This is similar to Biblical scholars’ “Criterion of Embarrassment.” If an account is embarrassing to its authors’ worldview, it’s regarded as more likely to be true.
Another suggestion I have is that we should require newely minted PhDs to take an oath like doctors do -- an oath that recognizes the special position of trust they have as an expert and requires them to swear to -- when speaking as an expert -- always attempt to convey the full state of the evidence not cherry pick positions for personal comfort or partisan benefit, to endeavor to publish in ways that add to our overall understanding and never p-hack or hide unwanted outcomes and to speak up to correct the record about their area of expertise even when they fear the consequences of how people would react.
While I think part of the benefit would just be getting academics to think more seriously about the impact of their work the most important aspect is that it creates an excuse for why you are speaking up.
If you're an epidemiologist who is considering standing up to say BLM rallies are dangerous because of the potential for COVID spreading you will reasonably worry people will infer the reason you spoke up is because you are against BLM. An oath like this gives you another reason you can point to.
This is why I believe all scientific journals should reserve a slot (or a number of them) for the best rebuttal piece submitted within some period of time after some publication.
The exact structure can be tweaked but the key observation is that, more than politics, publications matter to academics and if you can get a publication more easily by challenging a finding they'll do that. And you can give the original authors their own response as well and the net effect will be to create a more accurate academic record.
Sure, but I find the political partisanship framing of the piece reductive and to some extent counterproductive because discussions will again fall into the tedious and unproductive us-versus-them discussion that led to the intellectual dark web fiasco.
I find that there are two broader, more fundamental issues, worth exploring:
1- Scientific Rigor and Popular Appeal: Research that aligns with popular hopes or beliefs - regardless of political orientation - often receives less rigorous scrutiny. This extends far beyond any single ideological domain. Recent examples include claims about social media's impact on youth, smartphone effects on cognition, mindfulness benefits, and psychedelics' therapeutic potential. When mainstream media eagerly amplifies these findings, journal editors may face pressure to expedite publication of studies that warrant more thorough examination.
2-The Misuse of Empirical Research for Moral Arguments: We should ground moral positions in ethical reasoning rather than contingent empirical findings. Take workplace diversity: If we believe in its intrinsic value, we should advocate for it based on moral principles of human dignity and representation. Supporting diversity solely through productivity studies is both intellectually dishonest and strategically flawed - few would accept fully homogeneous teams even if data suggested they performed better. Similar issues arise with environmental corporate responsibility and other cases where empirical arguments are used to buttress fundamentally moral positions.
The issues you raise are good ones (though I disagree that moral positions have to be disengaged from empirical facts.) I'm not sure, though, why you believe that my own topic shouldn't be discussed.
I don't think that's what I said. I just thought it would have been interesting to make the more general point about hype, bias and rigor. Maybe it's election fatigue, but I seem to have a knee-jerk aversion to any progressives vs conservatives discussions. Sorry if I seemed dismissive. I've been following you on podcasts and in writing for years, and you always seem to have a better, more insightful, detached take on these issues – I hope to read more of them here.
If you use empirical data to argue why moral positions are good (like in the PNAS paper you mention: "[Our results] serve as an important call to continue the diversification of the medical workforce"), then you place the debate on empirical grounds, where, as an honest scientist, you should be open to changing your position in light of new evidence. Most wouldn't – and shouldn't – because the core argument for diversity rests on human dignity and equality, not performance metrics.
"because the core argument for diversity rests on human dignity and equality, not performance metrics."
And the core argument against diversity rests on the same things.
When it comes to basketball, no-one gives a fig for diversity. They seem to be happy for blacks to be "over represented" there. And theere is a reson why we are happy with that, because it can be proven scientifically that the mass of black men are better are basketball than the mass of peoploe from other races. But of course, we don't really resort to science in determining that diversity is not important in basketball. We hust know that the game wouldn't be as good if the players had to look "more like America".
What is important for human dignity is not enforced diversity, which by its very nature will exclude people of talent, but openess to diversity. Equality means equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
I'm not an expert on ethical philosophy, but I don't see how it's possible to escape consequentialism. The best arguments for deontology and/or virtue ethics seems to be: we can't reason through every possible consequence, and people would come up with self-serving rationalizations to justify behavior that benefits them at the expense of others, possibly without being aware of it... It's easier/more effective to have a set of guidelines that will generally lead to better OUTCOMES for all concerned... Pursuing virtue, just trying to do the right thing and be a good person, to cultivate humility, courage, etc, is likely to be good for you and the people around you... IOW consequences. Even if you believe morality comes from God...hellfire and/or God's displeasure are consequences. When I try to imagine what it could possibly mean for an action to be intrinsically right or wrong, regardless of any possible consequence it could have in this or any conceivable world...my mind just draws a blank. Does not compute. I can't think of any examples of people believing something is wrong without believing that it would some sort of negative consequence.
"We should ground moral positions in ethical reasoning rather than contingent empirical findings."
I don't think anyone ever does that, I don't see how it's even possible. To use a spicy, hot-button example:
"The importance of race differences is evident at an intuitive level. Whether fear of black crime is legitimate depends on whether blacks do in fact commit more crime, and, if so, why. Whether black poverty and academic failure are the fault of whites, and therefore impose compensatory obligations on whites—perhaps to be discharged by racial preferences—depends on why blacks fail." -Michael Levin
"moral principles of human dignity and representation" ...I don't know what that means, much less why it should justify discriminating against certain race(s) in favor of others in employment.
