Science and normative authority

Science can provide us with reliable information relevant to our welfare, values, and ends. In combination with those ends, it surely provides us with reasons to do or refrain from certain actions. To the extent that our ends have normative significance, the reasons science derivatively provides us with have normative force. So if I aspire to become highly skilled at an activity which requires close concentration for peak performance and the best science says that early mornings are when such concentration is at its peak, I ought to get up early. I have a compelling reason to do so.

Likewise the discovery that smoking causes lung cancer seems to provide compelling reasons to stop smoking and to institute social policies that minimize smoking. Many other scientific discoveries similarly give rise to prescriptions about behaviour – at least when considered against a background of widely shared and robust views about the nature of the good life for we human beings. Health is not sufficient for a good life but it is thought to be a central good, both in itself and because it permits the pursuit of other valued ends. Moreover, it is unlikely that cultural shifts or fashions will result in any radical or enduring change in the centrality we accord to health in a good life – though we will undoubtedly continue to refine our notions of health and illness both with the aid of the sciences and in response to challenges from other disciplines.

The normative authority of science thus most plausibly and uncontroversially derives from the combination of its epistemic authority and the authority that certain central human interests may be thought justifiably to have in deliberation and choice. Against this background, the prescriptions derived have a non-hypothetical character – their authority does not depend upon their conformity with individual aims.

But can science go further than this? The philosophical interest in probing the normative authority of science is surely in whether and how science might have anything authoritative to say about our ends and values themselves. Can the sciences contribute to our discussions of the nature of the good life other than instrumentally? Could a scientific account of human nature reveal constraints on what we can rationally aspire to in, for example, the way of gender equality? Is an egalitarian society a genuine possibility for creatures like us? If it is not, then, on the basis that ought implies can, egalitarian prescriptions and ideals are undermined.

But perhaps human nature is sufficiently plastic to permit a wide variety of social arrangements and ideals. What then? If human nature is plastic does it undermine the assumptions about human welfare that would permit the derivation of non-hypothetical imperatives from scientific discoveries? Does it undercut the basis for a scientific study of well-being?

Another possibility is that an advanced understanding of human cognitive processes could inform reflection upon and revision of some of our evaluative concepts such as wisdom, which seem to incorporate controversial or even false assumptions about the role of reflection in good decision-making. Could such an advanced understanding of human cognition also challenge the justificatory basis for (and view of human nature embedded in) entrenched institutional practices of responsibility in the law, or does it provide, at most, evidence relevant to those practices.

These are some of the questions explored in the lively and diverse contributions to this special issue on science and normative authority.

The issue opens on a cautiously skeptical note about the prospects of science informing normative discourse in an authoritative way. In Culture by Nature, Neil Levy reviews recent evidence from social and cognitive psychology that seems to overturn the antinativist views that had dominated social science for decades and were thought to generate progressive political views by implying a radical freedom from nature. The thought was that if human beings lacked an essential nature then we could redesign society in accordance with our freely chosen ideals. Here the lack of constraints from our nature, as supposedly revealed by the social sciences, opened up a range of normative possibilities. But the sociobiology project of identifying universal features of the human mind has arguably re-imposed limits on the kinds of moralities that are possible for us, as well as identifying the cognitive biases that affect our reasoning about moral matters and even about our own well-being. Cognitive science now seems to show that the form and even some of the content of our moral beliefs is part of our innate cognitive endowment. The science directly investigates the mechanisms driving our automatic moral responses, explains these as having been fitness enhancing, and suggests that in trying to change or override them we will go against the grain of our nature.

What are the normative implications of this? It appears that evidence of our nature, e.g. of fixed essential differences between males and females, or of the adaptiveness of hierarchical social orderings, might conflict with certain ideals, e.g. of egalitarianism. Where it does it might give us reason to either give up on those ideals or to radically re-conceive what equality might mean in a world of irremediable gender difference. Now of course the scientific evidence of gender differences in the brain is at best shaky (as Cordelia Fine's recent book (2010) has emphatically established) but in principle, evidence about our natures could provide us with reasons to rethink our values.

