The Roots of Ethics: Science, Religion, and Values PDF
Preview The Roots of Ethics: Science, Religion, and Values
THE ROOTS OF ETHICS SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND VALUES THE HASTINGS CENTER SERIES IN ETHICS ETHICS TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION Edited by Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok MENTAL RETARDATION AND STERILIZATION A Problem of Competency and Paternalism Edited by Ruth Macklin and Willard Gaylin THE ROOTS OF ETHICS: Science, Religion, and Values Edited by Daniel Callahan and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. ETHICS IN HARD TIMES Edited by Arthur L. Caplan and Daniel Callahan VIOLENCE AND THE POLITICS OF RESEARCH Edited by Willard Gaylin, Ruth Macklin, and Tabitha M. Powledge WHO SPEAKS FOR THE CHILD: The Problems of Proxy Consent Edited by Willard Gaylin and Ruth Macklin A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher. THE ROOTS OF E T H I C S SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND VALUES Edited by Daniel Callahan The Hasings Center Hastings-on-Hudson, New York and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. The Kennedy Institute ojE thics Georgetown University Washington, D.C. PLENUM PRESS . NEW YORK AND LONDON ISBN-13: 978-94-009-5731-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-5729-9 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-5729-9 © 1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981 The Hastings Center Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1981 Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences 360 Broadway, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York 10706 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher Preface OUR AGE IS CHARACTERIZED by an uncertainty about the na ture of moral obligations, about what one can hope for in an afterlife, and about the limits of human knowledge. These uncertainties were captured by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, where he noted three basic human questions: what can we know, what ought we to do, and what can we hope for. Those questions and the uncer tainties about their answers still in great part define our cultural per spective. In particular, we are not clear about the foundations of ethics, or about their relationship to religion and to science. This volume brings together previously published essays that focus on these inter relationships and their uncertainties. It offers an attempt to sketch the interrelationship among three major intellectual efforts: determining moral obligations, the ultimate purpose and goals of man and the cosmos, and the nature of empirical reality. Though imperfect, it is an effort to frame the unity of the human condition, which is captured in part by ethics, in part by religion, and in part by the sciences. Put another way, this collection of essays springs from an attempt to see the unity of humans who engage in the diverse roles of valuers, be lievers, and knowers, while still remaining single, individual humans. The essays in this volume address, as a consequence, the philosophi cal foundations of ethics, the importance and relevance of religion for ethical viewpoints, the ways in which science can illuminate our na ture as knowers and valuers, and the extent to which moral psychology can account for our roles as scientists. In addition, the embedding of science in a nexus of moral obligation is explored. It is no accident, as these essays show, that there are interconnections among ethics, religion, and science. Nor is it an accident that we as a culture are re curringly brought to examine these interrelationships. Over the last half a millennium, the West has repeatedly had its ori- V vi PREFACE entation to ultimate place and purpose shaken as a result of changes in the understanding of the possibility for knowing, valuing, and be lieving. Before the Reformation, the West for the most part shared a common view of morals and faith. There was a structure of values and of religious authority, which included modes for the resolution of disputes. Religion was thought to provide objective knowledge of fact and value. The Reformation shattered that certainty, putting in jeopardy claims to objectivity in religion. Numerous competing ortho doxies arose, each claiming the truth of its own viewpoint, many claiming the right of each individual to mediate directly with the deity and to interpret for himself the Holy Scriptures. The issue of the ob jective resolution of competing claims to religious truth became in creasingly difficult, as the interchange in this volume between Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ramsey suggests, and as the article by David Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas argues with respect to moral claims generally. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to All Saints' Church in Wittenberg on the eve of All Saints' Day, 1570, he marked a new era for the West and established many of the background pre suppositions of these essays. That Halloween signaled the end of a consensus and the loss of commonly held ways of framing a moral consensus. The changes of the Reformation did not occur alone, but in tandem with other cultural challenges. Exposure to other cultural viewpoints through the colonial and imperial adventures of Europe brought Euro peans into contact with individuals holding radically different views of the nature of reality and of the important good of life. The question of objectivity in ethics, even outside religious grounds, was thus brought into question, fashioning the lineaments of the modern pre dicament, in which moral certainty seems elusive. In great measure, the loss of a moral orthodoxy and of an established sense of moral objectivity restored the conditions of the pre-Christian West. Much of the sense of crisis in moral philosophy reported in some of the essays in this volume reflects this loss of objectivity or intersubjectivity. A concrete ethic, as Burrell and Hauerwas argue, has become the de liverance of a particular moral story, rather than that of a formal moral system. However, it is not simply that the pre-Christian absence of a moral consensus and orthdoxy has been restored to the West. The loss of orientation has been more profound. There is now an objective ac count to justify the sense of loss of orientation, provided in the same century as the Reformation: the loss of the Ptolemaic account of the Preface vii cosmic centrality of the earth and therefore of man. The understanding of man's place in the cosmos was shaken. When Nicolaus Copernicus saw the first copy of his De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium on his deathbed on May 24, 1543, he saw a force for the uprooting of the Western viewpoint that was as substantial and profound as that of the Reformation. He had provided an understanding of the cosmos that dislodged man from his central place in creation and cast him adrift in a directionless universe within which there was no absolute point of reference to give final orientation. This profoundly upsetting truth, which Giordano Bruno embraced to his end, even when he was condemned by Pope Clement VIII and burnt in the Plaza of Flowers at Rome on February 17, 1600, is an appropriate metaphor for the value uncertainties of our modern age. The proposition that the universe was infinite and filled with innumerable worlds in great measure signaled the modern context for the problem of understanding man's place in nature. Bruno's cosmological thesis had ethical significance for it sug gested the arbitrariness