A colleague of mine in the social sciences recently bemoaned the fact that data on her recent study shows a significant average personality difference between men and women. She wondered aloud whether she should even publish the study for fear of pushback from colleagues who were likely to think that her findings undermined the idea that men and women are moral equals.
She is right to be concerned. Recently, the editors at Nature published editorial guidelines under the title “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans,” noting that work on human populations can harm people indirectly, for example, by providing justification for undermining the human rights of specific groups because of their social characteristics. The guidelines function as a kind of preemptive censorship since editors reserve the right to reject studies not because the experiments are poorly conducted, the evidence too thin, or the conclusions false. Instead, they reserve the right to reject a well-evidenced study’s conclusions if they think that “potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication.” If my colleague sends her study to Nature, it might be rejected not on scientific grounds but moral ones.
Nature isn't an outlier. The fear of the science of human differences is driving an illiberal faction of higher education to censor scientific findings that establish human differences and to cancel the scientists doing that research (for example, see here, here, here, and here). Most of this pressure is coming from the political left from scholars who are fixated on social justice and think that discrediting the science of human differences is essential for defending the moral dignity of all. (For readers wanting a deep dive, check out Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger.)
In all of these cases, the underlying assumption is that empirical differences imply moral differences. And since we’re committed to moral equality of humans regardless of race, sex, gender, class, and so forth, we should censor research showing empirical inequality of any sort.
This is a bizarre view for two reasons. First, it commits us to ignorance about humanity, the epistemic equivalent of putting your head in the sand. It’s pretty clear that humans are more-or-less alike but differ, on average, in important ways. For example, men are far more likely to go to prison, women are more likely to be neurotic, young people are more likely to be anxious or depressed, older people are more likely to fall for fake news, white people are far more likely to die of the skin cancer that killed Jimmy Buffet, and Tay-Sachs disease is almost exclusively found in Ashkenazic Jews.
That list can be extended in a myriad of different ways. But notice that the mere existence of an average difference doesn't say anything at all about the best explanation for the difference. In each case, even if there is a measurable difference between populations, it's an open question of what caused it: nature or nurture? For example, my colleague might have discovered a genuine personality difference between men and women that is explainable by appeal to a sexist environment rather than biology.
But even if the best explanation of the personality difference was natural rather than environmental, that shouldn't be a surprise. As researchers recently reported in Nature, human ancestors nearly went extinct roughly a million years ago. That “keyhole event” means that we all share virtually the same genetic stock. But that doesn’t mean that we are clones, either. Many human capacities and character traits are heritable to some degree, and that implies that variation across individuals or groups might be partially explainable by variation in genes. Scientists should be free to explore those differences, their magnitude, and their causes without fear of moral incrimination.
But, second, when the eminent journal Nature says that "science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans," the editors are making a conceptual mistake. Science can't respect or disrespect humans. That's because science just tells us what the empirical world is like, and it's not disrespectful to discover those facts.
The editors presume that science has the potential to disrespect people because they assume that there's a link between empirical equality and moral equality. Empirical qualities are those we can confirm with the tools of science. Are people the same height? Have the same strength? Susceptible to the same diseases? Get depressed at the same rates? If you can test for it, it’s empirical. Moral qualities, on the other hand, are not measurable. There’s no scale for inherent worth, dignity, or scope of rights. So whether any two people or groups of people are empirically equal is one question, and whether they are morally equal is another.
A central commitment of Western liberalism is that of human equality. The Declaration of Independence asserts that all men are created equal, and the UN Declaration of Human Rights opens with the assumption that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” But as any ethics teacher knows, pitching these principles to students generates the obvious rejoinder: people aren’t equal. I can’t run as fast as Usain Bolt, solve a Rubik’s cube like Max Park, or write lyrics that compete with Taylor Swift.
But when students object to moral equality in this way, they make a conceptual mistake. Moral equality is one thing. Empirical equality is another. The authors of the Declaration knew that no two people were empirically the same. But they thought it self-evident that they were worthy of equal moral consideration, nonetheless. (Yes, of course, that moral consideration wasn’t extended to everyone at the time, but even those covered by the blanket of moral equality differed from one another in thousands of ways.) Two humans can be morally equal even if one is taller, smarter, or more athletic than the other.
To link moral equality with empirical equality is to make the assumption that scientific findings determine the moral facts. That’s a philosophical error, and it’s one that partisans on the right and left make routinely when they invoke science to defend their moral views.
Here’s a historical example. In the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a lot of buzz about whether homosexuality was driven by nature or nurture. When your cousin comes out as gay, was that the result of his genes or his environment? American views of gay marriage were shifting quickly, and both sides of the cultural divide invoked science to defend their views.
The right (predictably) rallied around the view that homosexual orientation was learned. People were born straight, and the cultivation of homosexual desires was the result of environmental cues like trauma, cultural indoctrination, and social contagion. Heterosexuality was the biological imperative, and homosexuality was a deviation. This view set the stage for conversion therapy and the moral critique of the gay lifestyle.