Levy agrees that we have a nature, but argues that the constraints it places upon us are few. For he thinks the evidence shows that we are deeply cultural by nature and it is precisely because of this that we have the flexibility to create, adopt, and flourish in “a dizzying multitude of social formations”. It is culture that permits us to go beyond the evaluation of means to biologically preset ends and explore our ends, both final ends and ends that are components of an overall conception of the good life. Levy emphasises that human ends are transmitted by culture, not merely biologically given, and he suggests that cultural transmission is enabled by our imitative facility. While other primates imitate, Levy points out that humans imitate more slavishly than apes and he speculates that this over imitation enables the elaboration of complex cultural behaviours, far more complex than are achievable by other animals. If Levy is right, the results of scientific investigations of human nature do not currently support content-specific universal normative conclusions about what ends or practices to adopt. We must look elsewhere for reasons for our practices.

Perhaps then we should turn to what science can tell us about well-being. As Daniel Haybron points out, well-being is standardly considered to be an evaluative or normative kind – a value. It concerns what is good for people, what benefits or harms them. Can science make such judgments? If Levy is right, what benefits or harms us is subject to cultural variation, and indeed the focus of empirical investigation has been on subjective well-being – a psychological rather than a normative kind.

Haybron argues however that researchers cannot entirely avoid the hard questions about the importance of the states they study. Well-being research naturally lends itself to normative conclusions. If you publish data that purports to show that a group of people are happy, it will be inferred that those people are doing well. And if they are doing well then we do not need to help them. Certainly this is how many individuals interpret reports about happiness in slum dwellers. They are off the hook. As Haybron puts it, “to claim that people are happy or unhappy is to make a weighty assertion, which will be widely taken to have major implications for what ought to be done. Indeed, for how people ought to live”. So such research may be thought to have normative authority in two ways. It may tell us something about what happiness consists in, and given the importance we commonly attach to happiness it can provide reasons to reconsider social arrangements which are sub-optimal for well-being.

But Haybron thinks current well-being research does not license any particular normative conclusions. Current research focuses on global life satisfaction measures and these are profoundly flawed. In sum Haybron argues that global measures are useless because we have no clear idea of what they mean. We can evaluate how well we are doing in a particular domain but overall ratings tend to be arbitrary and driven by a variety of biases and situational factors which introduce noise into the data. Moreover, as Haybron points out, life satisfaction involves a judgment about whether your life is good enough. This requires you to determine, not only what you care about, but how much of it you have to get, and he suggests there is no principled way of deciding where to set the bar. He recommends replacing life satisfaction measures with assessments of particular “‘satisfactions’ or ‘dissatisfactions’ – things people are pleased or displeased about in their lives”. This would not allow serious dissatisfactions to be masked by an overall positive rating.

These two papers invite the conclusion that while science is relevant to our normative interests and may be cited in normative discourse and debates over policy, it does not have any particular normative authority. It has not thus far provided us with decisive reasons to shape our values policies and practices in one way rather than another. In the case of well-being research however, this failure of normative authority may rest on upon a different failure. Current well-being research may lack epistemic authority.

Wim de Muijnck's contribution takes an optimistic view of the prospects of science to acquire normative authority via epistemic authority. Contra Levy, he claims that “authoritative beliefs about what we human beings are like translate into authoritative beliefs about what values we should or should not endorse”. Good science can provide such authoritative beliefs. And he thinks that while many values are legitimately contested it is surely not the case that what constitutes human well-being is entirely up for grabs.

de Muijnck turns his attention to the literature on child development – in particular, to attachment theory. As Levy highlights, humans are intensely social creatures with a very long period of dependency on caregivers. Attachment research has established the importance of emotional support and the proximity of a primary caregiver in child development. Such availability permits and promotes exploration of the environment and learning, and the development of self-confidence and trust. Insecure attachments styles are strongly associated with poor mental health, unstable relationships and reduced well-being over the life of the person. Allowing that the science of attachment is relatively reliable and settled, what does this teach us?

At first blush it may be thought that this is one more example of the kind of simple case I began with – on a par with the discovery that smoking causes lung cancer. But I think it is more than this. The study of child development is the study of how we become persons, and of the type of persons we become under certain environmental conditions. We require certain kinds of environmental inputs to develop capacities, such as language, that are partly constitutive of being a person. So if a practice were found to systematically undermine or degrade these capacities it could have far more systemic implications for our values.