of any view of the place of man in the cosmos. And, as the interchange between Stephen Toulmin and Loren Graham suggests, the concern about the ethical implications of science, includ ing cosmology, continues into this century. Indeed, Stephen Toulmin points out that Charles Darwin and Russell Wallace further contributed to this metaphysical disorientation with the appearance of The Origin of the Species in 1859. Not only was the cosmos not designed around the earth as its center, but neither was man a product of divine design. In fact, man was no longer a creature but a product of evolution. Just as the earth's place in the cosmos was the result of blind chance, so too was man's place in nature. As the socio biologis·ts would indicate in the years to come, and as Richard Alex ander argues by implication in his essay, so too are human moral dis positions the result of :the blind forces of evolution. Thus, on the one hand, the interplay of ethics and science has been puzzling and disturbing. On the other hand, this interplay is central to the modern human condition. It is for this reason that it was selected as the focus of the research project that produced the essays selected for this volume. From 1974 through 1978 The Hastings Center, with the support of the National Endowment for the Hu manities, explored "the foundations of ethics and their relationship to the sciences." Those four years of research produced four volumes published by The Hastings Center, from which these essays were taken: Science, Ethics, and Medicine; Morals, Science, and Sociality; Knowl edge, Value and Belief; and Knowing and Valuing. The result was a viii PREFACE multidimensional geography of the nexus of science and ethics which displayed: (1) how concepts guide both science and ethics, not simply through their conceptual content, but through their metaphorical force; (2) how causal explanations are made available to account for the ex istence of moral dispositions so that science can appropriate ethics in part by giving an empirical explanatory account of ethics, and how ethics can offer a moral account of science, and in that way appropriate science as part of its domain; (3) that there are recurrent attempts to secure the objective status of some values by endeavoring to read them from the processes of nature (e.g., evolution); (4) that both science and ethics presuppose value judgments, so that there is is no crisp line to be drawn between an explanation and an evaluation, between val ue-neutral facts and fact-free values; and (5) that though both ethics and science can make claims of universal -truth or applicability for their axioms, the articulation of both scientific and ethical asser tions is heavily time-bound, placed within particular historical con texts. Further, as a result of pressing for the nature of the interplay of ethics and science, the nature of the foundations of ethics was itself ex plored, as the essays in the volume by Alasdair MacIntyre, Gerald Dworkin, Hans Jonas, and Daniel Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas attest. The essays on the foundations of ethics, and the relationship of re ligion to those foundations, address the problem of fashioning con vincing and encompassing moral viewpoints, of dealing with moral authority and moral autonomy, and of delineating convincing senses of moral obligation. For example, Hans Jonas addresses in his essay, "The Concept of Responsibility: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Ethics for Our Age," the problem of ethics in a technological age and the issues that that age raises regarding responsibility for thle safety of mankind. Mankind, having become the lonesome master of this earth, is left with the task of developing a sense of obligation, as Jonas argues, sub specie temporis. Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ramsey, Gunther Stent, and Hans Jonas also explore where religion can help ground such a sense of responsibility. The result is that one faces the issue of whether religion can ground ethics, or whether ethics must ground religion in the sense of providing a basis for choosing among the moral claims of competing faiths. And in fact, as the interchange of Hans Jonas and James Gustafson suggests, the character of religious claims has itself changed over the last half millennium, leading at times to much more tentative contributions from theologians. The interplay of science and ethics is explored in Stephen Toulmin's analysis of the moral psychology of science and of the sciences, which Preface ix casts science within a larger moral account, and by Gunther Stent's argument for causal grounds of ethics in the deep structure of the human brain, which fixes ethics as an object of scientific study. This latter enterprise is pursued further by Richard Alexander, who pro vides a sociobiological account of societal laws and ethics. Thus both ethics and science, each in its own way, appropriate one another as objects of study. The interplay is thus one of dialectical, mutual il lumination. Finally, the closing essays in the volume indicate con ceptual links between ethics and science. John Ladd argues for the moral responsibility of the scientist, and Stephen Toulmin and Loren Graham explore the ways in which scientists have understood and can understand the interconnection of ethics and science. In closing with these essays, the volume signals the leitmotif of the modern age. Science is continually evoking ethical issues either directly or through refash ioning our understanding of ourselves and of our state in the cosmos. Man is recurringly pressed to see how prevailing values can control science as well as be compatible with prevailing scientific views. As this selection shows, the research from which these essays was drawn was necessarily interdisciplinary. This was unavoidable, for each discipline casts doubt upon the other and calls its charge into question. The analysis was, therefore, multiperspectival in enlisting philosophers, scientists, theologians, and historians. Though the de liverances of this undertaking are in part incomplete, in part frag mentary, and in part tentative, they suggest well that future explora tions must similarly be interdisciplinary, for the questions and puzzles of the place of ethics and of science are in the end inseparable. This, though, should not be unexpected, given the history of the modern age, which was born out of intertwining ethical and scientific puzzles about the nature of the human condition. An understanding of the nature of man and the human condition will, as these essays show, be found not only in distinguishing but also in relating the grand human endeavors of valuing, believing, and knowing. Daniel Callahan The Hastings Center H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Contents Preface v 1. The Foundations of Ethics 1 A Crisis in Moral Philosophy: Why Is the Search for the Foundations of Ethics So Frustrating? .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Alasdair MacIntyre Commentary Ethics, Foundations, and Science: Response to Alasdair MacIntyre ...................................... 21 Gerald Dworkin 2 Moral Autonomy ........... ,. . ... .. . .. ... .... ...... ..... 29 Gerald Dworkin 3 The Concept of Responsibility: An Inquiry into the Foundations of an Ethics for Our Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 45 Hans Jonas 4 From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics ................................................. 75 David Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas xi
The list of books you might like
