BOOK INFO:
The Science of Good & Evil.
Michael Shermer.
Henry Holt & Co, 2004.
ISBN 0-8050-7520-8; 350 pages.
Kevin Baldeosingh
There are thousands of books about morality, and some of them are thousands of years old. Yet, in terms of moral thinking, human beings have progressed very little in the past hundred thousand years.
This is not to say that the species has not progressed in terms of moral action, for the world is a far less violent and more compassionate place than it was even five centuries ago. Yet, when it comes to moral reasoning, most people rely on the same intuitions that their ancestors did.
Philosopher and Skeptic Magazine publisher Michael Shermer treats with this issue and many other aspects of morality in this book. The Science of Good & Evil is both empirical and philosophical, as indeed any book about morality must be (but which only a minority of authors meld competently). Shermer's book is divided into two sections and eight chapters. The first section, titled The Origins of Morality, is empirical; the second, titled A Science of Provisional Ethics, is philosophical and discusses thorny moral issues such as pornography, abortion, cloning and animal rights.
In the first section, Shermer examines the links between human evolution and ethics. He cites the Golden Rule as the basis of morality, noting that it first recorded 2000 years ago in Leviticus and is universal to all complex societies and many simple ones. In The Sabbath in 30 BCE, Hillel Ha-Babli expresses the rule thusly:"Whatsoever thou wouldst that men should not do to thee, do not do that to them. This is the whole Law. The rest is only explanation."
Not only does Shermer use evolution to explain why human beings are moral but, just as importantly, why we are immoral. Examining war and violence, this evolutionary perspective deals with the problem of evil in a way that all religions which posit an omnipotent benevolent god have failed to do.
This leads to the first chapter of Section 2, which asks, "Can we be good without God?" In the second chapter, Shermer then looks at absolute, relative and provisional ethics, noting that "Absolute morality generates absolute intolerance. And the problem is endemic to all absolute systems of thought, from religious to nonreligious, from libertarian to communist."
He argues that: "Provisional ethics provides a reasonable middle ground between absolute and relative moral systems...they are true for most people in most circumstances most of the time." The book includes an eight-page appendix of moral universals.
It is in the section on provisional morality that Shermer examines the issue now engaging public debate here: abortion. In this context, he asserts that whereas, "Moral and political decisions are grounded in binary logic in which unambiguous yeses and noes determine Truth," a scientific approach to moral questions "is grounded in fuzzy logic in which ambiguous probabilities determine provisional truths." Fuzzy logic is non-binary, "one sees the world in shades of gray, between up and down, in and out," Shermer explains.
Applied to abortion, he argues, "From a scientific perspective, life is a continuum from sperm and egg, to zygote, to blastocyst, to embryo, to foetus, to newborn infant. Neither sperm nor egg is a human individual, nor is the zygote or blastocyst because they might split to become twins or develop into less than one individual and naturally abort."
From this basis, he goes on to discuss the definition of personhood and potentiality. Shermer's approach to moral issues is rigorous and sophisticated, and it is unfortunate that his prose tends to be turgid and lacking in passion. Still, the sheer volume of ideas makes up for this.