de Muijnck takes values to be “the things in life that we find especially important – not individually and idiosyncratically, as mere concerns, but in community and critical exchange with each other”. These values are manifested in norms or rules which govern our practices. As a community practice our values form a system and this system is subject to a constitutive pressure in favour of consistency. Indeed de Muijnck makes the strong claim that consistency is necessary if we are to be said to have values at all – valuing is revealed as a kind of patterned or structured set of responses and practices. Values and beliefs are thus properly conceived of as interwoven: “our systems of beliefs and values can be thought of as a Quinean web”. One form of rational pressure that science may place on us, by virtue of its epistemic authority, is thus to revise our values and practices to make them consistent with each other.

de Muijnck outlines a case for thinking that the normative authority of empirical science may go beyond licensing or requiring “some shifts here and there in an existing system of values, and support or threaten larger parts of such a system”. Research on attachment may present us with an ideal for how to relate to others. It may help us to shape a conception of the good life – for the social animals that we are. So de Muijnck can agree with Levy on a great deal but offers a view of how even after allowing for a great deal of flexibility in our natures and a large role for culture, the science of human nature can provide substantive reasons to revise even quite fundamental values.

Two papers on wisdom, the first by Valerie Tiberius and Jason Swartwood, and the second by Lisa Bortolotti, also explore the idea that science can help us to shape our normative concepts and ideals and address the ways in which philosophy and science interact in normative theorizing.

How might psychological research help us to theorize well about wisdom? Tiberius and Swartwood's project is to articulate the main components of wisdom in a way that does not presuppose any particular moral theory. Their interest is not in how science might provide us with norms, or tell us which norms or values to adopt, or tell us about the means to our normative ends. They employ empirical research in theorizing to inform conceptual analysis and to help fill out a rationally compelling, psychologically realistic theory of wisdom. Science for them is an important element of the process of wide reflective equilibrium. They thus aim to demonstrate “one way in which psychological research can be incorporated into the construction of a normative theory”.

Bortolotti takes herself to show that philosophy and the cognitive sciences can genuinely interact in tackling normatively charged questions such as whether reflection leads to making wise choices. As she says, the work of cognitive scientists can contribute to understanding the causal mechanisms related to reflection that could not be determined by a priori reasoning or naturalistic observation of behaviour, and that are important if our philosophical theories are to be psychologically realistic. But there is also a job for philosophers to do in examining the normative implications of the relevant data and interpreting it in the light of the interests that we have in good decision-making.

These authors all take psychological realism to be a constraint on the ideals to which we can rationally aspire. So our accounts of wisdom must be sensitive to evidence of human cognitive capacities and limitations. But there is another way in which philosophical accounts of wisdom may be informed by empirical work.

The supposedly “new” field of experimental philosophy arguably represents a return to “an earlier conception of the inseparability of philosophical reflection and scientific inquiry” (Justin E.H. Smith 2011) Joshua Knobe (2011) suggests that “philosophy has been concerned throughout almost all of its history with questions about how ordinary people actually think and feel”. While Tiberius and Swartwood do not represent themselves as engaging in this new/old field, they do take seriously folk accounts of wisdom. They argue that by taking the folk theory as their starting point we can understand wisdom “an ideal that people already have”. This allows them to satisfy another important constraint on a good theory of wisdom: that it be rationally compelling. The theory “ought to describe an ideal of wisdom that people have (justifying) reason to aspire to”. So for example they use the folk theory of wisdom, as measured in a variety of psychological studies, to critique perceptualist accounts of wisdom. Perceptual models understand wisdom as the ideal or perfect capacity for discerning reasons, whereas the folk conception emphasises the capacity to be self-critical and open minded. Reflectiveness and helpfulness are also important elements of the folk theory not emphasized by perceptualist accounts.

A theory of wisdom however cannot just rest content with the folk theory as it stands. There is a crucial role for philosophical analysis, interpretation, and justification. Philosophical analysis may reveal internal inconsistencies within the theory. Some notions in the folk theory, e.g. the notion of “deep understanding”, may need further elaboration. The issue of normative coherence also arises. For Tiberius and Swartwood “[t]he folk theory is only worth aspiring to if it, for example, fits well with our best accounts of the good life”. If wisdom is to serve as an action guiding ideal it must be understood as a network of rational goals and policies and they see it as the role of the philosopher to make the normative structure of wisdom explicit.

Tiberius and Swartwood offer a broad view of the interaction of science and philosophy in the construction and justification of a mature normative theory. Lisa Bortolotti undertakes a more focused examination of the possibility, also raised by Tiberius and Swartwood, that the kind of reasoning that takes centre stage in our accounts of wisdom may in fact be incompatible with good decision-making skills – the kinds of reasoning that supposedly characterize the wise may be unachievable given our human capacities. Cognitive science may tell us that wisdom is not what we thought it was and so force a reconceptualization of this central normative notion and ideal.