But we probably have different perspectives due to different beliefs...about the relevant facts. I can't think of a moral issue to which facts are not relevant, unless morality to you means no more or less than "God said so"...but then whether or not God did in fact say such and such, whether a given scripture can be considered reliable, whether or not God exists at all, etc. are facts that we are likely to dispute, and which are inseparable from the moral question.
I have to question whether we understand morality the same way at all. Morality to me is a lot of "oughts", and facts are "is", and you can't get an "ought" from an "is" by most philosophy I'm aware of. Moral precepts are generally independent of facts. I'd argue they're at base intuitions / preferences.
""God said so"...but then whether or not God did in fact say such and such, whether a given scripture can be considered reliable, whether or not God exists at all, etc. are facts that we are likely to dispute, and which are inseparable from the moral question."
This is tricky because to me there's a moral question that is - by a given morality is an action moral or immoral. God actually saying something or existing is irrelevant to deciding by a Catholic moral framework is something moral or immoral.
Then there's a question of if there is some universal "correct" morality. I don't think there is, and I don't think anyone has come close to proving there is. The facts only matter *if* we all agree on a moral framework. Some people are convinced by Consequentialism and "the most good for the most people" but that fails to convince millions who say "god works in mysterious ways and you must suffer to achieve the good of entrance to Heaven etc".
I’m not sure if there’s a universally correct morality either. But it seems like the only possible way to attempt to convince someone else to change their mind and agree with the rightness of your moral position is to make arguments based on the likely consequences of doing one thing vs another. True, it rarely works, as people don’t often change their minds…but sometimes they do. And it seems like the only alternative is to say, X is wrong because…it just is. Agree with me because I’m telling you to. Which could only work if you’re exceptionally influential/powerful/high status.
All oughts eventually have to terminate in some axiomatic ought, like “you should want to not die”. Why should I? Because if I was dead, I couldn’t do the things I want to do. Well why should I want to do the things I want to do? Well…I don’t know how to answer that, but…I just do.
Humans aren’t uniform in our desires/values, but due to human nature, and especially if we have a shared culture, people usually have enough in common to work with.
As I said in another comment, I can hardly imagine how I could avoid being a consequentialist, and I’m an atheist… But more and more I’ve been coming to think that Christians are basically right about morality in a lot of ways. Not in every particular, and of course there’s a wide range of things different kinds of Christians believe… But for example the importance they place on monogamous marriage...I think they are right that it’s better for society and for most individuals. I’m not an expert on what most Christians believe, but it seems that they tend to think that living in accordance with God’s will is generally a better way to live, better in the sense of having better consequences in this world. Granted, “better” is subjective…but most people can agree it’s better to be rich than poor, happy than sad, healthy than sick, to have people around you who value you than to be alone, etc etc etc.
Maybe we don’t understand morality the same way… Here’s basically how I understand it:
“One might wonder why morality evolved in the first place,7 but a key feature of morality is that humans seem designed to accept—even create—rules that constrain their own behavior, as long as these rules constrain others’ behavior as well. Morality can be seen as the informal equivalent of a justice system. I'll agree to rules that specify that I can be punished for various deeds, but only as long as everyone else is subject to the same rules. This makes sense; we shouldn't expect evolved creatures to be designed to consent to limit their own options, but not others’. This means that a key—perhaps the key—feature of moral cognition is that morality, to be stable, must include impartiality, the idea that rules apply equally to everyone. Impartiality is crucial because without it, rules become nothing more than a way from some people to coerce others. As one might expect, humans don't tend to want to accept rules that bind them but not others.”
Kurzban, Robert O.. Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (p. 214). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
"But it seems like the only possible way to attempt to convince someone else to change their mind and agree with the rightness of your moral position is to make arguments based on the likely consequences of doing one thing vs another."
I think this is the part where I said the 3 main moral systems do kind of all have a small part of the others in them. And I've been reading your responses a specific way, that you mostly mean external consequences in a very utilitarian way.
"But for example the importance they place on monogamous marriage...I think they are right that it’s better for society and for most individuals."
This example confirms that for me to some extent. For the different systems, the type of consequences matter. A virtue ethics doesn't exactly care about effects on society that aren't framed in increasing or decreasing virtuous citizens. You can call that a consequence but it's to me materially different from a consequence of incidents of domestic violence or mental health issues or the like. The virtues I've seen in my limited reading tend to be kind of arbitrary - they are NOT justified by anything, they're the brute assumption like utilitarianism has a brute assumption that "the most good for the most people" is the goal.
So while utilitarians like us would discuss societal benefits and to a much lesser degree individual benefits, a virtue ethics person would say "monagamy is a virtue".
And so some people are motivated by ideas like "increasing their virtue / their societies virtue". But this is less clear when they otherwise agree I think.
Here's my attempt to give a position that is the opposite. You could have a virtue of "have the most offspring". This isn't really an off the wall one either - historically powerful men have occasionally pushed for this (Kahns IIRC) and genetics would push for this also. A man following this virtue would see monogamy as immoral. It's obviously limiting his offspring potential. An argument based on consequences is going to talk past the virtue part.
