in the funding of physics by saying “God said we must fund physics”), I poked fun at his reply. “I doubt he is correct,” I answered. “He comes from Kansas State University.” “So what?” said the reporters. “Simple,” I replied. “If God chose to reveal his will at a veterinary school, it certainly would not be at Kansas! It would be at Colorado State, which is God’s country!”

What are we to say of the aspect of scientific ideology that denies the relevance of values in general and ethics in particular to science?

As I hope the astute reader has begun to realize, as a human activity, embedded in a context of culture, and addressed to real human problems, science cannot possibly be value-free, or even ethics-free. As soon as scientists affirm that controlled experiments are a better source of knowledge than anecdotes; that double blind clinical trials provide better proof of hypothesis than asking the Magic 8 Ball; or for that matter, the science is a better route to knowledge of reality than mysticism, we encounter value judgments as presuppositional to science, to be sure, they are not ethical value judgments, but rather epistemic (“pertaining to knowing”) ones, but they are still enough to show that science does depend on value judgments. So choice of scientific method or approach represents a matter of value. Scientists often forget this obvious point; as one scientist said to me, “We don’t make value judgments in science; all we care about is knowledge.”

In fact, reflection on the epistemic basis of science quickly leads to the conclusion that this basis includes moral judgments as well. Most biomedical scientists will affirm that contemporary biomedicine is logically (or at least practically) dependent on the use of animals. This entails a moral judgment. [Explain] This ideology has caused incalculable damages to science, society, and objects of moral concern in science’s failure to engage ethical issues.

In the area of human research, the abuses of humans have been legion from the Tuskegee studies to the death of Jesse Gelsinger to the radiation studies performed by the Department of Energy to the release of microbes in subway systems to Willowbrook…etc. And the results for science have been equally pernicious—the Federal imposition of draconian rules for researchers; rules that change with PC (e.g. pregnant women as subjects, Indians, alcoholics on committees). The net effect is that researchers see these rules as bureaucratic hoops to jump through with absolutely no grasp of the ethical issues.

In the area of animal research, countless amounts of animal suffering were created not only by the “value free” component, but by a second component of scientific ideology affirming that scientists needed to be agnostic about subjective states in people and animals, and that this led to the denial of pain that in turn ramified in open heart surgery on babies in the 1980s using paralytic drugs, not anesthetics; failure to provide adequate analgesia to all patients (Marks and Sacher); and failure to control any animal pain in research at the expense of both animals and science. A healthy dose of philosophy of mind (as well as legislation) was needed to begin to correct this. This hurt not only innocent creatures but science also by failure to control stress and pain valuables! [Tell Shock Society]

Finally, ignoring ethical issues has done immeasurable harm, perhaps irreparable, to biotechnology. Biotechnology is probably the most powerful tool even devised by humans. Yet the failure on the part of scientists to initiate legitimate ethical discussion has led to what I call a Gresham’s law for Ethics, the social lacuna in ethical thought filled by absurdities, which are unanswerable. [Tell re Gaskell]

[Tell re Dolly]

In short, one major future role for philosophy is to inaugurate and orchestrate the rational, ethical dialogue attendant on scientific activity. Scientists will not do it themselves as long as scientific ideology is regnant! But it needs to be done.

This means at least some of philosophy needs to become serious applied ethics—not the intellectual ping-pong of “pure applied” philosophers talking only to each other. Medical ethics in its current form has virtually no impact on doctors—it is philosophers building vitas! (Tell re history of the Kennedy Center). Kennedy and Hastings are peopled by “tame philosophers”. And what soldier or politician ever read material on “military ethics” or “peace studies”?

This in turn means mastering science fields well-enough to swim with practitioners of the sciences and point out important questions and better ways, as I was forced to do with animal research, vet med, pain control, and agriculture. [Tell re Experimental Animal book, Optibrand, Mention that the very concept of animal welfare seen as value free, CAST]

I have used up most of my time deliberating one future role for philosophy; let me just mention some others: We are losing freedom of expression to two opposed trendy ideologies—left wing political correctness, which I think is more oppressive than McCarthyism, because it comes from within the academy, and right-wing Christian fundamentalism that would have us teach intelligent design: creationism. Philosophers should not, as they often do, pander to PC, but resist it vigorously. By the same token, they should educate students to be critical of right wing paradigms—a good dose of Hume should lay the intellectual grounds for intelligent design to rest, and some conservatism needs to be criticized for being inconsistent, for example for espousing less government intervention and more censorship!

Also, our educational system has slipped greatly (Tell re Denver Post elementary school test of 75 years ago). Not only is there little or no concession to gifted children (“everyone is gifted”), what is taught is pablum and ideology, leading to the current college student’s sense of entitlement. Philosophy can uphold cultural tradition and demand proper reading, writing and thinking. How many of our peers teach the classics—how many young instructors teach to the student evaluations? (Tell re Loren, and Open Court series.)

The proliferation of knowledge and exponential growth of specialization has led to a lack of critical apperception and a correlative lack of self-criticism. Philosophy can help here as well. Some examples, the concept of illness in medicine [discuss], the problematic use of money as a measure of values in economics, the “medicalization of evil,” the application of business management to universities, the untestable nature of evolutionary explanations, legal positivism.

Finally, philosophy can puncture ideologies as they emerge, as rest assured they will. We must also teach serious courses in critical thinking (assuming it can be taught) lest, God forbid, as has begun to occur, other disciplines undertake to teach it themselves!