Good decision-making, self-knowledge, and the integration of diverse skills in the solution of familiar and novel problems are key elements of wisdom, made manifest in the capacity to make good choices. Bortolotti explores the respective roles of conscious reflection, intuition, and experience in making wise choices and finds a variety of evidence which might be thought to support the more perceptualist accounts of wisdom that Tiberius and Swartwood reject.

A wealth of psychological evidence purports to establish that good decisions are often made not by consciously weighing the reasons for and against a certain course of action, but through intuition. Bortolotti cites researchers who suggest that this is because “consciousness has low capacity, conscious thought often leads people to take into account only a limited subset of information at the expense of other information that should be taken into account when making a decision” (Dijksterhuis and van Olden 2006, 628). This threatens our conception of wisdom in the following way: since the cognitive mechanisms underpinning intuition are opaque to introspection, the justifications provided for the decision must be arrived at post hoc, as Jonathan Haidt has argued. Since the reasons we give for our choices are not what explains them the supposedly wise person will suffer deficient self-knowledge.

Bortolotti attempts to rescue a role for reflection which builds on the importance of experience in getting wisdom. According to her, reflection can lead to self-understanding in a constructive, rather than a forensic way. We may not have good insight into the proximal causes of our decisions, but in reflection we construct narratives that give meaning to them in the light of our experiences and this has implications for how we go on. In particular, our self-narratives allow us to predict and intervene in the future. Thus, they are essential to self-knowledge and wise choices.

Narrative analysis and construction is not part of the folk theory of wisdom and has only recently begun to be discussed in philosophical accounts. It is a way of responding to the cognitive science of decision-making which involves a significant rethinking of what wisdom entails and illustrates the interplay between philosophy and the sciences in refining and revising our normative concepts.

Finally, Nicole Vincent's contribution considers the role and normative authority of scientific findings in the avowedly normative domain of the law. She focuses on the notion of responsibility and responsibility adjudications in both the criminal and civil law.

Vincent notes that our responsibility practices presuppose that responsibility tracks mental capacity. Mental capacity – for various types of reasoning, for understanding and for self-control – would seem to be amenable to empirical investigation, and the cognitive sciences may contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms which underpin these capacities and of the ways in which they might be impaired. If our mental capacities are quite generally not what we thought or as the law has presumed, should we alter our responsibility practices in the ways suggested by reformists? Should we perhaps also re-conceive our notions of responsibility in the way that we might re-conceive our notions of wisdom or of what constitutes good child-rearing practice in the face of reliable scientific findings?

First, let us note that the implications of granting normative authority to science in the domain of legal practice are likely to be far more revolutionary than if we permit it to guide our conceptions of wisdom. Changing fundamental institutions is not to be undertaken lightly, even if their presuppositions about human capacities turn out to be mistaken. We may have excellent pragmatic reasons for not deferring to science when thinking about responsibility.

And let us acknowledge that challenges to the idea that anyone can ever be responsible are hardly new. Should such challenges carry extra weight when dressed up in new scientific finery?

According to Vincent, conservatives say that reasoning about responsibility is an irreducibly normative domain over which science holds no sway. They say we must ultimately decide for ourselves such things as what capacities we require for responsibility, and in what degrees we require them. This is a norm setting exercise on which different societies may reach very different conclusions. While science may have epistemic authority in helping to determine if the standard is met in particular cases, it has no authority over where the standard should be set.

Vincent steers a middle course between reformists and conservatives. She distinguishes between science as authoritative and science as providing the grounds of normative reasons. She rejects the idea that science could have a kind of ultimate normative authority but notes that nothing else does either. On this picture we should see science as providing normatively relevant considerations to be weighed in deliberation along with others. In particular, she suggests that facts about which mental capacities humans actually possess might constrain our decisions about what it is reasonable to expect of one another.

The papers in this issue delineate a number of domains of enquiry and ways in which evidence from the sciences bears upon philosophical theorizing and normative reflection. While there is no consensus on the extent to which science might rationally constrain or even mandate our normative conclusions, the overall picture they present is one of fruitful interaction between disciplines. The contributions demonstrate, if not the inseparability of philosophical or ethical reflection and scientific inquiry, the wisdom of pursuing each in the light of the other.