Thought-provoking articles are a source for many articles I write, and I often use them as a springboard for my own thoughts. An article by Trent Horn, Neil DeGrasse Tyson Shows Why Science Can’t Build a Utopia[1], is my springboard for this article.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, of course, is an outspoken and popular agnostic ambassador of science. The Horn article was precipitated by Tyson’s tweet:
“Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence”[2]
and Horn’s counter-tweet:
“@neiltyson ‘Rationalia’ is as useless as ‘Correctistan,’ or a country whose constitution says, ‘Always make the correct decisions.'”
To illustrate what Horn means by his counter-tweet, he used the example of a driverless car. Fatalities have already happened with them and will undoubtedly happen again. Knowing that fatalities are unavoidable, the question becomes: how should driverless cars be programmed when confronted with two options: 1) to run over pedestrians or 2) to run into an object that may destroy the car and kill the passengers?
How does Tyson’s “Rationalia” weigh the evidence to determine which is the best course?
It so happens that the journal, Science, recently published an article based on polls to determine how people think about that dilemma[3]. The results are extremely interesting, and telling.
Participants in six studies favored the utilitarian approach: when faced with two evils, such as running over pedestrians or sacrificing the vehicle and its passengers to save the pedestrians, the people overwhelmingly chose the policy of sacrificing the vehicle and its passengers for the greater good.
And, this is the interesting (and telling) part:
In the same study, participants did not approve of enforcing those utilitarian requirements on the driverless automobile industry, and the overwhelming majority would not buy such a vehicle designed programmed to protect the greater good.
Again we need to ask: How would Rationalia weigh the evidence to determine how driverless vehicles should be programmed?
Is the utilitarian ideal more rational than another model? And, if so, why? According to Horn,
“Rationalia’s anemic constitution cannot resolve societal disputes any more than your GPS unit can resolve a fight your family has over a summer vacation.”
Horn used this example to highlight the “myth of objectivity.”
I will get into that but first we need to think about the back story. prompted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Tweet was prompted by his assessment that “it is unsafe to build a government on a belief system.”[4] Tyson reasoned that people who have belief systems (meaning religious people, presumably), disagree with each other, and he asserts that government should be built on “objectively verifiable truths” So that government determinations are not subject to disagreement.
The problem that Horn highlights is that “the materialistic, utilitarian thinking that motivates scientists like Dr. Tyson is not exempt from this critique.” Building governmental policy on utilitarianism is no different than building a governmental policy on some different belief (or value) system. The dilemmas that present themselves are still subject to disagreement, as illustrated by the driverless car example.
After making this observation, Horn moves on to other things, but I want to dig a little deeper into that last statement.
First of all, what critique? For Dr. Tyson, governments should not be built on belief systems because people with belief systems disagree with each other… as if people without belief systems never disagree. Do all scientists agree with each other on all things? We don’t have to look very far for the answers.[5]
More fundamentally, though, who doesn’t have a belief system? Tyson seems to believe that scientists do not have belief systems. Is Dr. Tyson asserting that a materialistic, naturalistic worldview is not a belief system? I beg to differ!
The myth of objectivity is that some people (like Dr. Tyson presumably) are not tainted by biases and are, therefore, objective. They only need facts, and then they can spit out objectively verifiable determinations.
Does that really pass the smell test?
I am here to say that no one is free of bias – and that includes scientists. It’s dangerous for anyone to believe that he is unbiased – even a scientist. Anyone who thinks he alone is right because he is unbiased is appealing to his own authority to support that claim. We call that a God complex – scientists can have God complexes too.
I am not saying that Dr. Tyson believes he is unbiased or that he has a God complex, but I think he is naïve if he is suggesting some people are without belief systems or biases.
To give him the benefit of the doubt, he might be saying that the scientific mind – in the abstract – is unbiased and without a belief system. If we can just achieve a perfectly scientific mind, we would be unbiased and free of belief systems. I am not sure whether that is what he is saying or not.
It seems to me that he might be assuming that people like him don’t have a belief system and are, therefore, unbiased and complete the objective. If that is what he is actually saying, then he is not just wrong; his thinking is extremely dangerous.
Utilitarianism, of course, is a belief system. It’s a philosophy. It’s a way of ordering values in the world. There is no scientific proof that utilitarianism is better than another belief system or philosophy or way of ordering values in the world. We can make arguments about it, but I guarantee people will not agree at the end of the day whether utilitarianism is better than another belief system, philosophy, or a way of ordering values.
In fact, the idea that we can build a system of government built on “objectively verifiable truths” is a belief system itself. It’s a belief system that requires a lot of assumptions that we cannot prove, beginning with the assumption that it is even possible to achieve perfectly, objectively verifiable truths.
