As it turns out, to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific meeting is to court controversy (after all, “Who decides what is a successful life?”) At the conclusion of my talk, I fell into debate with another invited speaker, who seemed, at first glance, to be very well positioned to reason effectively about the implications of science for our understanding of morality. She holds a degree in genetics from Dartmouth, a masters in biology from Harvard, and a law degree, another masters, and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of biology from Duke. This scholar is now a recognized authority on the intersection between criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. Here is a snippet of our conversation, more or less verbatim:
She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?
Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of increasing or decreasing wellbeing—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human wellbeing.
She: But that’s only your opinion.
Me: Okay… Let’s make it even simpler. What if we found a culture that ritually blinded every third child by literally plucking out his or her eyes at birth, would you then agree that we had found a culture that was needlessly diminishing human wellbeing?
She: It would depend on why they were doing it.
Me (slowly returning my eyebrows from the back of my head): Let’s say they were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In their scripture, God says, “Every third must walk in darkness.”
She: Then you could never say that they were wrong.
I don't believe he'll be too successful, at least not in this generation. What he proposes is basically an attack at religion. Though he didn't state this explicitly, religious people will feel uneasy about the proposal of entrusting morality to secular experts driven by the goal of maximizing “well-being”. Not that secular experts any worse than religious leaders, but the former certainly lack the support of “tradition”. It took several centuries to acknowledge superiority of empirical evidence over tradition in science, so I don't think it will happen overnight in morality.
Also, why oh why, the first comment to an insightful, 5000 words article on ethics has to be like this?