I would guess you'd say - "that's not actually a virtue" but the problem is - unless you're already NOT a virtue ethics person - i.e. you already think that virtues are grounded in something else like consequences - there's nothing to argue about. You can disagree with someone about their base values, but you can't tell them they're wrong any more than you could tell someone their preference for vanilla over chocolate is wrong. The only way you could coherently argue them out of a position like that would be to show that the're somehow misunderstanding the virtue or set of virtues.
To hopefully make this clearer - if you're on the receiving end of this argument that monogamy is wrong because it is not virtuous to limit your lineage - you're going to go "WTH? that doesn't even make sense to me. I don't care about being 'virtuous' I care about the consequences." Someone would have much better luck making a logical or empirical case as to why monogamy overall causes more harm than good.
The only way to use a different systems arguments is to convince someone to *change to that system* IMO.
"I’m not an expert on what most Christians believe, but it seems that they tend to think that living in accordance with God’s will is generally a better way to live, better in the sense of having better consequences in this world."
I'm also far from an expert, but I will say that in my various excursions in books and youtube debating theism, philosophy etc - there are certainly Christians who care way way more about the next life in Heaven than consequences in this world. Pascal's Wager puts this starkly. Various sects rejection of modern medicine for theological reason does as well IMO.
"One might wonder why morality evolved in the first place" This doesn't really answer what you think morality is other than a set of rules some group of people somehow agree to follow together. However it doesn't really give any idea as to what those rules ought to be. Morality also is usually about a different sort of rules than a game of scrabble's rules. It would seem strange to say I am immoral for my house rules for scrabble.
Ginger Rogers didn't do anywhere near all the moves that Astaire did, as anyone who's watched more than a few minutes of them dancing knows. The old cliche about her doing "all of it but backwards in heels" is, ironically, another example of exactly the same unskeptical wishcasting that you rightly call out regarding scientific-research findings.
For what it's worth, I first heard the Ginger assertion made by Ann Richards, then Texas Governor (during her failed reelection against George W. Bush), as part of her feminist mythology. I didn't believe it then, as I had read how much work Fred and Hermes Pan, his choreographer, put into the dances long before Ginger came on to the set. The point of the meme (sorry to be anachronistic) is not whether it is true but as a useful point of reference for this piece. In that context, I think the meme works. Also, in other fields, such as the natural sciences (I'm a geophysicist), the work that supports one's preferred paradigm (which underscores your funded research project) is going to get your recommendation for publication, while you may jump through hoops to find objections to that manuscript which could sink your project. At the receiving end of such gymnastics my response has been to reexamine my research, usually find something I had missed before while completely rewriting the work, publishing it elsewhere, and, if it sinks somebody's project, be blissfully ignorant (although I'm still bugged about the initial treatment). Science, whether natural or social, is very human.
On point, Paul. I’m of the opinion that publishing research results tends to be beneficial even when the results are uncomfortable or when there is a potential for harm. But I can’t help wondering if my opinion is situational.
Your example of the retraction of the Nature Communications article is a good one. There is clearly a potential for harm created by publishing the results, but what about the harm from suppressing the results? Suppose we continue to assign female mentors to female scientists in the unwitting belief that it is better for them? Or, more importantly, because we refuse to acknowledge a difference between assigning a male versus female mentor, we’re not studying why the difference exists and how to correct it?
On the other hand, I could envision a scenario where a group, in trying to show that there are no statistically significant differences in intelligence between races, inadvertently shows that there are. Do they publish? Unlike the previous example, there is arguably no benefits to society or science in their results (at least, none that I can think of), and the potential for harm is extraordinary. I’m afraid that if I’m a reviewer of their paper, I might suggest not publishing.
Your last example is a lot like the question of whether a doctor should kill one organ donor patient in surgery so he can save 5 with his organs. Yes, if you imagine the doctor could do so with no risk of ever being discovered it's a hard question -- in the real world it's easy because the harms that would result in people distrusting the medical system in the case the doctor gets caught far outweigh the benefits.
Ultimately, the value of most scientific publication derives from it's ability to shift what people believe (no point publishing into the void) and if you don't believe troubling findings would be published if true then you don't get much information from the scientific literature in the first place.
Reading the literature has convinced me (eg the very nice Stanford study on traffic stops) that blacks are generally treated worse by the police (of all races) and a number of other important things. But the fact that journals published results challenging the claims about differences in rates of fatal shootings was equally important to me being persuaded so I knew it wasn't true that they'd have refused to publish a devastating counter argument. However on some issues I am starting to distrust the scientific record for exactly that reason.
In other words the harmful stuff needs to be published because if it's not we'll figure it out and stop trusting it all.
Counterpoint- if there is a statistically significant intelligence gap between races, isn't that important to know? And isn't knowing that it exists the first step in understanding why it exists? What if, hypothetically, one race was being systematically exposed to some intelligence-reducing factor (say, lead in water pipes)? That would mean the intelligence gap was something we could actually ameliorate- unless of course we collectively plug our ears and hum by suppressing those findings for fear of harm.