In Dr. Tyson’s case I assume his belief system is also premised on the assumption that truth is only that which can be objectively verified by measurement, quantification, classification, experiment, etc. Dr. Tyson’s naturalistic worldview doesn’t acknowledge or account for anything else, but he has to take that assumption on faith because he cannot prove it. It is a belief system.
Horn questions, as do I, whether such a system can possibly provide standards for governance. Using the driverless car as an example, what objectively verifiable truth helps us determine whether a government should mandate that driverless cars be programmed to veer into pedestrians to avoid damage to the car and its passengers or should veer into objects to save pedestrians at the expense of the car and its passengers?
When people are asked the questions, their answers depend on their perspective at the moment – passenger or pedestrian. The same people who said they would favor saving the pedestrians at the expense of the passengers as a general proposition also said they would never buy such a car themselves, and they wouldn’t mandate that cars be programmed that way.
The only thing that changed from one determination to the other was perspective.From the perspective of a pedestrian the policy of driverless cars that crash into objects and kill the passengers makes sense. From the perspective of the passengers in a car, it makes a lot less sense. I defy a scientist or philosopher to find an objectively verifiable way out of that conundrum.
Any determination like the example given ultimately depends on a value system, and value systems are not objectively verifiable. Is it better to save a mother with a small child or a scientist with no children if the only choice is to save one? The answer isn’t objectively verifiable… without a value system – a belief system.
Objectively verifiable facts don’t create value systems. The fact that one person is a mother with a child and another person is a scientist with no children doesn’t determine for us which life to save if only one life can be saved. We have to have a value system to apply to those facts to make that determination.
Objectively verifiable facts may inform value systems, but they don’t create them. The value system ultimately determines a course of action, not the facts.
I submit this is true whether we admit any value system at all. Without a value system, any determination, even a determination based on objectively verifiable facts, is a matter of whim or caprice. We have to have a value system to remove whim and caprice from the equation.
Ironically, the person who prefers the utilitarian approach to the driverless car dilemma generally, exposes the difficulty of the dilemma by acknowledging that he/she would not purchase such a car or agree to impose that approach by governmental fiat on other people. They prefer the utilitarian value system until it comes to their own good; then the system is abandoned to protect themselves.
Call it a belief system or a value system, it doesn’t matter. The system by which we make moral determinations, which includes how we govern ourselves, must be based on some value (or belief) system or it’s arbitrary. Abandoning utilitarianism to protect what is good for oneself is, likely, the kind of thing that Tyson would like to minimize with his objectively verifiable facts.
Abandoning utilitarianism to protect one’s own good, however, is a breakdown in the value system by the people who preferred it. It doesn’t prove Tyson’s point that belief systems are bad. It reveals another problem: which is that people like belief systems until they don’t. When a belief system produces results we don’t like, we abandon the belief system.
If I can be indulged to read between the lines, I think what Dr. Tyson is saying is that religious belief systems, or value systems informed by religious beliefs, should not be used to govern societies. People can agree to disagree about the propriety of his proposition, but, he goes too far when he suggests that his Rationalia wouldn’t be governed by a belief system at all. He fails to understand that Rationalia also must operate by a belief system – a system driven by assumptions that we cannot prove (like utilitarianism).
He is also naive to suggest that some people, even people who value objectively verifiable facts, are not influenced by their own biases that are derived from their own belief/value systems. No finite beings are without biases, driven by their own perspectives and limitations. Only a God could truly be objective and without bias but Tyson does not believe in gods.
Dr. Tyson seems to believe in the “objective person” (and presumably counts himself in that category). As intelligent (and objective) as he may be, he is not without bias, and he is not without a belief system. Our biases are formed by our value systems. We all have value (belief) systems, whether they are consciously formed or unconsciously assumed. Objectivity is a myth for finite creatures such as ourselves.
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[1] Published at Strange Notions: http://www.strangenotions.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-shows-why-science-cant-build-a-utopia/
[2] https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736
[3] The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles, Science 24, Jun 2016: Vol. 352, Issue 6293, pp. 1573-1576 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6293/1573
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KszJuhBcVjE&feature=youtu.be&t=8m13s
[5] For example, the theory of evolution, which we are led to believe is accepted universally in the scientific community, is still subject to question and debate in that same scientific community. As proof, we can look at the recent advertisement of a meeting of the Royal Society in London, England that describes the subject matter as follows:
Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields have produced calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution, although the issues involved remain hotly contested.
See Meeting: New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives
Navigating by Faith 
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