Comments Elsewhere

There aren’t many things in this world that Leo Strauss is right about, but I think the following may be one of them: the alleged problem between the scientific worldview and ethical norms has less to do with science per se than it has to do with the philosophical victory of mechanistic over teleological accounts of nature in the language used to discuss scientific discoveries. It becomes much less difficult to square the idea of moral facts with your conception of science and the natural order if the language that you feel entitled to use in descriptions of the natural includes terms like “purpose” and “end” and “form of life”, than if you are methodologically committed to burning those kind of terms out of the language wherever you can find them. If there is a distinctively human form of life and virtues can be explained in terms of the ways of being and kinds of activity that are appropriate to that form of life, then morality becomes much easier to fit into something that you might call a naturalist worldview. (See, for example, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, or more recently Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness.)

Of course, it’s probably no coincidence that the same people who revolutionized mechanics, chemistry, etc. in the early modern period were also the people leading the philosophical charge against teleology and in favor of mechanism. So the victory of mechanism over teleology probably has had some concrete historical pay-offs. But of course that’s not the same thing as being true, and anyway the fact that teleological language was once abused and as a result (in the context of a rather complex set of historical, political, and intellectual factors) science stagnated, does not mean that it would have similarly harmful consequences today.