To steelman the other side, I think what they would argue is that before publishing results which are going to fuel harmful attitudes one should meet some much higher burden of both proof and reason to publish. In other words, you wait untill you are relatively confident of some offsetting benefit.
But this misses the fact that the second people realize you are playing this game you bring about the harm you were hoping to avert -- after all finding out that some claim might not be published even if we kept finding evidence for it is a reason to increase confidence in that claim.
This recent article about climate scientist Patrick Brown provides a good account of his experience of the dynamic you’re describing and his attempt to stay oriented towards the full picture…
I follow him and Roger Pielke Jr. for exactly the purpose of checking the overall tendency of climate journalism towards more alarmist accounts of the science.
One thing that I would add to buttress your point in the conclusion as to the desirability of truth seeking institutions is that we have so few out there in the world! Besides science, how many institutions do we really have which strive (ideally) to incentivize truth-maximization? There aren’t that many.
That’s why it’s so important I feel to keep ideology out of science. This is true even if you think ideology is super important. There already are so many institutions out there dedicated to maximizing ideological aims, let’s not make science one of them, otherwise we run into the danger of running out of any institution which incentives the search for the truth, and that would be disastrous. Surely even the most ideologically committed person would agree that we should have at least one institution out there dedicated to discovering truth, so let’s keep truth-warping incentives out of science.
If we lived in a world where most institutions besides scientific ones were boring “just the facts please” types of social organizations dedicated to truth-maximization, and ideology was a dirty word, then maybe it might make sense to promote ideology at the expense of truth. But we don’t live in that world.
This is great, and receives all the more legitimacy (as per the article!) coming from someone who (I think) is generally fairly liberal. It's a shame that the necessity of this sort of rational evaluation of evidence (which would always be necessary, not just in response to a particular political climate) isn't more widely understood. I imagine we do it intuitively in many contexts.
As an outsider, I wish there was more talk about these sorts of issues from principled people. It seems like whenever someone does attempt this, it becomes their whole "thing", they become less principled/lose themselves to fighting a larger culture war and their criticism loses its legitimacy (I think Jordan Peterson is a decent, though perhaps especially odd, example of this). If the "minority of professors" you mentioned who are more ideologically driven is indeed a minority, then the majority should be doing a better job of being explicit about how they think these issues should be handled. Otherwise, presumably, the minority dictates the attitudes and standards of the field as a whole.
I'm having trouble articulating this in detail, but I think you get idea.
Good article. The reforms I would like to see involve a clear acknowledgement that truth and activism are not the same thing, and are often in conflict. Perhaps universities could do more to establish a wall of separation between truth/knowledge and activism by establishing dedicated schools of Activism, and moving the various 'studies' programs into that.
So... in conclusion, you hate freedom ? ;-) Seriously, great article. I know you are primarily an academic, but you write in such an accessible writing style that I wish more people would adopt from that world.
The much diminished belief in the plausibility of the NY Times, CBS, etc. over the last decade is the same story with a much bigger audience. It’s like drinking 5 martinis. You feel great tonight, not so good tomorrow morning.
When it comes to unconscious bias surely one of the most contentious areas is pro- or anti-Semitism. We in the UK have discussed this a great deal, in particular when the Labour Party was led by Jeremy Corbyn and the party's enemies used the label of antisemitism to attack them.
I am neither a Labour supporter not Jewish, but I found this attack unfair. Although in the process of observing this debate, I learnt how easy it is to slip into antisemitic tropes.
The other day I added what I felt to be an innocuous observation, to a Substack discussion to the effect that 22% of Nobel prizes are awarded to people.of Jewish extraction.
The moderator removed my post!
Had I in some way slipped into an anti- or pro- Semitic faux pas?
Well, if you're into 19th century Norwegian drama, it's certainly a go-to. I bring it up because Henrik Ibsen was, for most of his career, a "truth-at-all-costs" sort of guy. His play An Enemy of the People concerns a doctor who discovers that the water at his town's new spa is contaminated. He wants, reasonably, the truth to come out, but the political pressure against doing so mounts, and he quickly becomes - well, the title.
Ibsen softened his view in later life. The Wild Duck, a late play, deals with a young man who is determined that the truth come out about his family, and damn the consequences. The consequences are predictably awful.
I recoil against the "truth....but managed truth" attitude that prevails in a lot of the academy (if you think it's bad in the sciences, I recommend not looking at the humanities). But I understand its origins and rationale. The development of academic disciplines - and the modern university - coincided with hegemonic cultural and scientific racism. That "truth" was/is used as the blunt cudgel of repression can't invalidate "Truth." But it can give us a moment or two to think if what we're about to publish might be adding a few more footpounds of pressure to the boot on somebody's neck.
I very much like the idea of a "Ginger Rogers" test, but if next week Verso published "The Bell Curve: The Sequel" I'm afraid I would find little edifying in the ensuing conflagration.
This is similar to Biblical scholars’ “Criterion of Embarrassment.” If an account is embarrassing to its authors’ worldview, it’s regarded as more likely to be true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criterion_of_embarrassment
thanks -- that's excellent
Another suggestion I have is that we should require newely minted PhDs to take an oath like doctors do -- an oath that recognizes the special position of trust they have as an expert and requires them to swear to -- when speaking as an expert -- always attempt to convey the full state of the evidence not cherry pick positions for personal comfort or partisan benefit, to endeavor to publish in ways that add to our overall understanding and never p-hack or hide unwanted outcomes and to speak up to correct the record about their area of expertise even when they fear the consequences of how people would react.
