Science and Virtue

An Essay on the Impact of the Scientific Mentality on Moral Character

Louis Caruana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754655626
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351901840
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Charting new territory in the interface between science and ethics, Science and Virtue is a study of how the scientific mentality can affect the building of character, or the attainment of virtue by the individual. Drawing on inspiration from virtue-ethics and virtue-epistemology, Caruana argues that science is not just a system of knowledge but also an important factor determining a way of life. This book goes beyond the normal strategy evident in the science-ethics realm of examining specific ethical dilemmas posed by scientific innovations. Here Caruana deals with more fundamental issues, uncovering morally significant tendencies within the very core of the scientific mentality and explaining how science, its method, history and explanatory power can shape a conception of the good life.

Chapter 1
A Preamble on Virtue

Much work in moral theology and ethics has recognised the important fact that the way individuals live, the way they confront dilemmas and determine their obligations depends on how they see the world. In the course of history, religious and philosophical beliefs have been considered very important for the determination of a helpful list of virtues as road signs for the education of youth. Some recent historians, however, have argued convincingly that the present cultural situation in the world is so lacking in consensus that any attempt to revitalise the idea of a virtuous life is doomed to failure.¹ What seems a virtue to one can sometimes appear a vice to another. What could be the use of an appeal for a more virtuous life, if such an appeal will be refracted in myriad ways within the labyrinth of a fragmented culture? Admittedly, there is more disagreement on whether a piece of conduct is virtuous than disagreement on whether a given virtue is desirable. Radical relativism, however, remains a serious threat. The only hope seems to lie in a general retreat. One gives up the idea of reaching the global multitudes. One concentrates rather on small social units or communities within which intellectual and moral life could be rediscovered and sustained intact.²

The time has come, however, to realise that the fragmentation of culture that seems to necessitate such a retreat is just one layer among others in today’s complex cultural landscape. There is another layer that presents itself as uniform and global. It is constituted by the methods and results of the natural sciences and technology. No amount of pluralism among philosophers of science, no degree of radical relativism among sociologists of knowledge, seems capable of undermining this simple fact. Natural science and technology are here to stay, and they are everywhere. Determining how such a cultural reality, how such a kind of uniform substratum, reflects upon the building of character, upon the attainment of virtue, promises therefore to be a fruitful path to follow in view of rediscovering the common aspirations of the global community as regards the good life. Such a move is based on the observation that religious and philosophical beliefs are not the only ones that matter. The personal dispositions of people working in the area of the natural sciences are deeply marked by the methods and skills required by this discipline, and also perhaps by the discoveries themselves regarding the nature of the world. It is therefore very reasonable to assume that the way many individuals live depends on natural science and on whatever description of the world comes to be considered warranted by its methods. The domain of philosophy of virtue is vast. One needs to clarify at the outset some fundamental aspects that are indispensable for this kind of investigation. This introductory chapter will be focused on the following three questions. What is virtue? How does one grow in virtue? How can the natural sciences be relevant for growth in virtue?

Understanding Virtue

Recent philosophical work in the area of ethics has often focused primarily on duties, obligations, moral dilemmas, borderline cases and hypothetical situations. Such themes are certainly important and deserve a certain amount of attention. Ordinary people, however, are rarely in a position where they feel surrounded by tragic borderline cases, perplexing moral dilemmas or major clashes of duties. Philosophers who study virtue seek to concentrate not only on extreme moments or situations that stretch ethical theories to their limits, but also on the continuous behaviour patterns and dispositions that characterise an individual, that characterise a life. The study of virtue involves the study of such dispositions or character-traits. It therefore constitutes a specific domain distinct from other areas of interest in ethics, a domain that merits close attention, especially by those whose interest lies primarily in persons themselves.

