Science and the Good: the Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality is a serious work, useful for its thoughtful overview of what today's neuro and evolutionary scientists teach us about morality. Its title, of course, overpromises—how could it not? Authors James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky insufficiently analyze “the good,” and ways of knowing (“science,” generally) other than modern natural science are largely ignored. The book's protagonists, moreover, are not “tragic” figures but mostly earnest academics and the occasional publicity-hound. Some are vain; none is pitiable, and reading Science and the Good is not cathartic but, at best, soberly educational.
Hunter is a professor of religion, culture, and society at the University of Virginia, where he directs the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He has written many books on character, Christianity, and morality, including Culture Wars, the 1992 bestseller. Nedelisky is a fellow of the Institute. Their book has two main parts: a history of the “quest,” beginning in the 17th century, to ground morality on the methods and discoveries of modern natural science, and a discussion of contemporary findings. The authors call the quest “tragic” because it is doomed to fail.
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Hunter and Nedelisky's interesting historical discussion is, unfortunately, unreliable. It runs from Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes to Charles Darwin and his followers, via David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. Immanuel Kant, for whom the relation among nature, natural science, and morality was a central conundrum; G.W.F. Hegel, who believed he had solved this and all other seemingly intractable problems; and Friedrich Nietzsche, the psychological wizard who plumbed The Genealogy of Morals, make no appearance. Most of the book's historical account is devoted to Hume and Bentham because they seem closest to current views of pleasure and moral psychology, and because Hume's notion that we cannot derive an “ought” from an “is” plays a large role in the authors' thinking.
The book's second part is characterized by Hunter and Neldelisky's healthy skepticism of the inflated claims of sociobiologists, philosophy professors, publicists, neuro-economists, neuro-psychologists, and social psychologists. In the authors' view, the modern scientific approach to morality does not and cannot tell us what we ought to do. It can indicate something about the sentiments or neurochemistry that accompany morality, and the evolution of these sentiments—but even there, not much has been discovered. The authors do not exaggerate these findings, although scientists sometimes do.
One finding is that oxytocin is central to trust; the study behind this claim has not been replicated. Another is that moral judgments are tied to two different parts of the brain, one that calculates in a utilitarian manner, and one that intuits “deontological” matters such as rights' violations. But this discovery rests on experiments involving small numbers of today's Ivy League students—hardly a representative group—and the conclusions rest on a far-fetched example about whether and how you would kill one or a few to save many. A third finding involves (perhaps) discovering empathy in other primates, but with no indication that this involves moral choice. A fourth lists some general areas, or “receptors,” that call forth a spectrum of moral behavior, but with no sign of which behavior one ought to choose.
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