While I think part of the benefit would just be getting academics to think more seriously about the impact of their work the most important aspect is that it creates an excuse for why you are speaking up.
If you're an epidemiologist who is considering standing up to say BLM rallies are dangerous because of the potential for COVID spreading you will reasonably worry people will infer the reason you spoke up is because you are against BLM. An oath like this gives you another reason you can point to.
This is why I believe all scientific journals should reserve a slot (or a number of them) for the best rebuttal piece submitted within some period of time after some publication.
The exact structure can be tweaked but the key observation is that, more than politics, publications matter to academics and if you can get a publication more easily by challenging a finding they'll do that. And you can give the original authors their own response as well and the net effect will be to create a more accurate academic record.
Sure, but I find the political partisanship framing of the piece reductive and to some extent counterproductive because discussions will again fall into the tedious and unproductive us-versus-them discussion that led to the intellectual dark web fiasco.
I find that there are two broader, more fundamental issues, worth exploring:
1- Scientific Rigor and Popular Appeal: Research that aligns with popular hopes or beliefs - regardless of political orientation - often receives less rigorous scrutiny. This extends far beyond any single ideological domain. Recent examples include claims about social media's impact on youth, smartphone effects on cognition, mindfulness benefits, and psychedelics' therapeutic potential. When mainstream media eagerly amplifies these findings, journal editors may face pressure to expedite publication of studies that warrant more thorough examination.
2-The Misuse of Empirical Research for Moral Arguments: We should ground moral positions in ethical reasoning rather than contingent empirical findings. Take workplace diversity: If we believe in its intrinsic value, we should advocate for it based on moral principles of human dignity and representation. Supporting diversity solely through productivity studies is both intellectually dishonest and strategically flawed - few would accept fully homogeneous teams even if data suggested they performed better. Similar issues arise with environmental corporate responsibility and other cases where empirical arguments are used to buttress fundamentally moral positions.
The issues you raise are good ones (though I disagree that moral positions have to be disengaged from empirical facts.) I'm not sure, though, why you believe that my own topic shouldn't be discussed.
I don't think that's what I said. I just thought it would have been interesting to make the more general point about hype, bias and rigor. Maybe it's election fatigue, but I seem to have a knee-jerk aversion to any progressives vs conservatives discussions. Sorry if I seemed dismissive. I've been following you on podcasts and in writing for years, and you always seem to have a better, more insightful, detached take on these issues – I hope to read more of them here.
If you use empirical data to argue why moral positions are good (like in the PNAS paper you mention: "[Our results] serve as an important call to continue the diversification of the medical workforce"), then you place the debate on empirical grounds, where, as an honest scientist, you should be open to changing your position in light of new evidence. Most wouldn't – and shouldn't – because the core argument for diversity rests on human dignity and equality, not performance metrics.
"because the core argument for diversity rests on human dignity and equality, not performance metrics."
And the core argument against diversity rests on the same things.
When it comes to basketball, no-one gives a fig for diversity. They seem to be happy for blacks to be "over represented" there. And theere is a reson why we are happy with that, because it can be proven scientifically that the mass of black men are better are basketball than the mass of peoploe from other races. But of course, we don't really resort to science in determining that diversity is not important in basketball. We hust know that the game wouldn't be as good if the players had to look "more like America".
What is important for human dignity is not enforced diversity, which by its very nature will exclude people of talent, but openess to diversity. Equality means equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
This will depend a lot on your morality. Consequentialists / Utilitarians will look to outcomes to determine morality and hence empirical evidence.
I'm not an expert on ethical philosophy, but I don't see how it's possible to escape consequentialism. The best arguments for deontology and/or virtue ethics seems to be: we can't reason through every possible consequence, and people would come up with self-serving rationalizations to justify behavior that benefits them at the expense of others, possibly without being aware of it... It's easier/more effective to have a set of guidelines that will generally lead to better OUTCOMES for all concerned... Pursuing virtue, just trying to do the right thing and be a good person, to cultivate humility, courage, etc, is likely to be good for you and the people around you... IOW consequences. Even if you believe morality comes from God...hellfire and/or God's displeasure are consequences. When I try to imagine what it could possibly mean for an action to be intrinsically right or wrong, regardless of any possible consequence it could have in this or any conceivable world...my mind just draws a blank. Does not compute. I can't think of any examples of people believing something is wrong without believing that it would some sort of negative consequence.
"We should ground moral positions in ethical reasoning rather than contingent empirical findings."
I don't think anyone ever does that, I don't see how it's even possible. To use a spicy, hot-button example:
"The importance of race differences is evident at an intuitive level. Whether fear of black crime is legitimate depends on whether blacks do in fact commit more crime, and, if so, why. Whether black poverty and academic failure are the fault of whites, and therefore impose compensatory obligations on whites—perhaps to be discharged by racial preferences—depends on why blacks fail." -Michael Levin
"moral principles of human dignity and representation" ...I don't know what that means, much less why it should justify discriminating against certain race(s) in favor of others in employment.