Philosophers since antiquity have shown that the idea of virtue can be understood in various ways. Much insight can be gained by recalling at least the two distinct ways presented by Plato and Aristotle. The former struggles at some length with the relation between virtue and knowledge. His overall view seems to amount to the idea that the nature of virtue is essentially expressive of a kind of knowledge. A virtuous person is one who lives in conformity to certain rational principles reflecting his or her true interests. On the contrary, a person of vice lives under the influence of various destructive natural passions and appetites. The basic proposal, therefore, is that virtue is the rule of natural inclination by right reason, while vice is the ignorance of the true good that leads to the individual knowing no better than to act at the impulse of his or her irrational instinct and appetites. Aristotle differs from this on a number of points. His basic originality lies in the idea that virtue is not a kind of knowledge but a character-trait of the individual. His interest lies primarily in determining a set of personal attributes in terms of which human beings might be said to fulfil their proper function or realise their proper end qua human beings. Just as we learn what a good horse is by observing and comparing actual horses in respect of the tasks we require of them, so learning about the virtue of humans is similarly a matter of observation and comparison. In this, Aristotle differs radically from Plato, who mistrusted observation of actual states of affairs arguing that what needs to be done is to avoid being tied down to what we perceive so as to apprehend the abstract form of the good, in a somewhat mathematical, intuitive grasp. Moreover, while for Plato human inclinations, passions and appetites are to be considered bad in themselves, for Aristotle they aren’t. Everything depends on the way in which these inclinations are expressed or exercised.

There are certainly other significant aspects worthy of fruitful investigation as regards the difference between these two basic views on the nature of virtue, but these need not concern us here. The little that has been said is enough to show that some fundamental options arise at the very start of any inquiry concerning virtue. The view I endorse in this book is more in line with the Aristotelian view than with the Platonic one. My approach will be naturalistic, in the sense that I will be engaged in extracting some valuable insights not from an allegedly necessary idea of the good, but from what good people actually do when they are affected by the scientific mentality. The strategy therefore is more inductive than deductive. There will certainly be an element of contingency in this inquiry precisely because it is enmeshed in a world of changing particular situations rather than well-framed by absolute, changeless principles.

Having clarified this fundamental option as regards my basic method, let me advance a somewhat fuller account of virtue within the parameters decided upon. If our inquiry starts from what good people typically do, then the focus of our attention is on character-traits or dispositions of individuals. When the disposition is good, we call it a virtue.³ We recognise an individual as virtuous in some way when he or she acts in the way characteristic of that virtue. This recognition is not straightforward, because we may have an individual doing what virtue requires but for a reason inappropriate to that virtue. We may have an individual, say, who does the right thing from self-interest. This complicates matters. To avoid pitfalls, it is good to recall that acting from virtue is a matter of explaining the act by reference to the virtuous disposition of the agent. Such action is the kind of action that manifests the virtue of the individual.⁴ It is worth noting also that the capacity itself to act in such or such a manner is not the virtue. It is the capacity’s being exercised well that constitutes the virtue. It is not, for instance, the faculty of moving one’s body around that constitutes courage, but the excellence of this faculty in certain circumstances, namely moving in the right way, say, in risky situations confronted by rescue teams. There cannot be any hard and fast rule to determine in all cases when rescuers should move into a dangerous zone or should refrain from doing so. The need for speaking of virtues arises precisely from the simple fact that life is complex. One can certainly concede the point that some guiding principles can help. When one is on the spot, however, it is up to the individual to exercise his or her faculties, and to do it well in those particular and unrepeatable circumstances.

The basic point is that one may distinguish between talking about good people and talking about good acts. It is the same individual who acts in the multiplicity of particular, unrepeatable situations. Taking virtue as a good character-trait of the individual is therefore a good starting point, since it expresses the element of continuity over and above the variety of act-situations. It is certainly possible to delve deeper into the nature of virtue itself. One may refer to the distinction between the various virtues, known in various philosophical works as the three theological virtues, faith, hope and charity, together with the four cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, justice and courage. A study of these distinctions, however, will not be carried out in any detail here since it would lead the discussion too far away from our main investigation envisaged in this book.⁵ It is essential however to say something further about virtues in so far as they are attributes.

If virtue is a kind of habit, then it is definable within human life taken as extended in time, sometimes taken even from beginning to end. If, moreover, virtue enables us to achieve a certain good, it is related to a certain aim. It is clear therefore that, when doing ethics in terms of virtues, the bearer of these virtues, the person, is seen as the one subject of a narrative that runs from birth to death, of a unique and unrepeatable life-story.⁶ A life includes many different aims; so much so that the individual may sometimes feel frustrated by various incompatible aims. A scientist, for instance, cannot be considered an individual characterised solely by a life in the laboratory. There is more to life than what happens in the laboratory, even for fully dedicated scientists. There are other areas of life, other aims that are pursued. Taking the scientist to be an individual in the laboratory does not do justice to the fact that the one living in the laboratory and the one having experiences outside the laboratory are one and the same person. Achieving a certain degree of integrity in one’s life means organising one’s various aims in such a way that they reinforce each other. Short-term aims are pursued in function of long term ones. The project in the following chapters can be described as a move to rediscover the unity of life of those engaged in science. This will be done by determining how virtue is affected, for better or for worse, by some aspects of the world of natural science. The main assumption therefore is that some aspects of scientific practice are deep enough to affect the quality of the person engaged in this practice. They are deep enough to leave their mark on all areas of the life-story of the individual.

