Truth, Values, and Science as a Football

In “Truth, Unrealism, and the Danger of Skepticism,” I argued that Cartesian skepticism poses a threat not only to science but also to knowledge through the advancement of unrealist epistemologies (theories of knowledge). Indirectly, I was reasserting philosophy’s priority to science, as well as its dependency on it. “We can’t begin to prove anything unless there are some fundamental things we can take as certain without needing evidence.” These fundamental things belong not just in the ontic and epistemic spheres but also in moral theory. The vaccination controversy shows how values play a role science can’t overcome in determining truth.

(The following essay seemingly equivocates between two primary senses of value: that of relative importance or worth and that of moral principle. To explain why the distinction is inconsequential would make a long story longer.)

The Totem of All Truth and Knowledge

An article recently appeared in Catholic Stand appealing to Catholic bishops to reconsider their support of covid-19 vaccination mandates. Canadian former journalist Mark Mallett doesn’t condemn vaccines or make outrageous claims about their dangers (such as causing autism). Instead, he argues that covid-19 shots aren’t vaccines at all and that they may be helping the virus to spread. Mallett has an adolescent fondness for “scare quotes” and a tendency to rely on scientists’ ipse-dixits and obscure sources. But while his scientific case isn’t immediately persuasive, it’s deserving of more than an off-the-cuff dismissal.

(Full disclosure: I’ve had my shots.)

Mallett’s beef isn’t with the science that produced the mRNA therapies, let alone with science in toto. Instead, it’s with the politics that rushed the treatments into production and distribution, bypassing and overriding many safety checks that ordinarily keep dangerous pharmaceuticals from the healthcare system. Similar politics are mandating shots (through law or social pressure) and promoting “vaccine passports,” despite the dangers he’s convinced they pose to global health. The same politics, he believes, are actively keeping relevant facts from emerging in the mainstream media because they contradict the preferred narrative.

In other words, Mallett’s article isn’t anti-vax or anti-science, but rather anti-left. As a result, people who even 20 years ago might have given his article a fair reading and judged it on its scientific merits or demerits instead will dismiss it because it falls on one side of a widening political divide. (I, too, may have given Mallett short shrift because of my growing disgust for partisan politics.) Science qua science is no longer relevant to the discussion. It only pertains as the postmodern totem of All Knowledge and Truth. Science says whatever your agenda wants it to say.

Some Thoughts About Science’s Limitations

Science as the ultimate arbiter of truth and knowledge is miscasting on a Hollywood scale. Taken as a whole, science is an applied epistemology, albeit a wildly successful application. As such, science presupposes metaphysical conclusions about being, reality, truth, and knowledge that it can neither prove without implicitly begging the question nor disprove without self-contradiction. There is no physics without particular metaphysics. Indeed, my colleague physicist Bob Kurland would say that science stops once the researcher goes beyond fact-gathering and model-fitting. After that, they’re doing philosophy while wearing a lab coat. (“Shut up and calculate!”)

In the foreword to Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, Dr. Norman Doidge states, “… [The] idea that we can easily separate facts and values was and remains naive; to some extent, one’s values determine what one will pay attention to, and what will count as a fact” (op. cit., xviii). From a different angle, physicist-theologian Fr. Stanley Jaki argued that certainty about real things doesn’t begin with science but with a philosophy that provides for reality (Miracles and Physics, 77-78). I’ve argued elsewhere that the so-called “‘is-ought’ problem” is an illusion and that values can’t be separated from science.

Science is a human methodology, not an impersonal machine that grinds out steaming mounds of error-free data. As such, it’s subject to the human flaws of those who apply it—flawed peer-review processes, corporate compromise, regulatory capture, scientific orthodoxies, and sociopolitical biases. Such defects most likely don’t affect the bulk of scientific research results; the exceptional testifies to the ordinary. However, those results reach most of us only as mediated by other people, such as journalists, educators, and political activists. “What the science says” and what these mediators say it says can be two different things.

Values and American Polarization

If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed. (Various attributions)

At issue, then, is not whether we trust the science, but instead whether we trust the sources from which we non-scientists get our explanations. And that trust is shaped in part by our impression that the authorities share our worldview—our values, attitudes, and beliefs. So even when they tell us what we don’t want to hear, we gain some comfort by knowing they share our dislike of the fact. Worldview similarity explains why, even when American trust in mass media has hit its lowest since 2016, Democrats trust the mass media far more than do Independents, let alone Republicans.