But we probably have different perspectives due to different beliefs...about the relevant facts. I can't think of a moral issue to which facts are not relevant, unless morality to you means no more or less than "God said so"...but then whether or not God did in fact say such and such, whether a given scripture can be considered reliable, whether or not God exists at all, etc. are facts that we are likely to dispute, and which are inseparable from the moral question.
I have to question whether we understand morality the same way at all. Morality to me is a lot of "oughts", and facts are "is", and you can't get an "ought" from an "is" by most philosophy I'm aware of. Moral precepts are generally independent of facts. I'd argue they're at base intuitions / preferences.
""God said so"...but then whether or not God did in fact say such and such, whether a given scripture can be considered reliable, whether or not God exists at all, etc. are facts that we are likely to dispute, and which are inseparable from the moral question."
This is tricky because to me there's a moral question that is - by a given morality is an action moral or immoral. God actually saying something or existing is irrelevant to deciding by a Catholic moral framework is something moral or immoral.
Then there's a question of if there is some universal "correct" morality. I don't think there is, and I don't think anyone has come close to proving there is. The facts only matter *if* we all agree on a moral framework. Some people are convinced by Consequentialism and "the most good for the most people" but that fails to convince millions who say "god works in mysterious ways and you must suffer to achieve the good of entrance to Heaven etc".
I’m not sure if there’s a universally correct morality either. But it seems like the only possible way to attempt to convince someone else to change their mind and agree with the rightness of your moral position is to make arguments based on the likely consequences of doing one thing vs another. True, it rarely works, as people don’t often change their minds…but sometimes they do. And it seems like the only alternative is to say, X is wrong because…it just is. Agree with me because I’m telling you to. Which could only work if you’re exceptionally influential/powerful/high status.
All oughts eventually have to terminate in some axiomatic ought, like “you should want to not die”. Why should I? Because if I was dead, I couldn’t do the things I want to do. Well why should I want to do the things I want to do? Well…I don’t know how to answer that, but…I just do.
Humans aren’t uniform in our desires/values, but due to human nature, and especially if we have a shared culture, people usually have enough in common to work with.
As I said in another comment, I can hardly imagine how I could avoid being a consequentialist, and I’m an atheist… But more and more I’ve been coming to think that Christians are basically right about morality in a lot of ways. Not in every particular, and of course there’s a wide range of things different kinds of Christians believe… But for example the importance they place on monogamous marriage...I think they are right that it’s better for society and for most individuals. I’m not an expert on what most Christians believe, but it seems that they tend to think that living in accordance with God’s will is generally a better way to live, better in the sense of having better consequences in this world. Granted, “better” is subjective…but most people can agree it’s better to be rich than poor, happy than sad, healthy than sick, to have people around you who value you than to be alone, etc etc etc.
Maybe we don’t understand morality the same way… Here’s basically how I understand it:
“One might wonder why morality evolved in the first place,7 but a key feature of morality is that humans seem designed to accept—even create—rules that constrain their own behavior, as long as these rules constrain others’ behavior as well. Morality can be seen as the informal equivalent of a justice system. I'll agree to rules that specify that I can be punished for various deeds, but only as long as everyone else is subject to the same rules. This makes sense; we shouldn't expect evolved creatures to be designed to consent to limit their own options, but not others’. This means that a key—perhaps the key—feature of moral cognition is that morality, to be stable, must include impartiality, the idea that rules apply equally to everyone. Impartiality is crucial because without it, rules become nothing more than a way from some people to coerce others. As one might expect, humans don't tend to want to accept rules that bind them but not others.”
Kurzban, Robert O.. Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (p. 214). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
"But it seems like the only possible way to attempt to convince someone else to change their mind and agree with the rightness of your moral position is to make arguments based on the likely consequences of doing one thing vs another."
I think this is the part where I said the 3 main moral systems do kind of all have a small part of the others in them. And I've been reading your responses a specific way, that you mostly mean external consequences in a very utilitarian way.
"But for example the importance they place on monogamous marriage...I think they are right that it’s better for society and for most individuals."
This example confirms that for me to some extent. For the different systems, the type of consequences matter. A virtue ethics doesn't exactly care about effects on society that aren't framed in increasing or decreasing virtuous citizens. You can call that a consequence but it's to me materially different from a consequence of incidents of domestic violence or mental health issues or the like. The virtues I've seen in my limited reading tend to be kind of arbitrary - they are NOT justified by anything, they're the brute assumption like utilitarianism has a brute assumption that "the most good for the most people" is the goal.
So while utilitarians like us would discuss societal benefits and to a much lesser degree individual benefits, a virtue ethics person would say "monagamy is a virtue".
And so some people are motivated by ideas like "increasing their virtue / their societies virtue". But this is less clear when they otherwise agree I think.
Here's my attempt to give a position that is the opposite. You could have a virtue of "have the most offspring". This isn't really an off the wall one either - historically powerful men have occasionally pushed for this (Kahns IIRC) and genetics would push for this also. A man following this virtue would see monogamy as immoral. It's obviously limiting his offspring potential. An argument based on consequences is going to talk past the virtue part.