Growth in Virtue

In the Meno, Plato presents Socrates answering the question of how best to acquire virtue. Surprisingly, the study of dialectic does not come first. In order to help people become virtuous, Plato starts with mathematics. It is only through such a discipline, which determines everything with certainty and which lacks space for personal opinion, can a student avoid losing the passion for truth. If beginners are faced with plausible argument and plausible counter-argument, they often conclude that in such matters there is only opinion and no knowledge. The first step therefore is to consolidate in the beginner a certain passion for truth. Personal sentiments and opinions must be seen at first as of marginal importance. One must give oneself over to the facts, receiving and discovering rather than producing or imposing one's own views. Such an exercise helps the individual grow immune to vanity, self-deception and disinterestedness. It is a long-term process. Only when the basic attitudes towards truth and falsity are well established can the individual move on to more demanding environments.⁷

For such environments, moral philosophers have identified a process with at least three distinguishable stages. The first consists in the learner’s living close to a master from whom he or she can absorb, as it were, the virtue manifested in the master’s way of acting. A set of rules for action could be a help to the learner, but rules will never be enough to make someone virtuous. The learner needs to know how to apply the rules and when. Only the master can help the learner gain those habits that go beyond ratiocination. The second stage of the process of becoming virtuous consists in the learner’s interior struggle to overcome fear, doubts, and weakness of will when it comes to action. Suppose a young cadet has been accompanying a courageous captain in a number of campaigns. For the cadet to grow in courage, accompanying the captain is necessary but not sufficient. It is necessary as a start, but there will be a time when the cadet needs to be on his own, and that is precisely when doubts and fears need to be overcome. The third and final stage in the process of growing in virtue consists in the learner gaining self-confidence and a certain self-satisfaction in acting virtuously. At this stage, doubts and fears are definitely overcome. The learner is independent. What is happening during this process has been famously described by Aristotle as the attainment of the mean between two extremes. The mean refers to the virtue, in this case courage, and the two extremes refer to two opposite bad habits, in this case an 'excess' of courage, which is rashness, on the one hand, and a 'deficiency' of courage, which is cowardice, on the other. In Aristotle's words, 'virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us. this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.'⁸

Science and Virtue

This way of understanding growth in virtue allows a valuable exploration of the possible effects a life in science may have on the individual. To become scientists, young people learn specific rules, rub shoulders with experts, have to overcome doubts and hesitation, eventually arrive at self-confidence. Something important is happening during this long process as regards the individual. The transformation of the individual has received little attention in the vast literature on philosophy of science. The aim of this book consists in determining how the particular mindset characteristic of natural science stimulates growth in virtue on certain fronts. The basic presupposition is that the methods of scientific investigation impinge on the individual scientist's way of life not only as regards knowledge acquisition but also at a deep personal level. Some dispositions are reinforced, others subdued or discouraged. The methods of science affect the habits of the scientist. The challenge to be faced in the following chapters is precisely the exploration of the terrain opened up by this assumption so as to see where it can lead.⁹

Before embarking on this journey, however, a crucial question needs to be met. Is the good scientist necessarily a good person? This question needs careful handling because there seems to be an important distinction between goodness at the level of skill and goodness at the level of a person as a whole, as is intended by the term virtue. Aristotle has famously expressed this point by saying: ‘it is from the same causes and by the same means that every virtue is both produced and destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced’.¹⁰ For the purposes of this book, this statement can be translated as follows: it is from engaging in scientific practice that both good and bad scientists are produced. There is no automatic transformation. The engaging in a practice does not guarantee goodness at the level of skill. Still less does it guarantee it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 A Preamble on Virtue
• 2 Observation
• 3 Method
• 4 Explanation
• 5 Science and History
• 6 Science as a Way of Life
• Appendix A: The Hippocratic Oath
• Appendix B: Elements of a Logic of Virtue
• Bibliography
• Index