A 2018 study that broke out Americans into six discrete political “tribes” showed sharp differences in core values as one moves across the tribal spectrum from right to left. However, the most acute differences in educational attainment showed up between the left (Progressive Activists and Traditional Liberals) and the center (Politically Disengaged and Passive Liberals). The Politically Disengaged and Passive Liberals also include higher-than-average minority representation, while whites are overrepresented in the wings. They’re part of the “Exhausted Majority,” the two-thirds of Americans who prefer compromise but feel largely unheard and squeezed out of the public square.

Liberals may point to the prevalence of college graduates and post-graduates on the left and claim it as a function of greater intelligence. However, as I discussed in my blog, intelligence may very well be oversold. Experiments conducted separately found that rationality is only mildly associated with intelligence and that educated people are no less prone to cognitive bias than the uneducated. (In the latter study, students who were good at math suddenly became terrible when asked to analyze numbers that contradicted their politics, whether they leaned left or right.)

Comments sociologist Musa al-Gharbi:

… [Highly-educated] people tend to be less self-aware of their own socio-political preferences than most—typically describing themselves as more left-wing than they actually seem to be. They also tend to be significantly worse at gauging others’ political beliefs, often assuming other people are much more extreme or dogmatic than they actually seem to be. This is perhaps because, compared to the general public, highly-educated or intelligent people tend to be more ideological in their thinking, more ideologically rigid, and more extreme in their ideological leanings.

Different Moral Universes

So far as education is having an effect, it appears to be ensuring that students graduate college with preferred biases. Training in values is part of what Aristotle (a dead white male) considered a good education (Nicomachean Ethics, 1104b). However, as the math experiment shows, that training in values doesn’t incorporate the skills to deal with contradicting evidence in a thoughtful, well-reasoned manner. While the de-emphasis of critical reasoning skills may have been a product of “progressive” education reform, its effects appear on both sides of the political chasm. Both sides are teaching students what to think, not how.

Part of the problem is that the Enlightenment tradition created an arbitrary division between fact (objective because provable, and therefore truth-capable) and value (subjective because not provable, therefore truth-neutral). Right and wrong became matters of taste, an amoral position that few people have been able to hold consistently in discussions of policy. If values are truth-neutral, there’s no rational basis for judging one value superior to its opposite. As I’ve said elsewhere, we have moral facts, but we’re not allowed to claim them as facts or even recognize their moral nature.

“Conflict arises,” wrote the late Jesuit philosopher Fr. James V. Schall, “when both sides of an issue realize that something basic is at stake, that our ideas do make a difference” (Catholicism and Intelligence, loc. 1997 [Kindle]). The extreme left and right live in different, mutually hostile moral universes. Each side claims theirs is superior to the other’s, despite having no common template by which their values could be judged. Postmodern conventional wisdom says no such common standard can exist. If all values are subjective and truth-neutral, so must be the values of tolerance, compromise, and inclusiveness. Conflict is inevitable.

Conclusion

Science is a political football because politics is applied ethical theory, answering the question “How are we to live?” Just as science truly begins with philosophy’s first principles of reason, we must have first principles of ethics, or practical reason, as a foundation for a coherent moral superstructure. C. S. Lewis’ Tao suggests a starting point, one that has found receptivity to virtue ethicists regardless of religion or irreligion. The sciences can contribute; psychologists are becoming more interested in the possibilities offered by moral foundations theory. (See here for a criticism that aims to improve rather than refute MFT.)

However, I recommend that we avoid viewing truth solely as an instrument for achieving a common good or common goals. That would be repeating Francis Bacon’s mistake of regarding knowledge only for what benefits it could produce rather than as a good in itself. From that error have arisen many atrocities and miseries. Truth, like knowledge, must be good in itself before it can be good for anything else, even if embracing the truth means embracing our death. As Lewis remarked, “No one who speaks from within the Tao could reject it on that account …,” adding Ajax’s prayer to Zeus:

“Let us be killed in the light.” (Iliad, 17:647; cit. in Abolition of Man, 39)