I would guess you'd say - "that's not actually a virtue" but the problem is - unless you're already NOT a virtue ethics person - i.e. you already think that virtues are grounded in something else like consequences - there's nothing to argue about. You can disagree with someone about their base values, but you can't tell them they're wrong any more than you could tell someone their preference for vanilla over chocolate is wrong. The only way you could coherently argue them out of a position like that would be to show that the're somehow misunderstanding the virtue or set of virtues.
To hopefully make this clearer - if you're on the receiving end of this argument that monogamy is wrong because it is not virtuous to limit your lineage - you're going to go "WTH? that doesn't even make sense to me. I don't care about being 'virtuous' I care about the consequences." Someone would have much better luck making a logical or empirical case as to why monogamy overall causes more harm than good.
The only way to use a different systems arguments is to convince someone to *change to that system* IMO.
"I’m not an expert on what most Christians believe, but it seems that they tend to think that living in accordance with God’s will is generally a better way to live, better in the sense of having better consequences in this world."
I'm also far from an expert, but I will say that in my various excursions in books and youtube debating theism, philosophy etc - there are certainly Christians who care way way more about the next life in Heaven than consequences in this world. Pascal's Wager puts this starkly. Various sects rejection of modern medicine for theological reason does as well IMO.
"One might wonder why morality evolved in the first place" This doesn't really answer what you think morality is other than a set of rules some group of people somehow agree to follow together. However it doesn't really give any idea as to what those rules ought to be. Morality also is usually about a different sort of rules than a game of scrabble's rules. It would seem strange to say I am immoral for my house rules for scrabble.
Ginger Rogers didn't do anywhere near all the moves that Astaire did, as anyone who's watched more than a few minutes of them dancing knows. The old cliche about her doing "all of it but backwards in heels" is, ironically, another example of exactly the same unskeptical wishcasting that you rightly call out regarding scientific-research findings.
Interesting, thanks. I'll admit that I've never seen their movies; it's just a nice metaphor.
For what it's worth, I first heard the Ginger assertion made by Ann Richards, then Texas Governor (during her failed reelection against George W. Bush), as part of her feminist mythology. I didn't believe it then, as I had read how much work Fred and Hermes Pan, his choreographer, put into the dances long before Ginger came on to the set. The point of the meme (sorry to be anachronistic) is not whether it is true but as a useful point of reference for this piece. In that context, I think the meme works. Also, in other fields, such as the natural sciences (I'm a geophysicist), the work that supports one's preferred paradigm (which underscores your funded research project) is going to get your recommendation for publication, while you may jump through hoops to find objections to that manuscript which could sink your project. At the receiving end of such gymnastics my response has been to reexamine my research, usually find something I had missed before while completely rewriting the work, publishing it elsewhere, and, if it sinks somebody's project, be blissfully ignorant (although I'm still bugged about the initial treatment). Science, whether natural or social, is very human.
On point, Paul. I’m of the opinion that publishing research results tends to be beneficial even when the results are uncomfortable or when there is a potential for harm. But I can’t help wondering if my opinion is situational.
Your example of the retraction of the Nature Communications article is a good one. There is clearly a potential for harm created by publishing the results, but what about the harm from suppressing the results? Suppose we continue to assign female mentors to female scientists in the unwitting belief that it is better for them? Or, more importantly, because we refuse to acknowledge a difference between assigning a male versus female mentor, we’re not studying why the difference exists and how to correct it?
On the other hand, I could envision a scenario where a group, in trying to show that there are no statistically significant differences in intelligence between races, inadvertently shows that there are. Do they publish? Unlike the previous example, there is arguably no benefits to society or science in their results (at least, none that I can think of), and the potential for harm is extraordinary. I’m afraid that if I’m a reviewer of their paper, I might suggest not publishing.
Your last example is a lot like the question of whether a doctor should kill one organ donor patient in surgery so he can save 5 with his organs. Yes, if you imagine the doctor could do so with no risk of ever being discovered it's a hard question -- in the real world it's easy because the harms that would result in people distrusting the medical system in the case the doctor gets caught far outweigh the benefits.
Ultimately, the value of most scientific publication derives from it's ability to shift what people believe (no point publishing into the void) and if you don't believe troubling findings would be published if true then you don't get much information from the scientific literature in the first place.
Reading the literature has convinced me (eg the very nice Stanford study on traffic stops) that blacks are generally treated worse by the police (of all races) and a number of other important things. But the fact that journals published results challenging the claims about differences in rates of fatal shootings was equally important to me being persuaded so I knew it wasn't true that they'd have refused to publish a devastating counter argument. However on some issues I am starting to distrust the scientific record for exactly that reason.
In other words the harmful stuff needs to be published because if it's not we'll figure it out and stop trusting it all.
Counterpoint- if there is a statistically significant intelligence gap between races, isn't that important to know? And isn't knowing that it exists the first step in understanding why it exists? What if, hypothetically, one race was being systematically exposed to some intelligence-reducing factor (say, lead in water pipes)? That would mean the intelligence gap was something we could actually ameliorate- unless of course we collectively plug our ears and hum by suppressing those findings for fear of harm.