Many on the left (predictably) favored a view in which being gay had deep biological roots. Some looked for multiple genetic markers increasing the likelihood of being gay while the most radical version of this story claimed that there was a single gay gene. Others thought that homosexuality wasn’t hardwired in that sense but was, indeed, heavily influenced by your biology. Religious liberals were fond of saying that this is just how God made them. On this view, conversion therapy was futile, and we have a moral imperative to accept gay people as they are.
In brief, political conservatives feared the idea that there might be a gay gene while political liberals championed it. Science was caught in a culture war in which both the left and the right wanted to use the findings of science to vindicate their moral viewpoints.
Both sides were making the same mistake. They were assuming that what’s natural is good or right or appropriate. It’s not. Settling the question of what causes homosexual attraction wouldn't settle the question of whether it's morally appropriate or not.
Consider violence. There are well-established biological roots of violent behavior. Some people are just born with a greater propensity towards violence than others. But that doesn’t imply that violence is morally good or that when we discover that some people are more inclined to violence than others that they are not our moral equals. Answering the question of whether violence is morally appropriate doesn’t require first finding out whether violence is natural.
The gulf between the findings of science and the dictates of morality is sometimes called the is-ought gap. The way the world is, is one thing. The way it ought to be, is something else. Science can tell you about the way the world is. It can’t tell you about the way it ought to be. The difference between the two was first described by David Hume nearly 300 years ago, but it seems that his lesson needs to be relearned by every succeeding generation.
Historically, it’s a lesson that has been shirked by both the political right and the left. On the right, historical defenses of race-based slavery and the subjugation of women often rested not just on bad science but on the unjustified assumption that empirical differences between groups implied moral differences between groups. And the left has defended everything from eugenics to redistributive economic systems by appealing to the assumption that empirically discernible differences justified differences in moral treatment.
While it's true that scientific findings can be abused these ways, the solution isn’t to stop doing science or to censor high-quality studies because someone might misinterpret them. The solution is to stop making unjustified inferences from scientific findings to moral ones and insist that others do the same. We shouldn’t have to choose between being empirically informed or morally virtuous. Yet that’s exactly what the illiberal faction would have us think: either we shield our eyes from the complexity of human life or else we become bigots that harm the most vulnerable among us.
Further, the solution isn’t to lie to the general public, either. When my colleague considered suppressing her findings rather than publish a journal article documenting differences between men and women, she was really considering whether to keep the public in the dark. Perhaps it’s better for people to assume that there are no average differences across human groups than for scientists to show them otherwise.
This is a noble lie on par with that recommended by Plato in The Republic. Socrates describes a utopia ruled by the few (called Guardians), and he needs a justification for oligarchy that the common people will accept. He settles for a noble lie: the Guardians are not empirically equivalent to everyday citizens, for they have souls of gold whereas others have souls made of iron or clay. The Guardians know that this isn’t true, but they spin a tale of empirical inequality to justify a difference in moral standing (they hadn't read Hume, either).
This same noble lie can be found on both the political right and the political left, and the leftist version is particularly virulent on college campuses. From controversies about intersex individuals in the Olympics to affirmative action, the illiberal left spins a tale of empirical equality in order to justify our commitment to moral equality. Even if the empirical story isn’t true, we should keep up pretenses so that the common people will accept a society in which all of us are morally equal. Same noble lie, different generation.
The fundamental problem in both cases is not that the science of human differences is inevitably bad science. Rather, the problem is that we shouldn't be teaching the next generation that their moral equality depends on their empirical equality. Not only is that a recipe for poor self-esteem (we all know that we’re not empirically equal), but it’s not good for science. Putting ideological blinders on researchers artificially limits our view of reality in a way that’s antithetical to the ethos of science. As the biostatician Karl Pearson put it in his 1892 essay “The Scope and Method of Science,” there is no shortcut to truth. And without such a shortcut, scientists must be free to pursue their inquiry wherever they like without allowing “the theologian or the metaphysician” to foreshore our present ignorance.
In Pearson’s day, the censors of science were churchmen or conservative politicians. Today it’s illiberal factions on both the right and the left. The right jumps on any hint of group empirical differences in a misguided effort to justify group moral differences (think of the trad wife movement). The left squelches any hint of group differences (think of the transgender athlete disputes) out of fear of losing hold of moral equality. But in both cases the impulse is the same: put ideological pressure on scientists for fear that empirical findings will undermine moral commitments. In a strange twist of intellectual fate, the social justice warriors of today are the Social Darwinists of yesteryear. Both assume that if differences between groups are real, then they are not moral peers.
We can do better. First, we shouldn’t censor scientific findings that confirm empirical differences between people or groups of people, excise all discussion of human differences from our classrooms, or cancel the scientists doing anthropological or social research. Scientists should be free to research and publish good research on humankind.
Second, we should resist those who want to translate findings about empirical differences into moral conclusions. For example, finding out that, on average, men differ from women in a number of different ways doesn’t imply that men and women are not worthy of equal moral consideration or that their moral rights are not precisely the same.
Empirical equality is one thing; moral equality is another.
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