To steelman the other side, I think what they would argue is that before publishing results which are going to fuel harmful attitudes one should meet some much higher burden of both proof and reason to publish. In other words, you wait untill you are relatively confident of some offsetting benefit.
But this misses the fact that the second people realize you are playing this game you bring about the harm you were hoping to avert -- after all finding out that some claim might not be published even if we kept finding evidence for it is a reason to increase confidence in that claim.
This recent article about climate scientist Patrick Brown provides a good account of his experience of the dynamic you’re describing and his attempt to stay oriented towards the full picture…
https://grist.org/science/patrick-brown-profile-climate-scientist-criticized-study/
I follow him and Roger Pielke Jr. for exactly the purpose of checking the overall tendency of climate journalism towards more alarmist accounts of the science.
I came to post that Grist profile but Jason got there first...
One thing that I would add to buttress your point in the conclusion as to the desirability of truth seeking institutions is that we have so few out there in the world! Besides science, how many institutions do we really have which strive (ideally) to incentivize truth-maximization? There aren’t that many.
That’s why it’s so important I feel to keep ideology out of science. This is true even if you think ideology is super important. There already are so many institutions out there dedicated to maximizing ideological aims, let’s not make science one of them, otherwise we run into the danger of running out of any institution which incentives the search for the truth, and that would be disastrous. Surely even the most ideologically committed person would agree that we should have at least one institution out there dedicated to discovering truth, so let’s keep truth-warping incentives out of science.
If we lived in a world where most institutions besides scientific ones were boring “just the facts please” types of social organizations dedicated to truth-maximization, and ideology was a dirty word, then maybe it might make sense to promote ideology at the expense of truth. But we don’t live in that world.
This is great, and receives all the more legitimacy (as per the article!) coming from someone who (I think) is generally fairly liberal. It's a shame that the necessity of this sort of rational evaluation of evidence (which would always be necessary, not just in response to a particular political climate) isn't more widely understood. I imagine we do it intuitively in many contexts.
As an outsider, I wish there was more talk about these sorts of issues from principled people. It seems like whenever someone does attempt this, it becomes their whole "thing", they become less principled/lose themselves to fighting a larger culture war and their criticism loses its legitimacy (I think Jordan Peterson is a decent, though perhaps especially odd, example of this). If the "minority of professors" you mentioned who are more ideologically driven is indeed a minority, then the majority should be doing a better job of being explicit about how they think these issues should be handled. Otherwise, presumably, the minority dictates the attitudes and standards of the field as a whole.
I'm having trouble articulating this in detail, but I think you get idea.
I agree with all that. Many people, including me, hate getting into culture war issues because they want it to take over their lives and identity.
Wonderful piece, Paul! I will definitely be assigning this to my students and sharing it with a lot of people.
Good article. The reforms I would like to see involve a clear acknowledgement that truth and activism are not the same thing, and are often in conflict. Perhaps universities could do more to establish a wall of separation between truth/knowledge and activism by establishing dedicated schools of Activism, and moving the various 'studies' programs into that.
So... in conclusion, you hate freedom ? ;-) Seriously, great article. I know you are primarily an academic, but you write in such an accessible writing style that I wish more people would adopt from that world.
The much diminished belief in the plausibility of the NY Times, CBS, etc. over the last decade is the same story with a much bigger audience. It’s like drinking 5 martinis. You feel great tonight, not so good tomorrow morning.
When it comes to unconscious bias surely one of the most contentious areas is pro- or anti-Semitism. We in the UK have discussed this a great deal, in particular when the Labour Party was led by Jeremy Corbyn and the party's enemies used the label of antisemitism to attack them.
I am neither a Labour supporter not Jewish, but I found this attack unfair. Although in the process of observing this debate, I learnt how easy it is to slip into antisemitic tropes.
The other day I added what I felt to be an innocuous observation, to a Substack discussion to the effect that 22% of Nobel prizes are awarded to people.of Jewish extraction.
The moderator removed my post!
Had I in some way slipped into an anti- or pro- Semitic faux pas?
Somebody hasn't read Ibsen's The Wild Duck. ;)
guilty as charged!
Well, if you're into 19th century Norwegian drama, it's certainly a go-to. I bring it up because Henrik Ibsen was, for most of his career, a "truth-at-all-costs" sort of guy. His play An Enemy of the People concerns a doctor who discovers that the water at his town's new spa is contaminated. He wants, reasonably, the truth to come out, but the political pressure against doing so mounts, and he quickly becomes - well, the title.
Ibsen softened his view in later life. The Wild Duck, a late play, deals with a young man who is determined that the truth come out about his family, and damn the consequences. The consequences are predictably awful.
I recoil against the "truth....but managed truth" attitude that prevails in a lot of the academy (if you think it's bad in the sciences, I recommend not looking at the humanities). But I understand its origins and rationale. The development of academic disciplines - and the modern university - coincided with hegemonic cultural and scientific racism. That "truth" was/is used as the blunt cudgel of repression can't invalidate "Truth." But it can give us a moment or two to think if what we're about to publish might be adding a few more footpounds of pressure to the boot on somebody's neck.
I very much like the idea of a "Ginger Rogers" test, but if next week Verso published "The Bell Curve: The Sequel" I'm afraid I would find little edifying in the ensuing conflagration.
Abolish peer review.