Some readers will recall the case of the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, former dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University, who was publicly exposed in 2011 for faking his data in several dozen published papers about human behavior that had made him famous – and who, after being caught, decided to publish a book about his con, detailing how and why he’d done it. Uncommon Descent ran a story about the case (see here), and another story about how it was exposed (see here), while James Barham discussed it at further length over on his blog, TheBestSchools.org, in an article entitled, More Scientists Behaving Badly. A story about the case appeared in The New York Times last week: The Mind of a Con Man, by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee.
The case has become something of an academic scandal, not merely because of the fraud perpetrated by Stapel, who doctored his data in at least 55 of his own papers, as well as 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students, but also because it cast the entire field of behavioral psychology into disrepute. In their final report on the case at the end of November 2011, the universities of Groningen and Tilburg found that “a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data” was what enabled Stapel’s fraud to go undetected for so long. While the report laid the blame for the fraud solely at Stapel’s feet and exonerated his students of any wrongdoing, it went on to blame Stapel’s peers, journal editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals for letting him get away with his fakery for a period of several years.
During his interview with Yudhijit Bhattacharjee for The New York Times, Stapel recalled his first fateful decision to doctor his research data, after a psychology experiment that went badly wrong:
The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me.
… It took a few hours of trial and error, spread out over a few days, to get the data just right.
He said he felt both terrible and relieved. The results were published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2004. “I realized — hey, we can do this,” he told me.
Stapel also professed contrition for his past misdeeds in the interview, as he attempted to explain his motivations for committing academic fraud:
Right away Stapel expressed what sounded like heartfelt remorse for what he did to his students. “I have fallen from my throne — I am on the floor,” he said, waving at the ground. “I am in therapy every week. I hate myself.”…
Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.
For my part, I hope that Stapel is as sorry as he declared himself to be, in his interview, and I have no wish to accuse him of insincerity. God alone knows the true state of his mind; God alone can judge him. It seems, however, that many people have questioned the sincerity of Stapel’s apology, following his recent decision to publish a book (called Derailed) describing how he pulled off his con. Among the cynics is Professor Jerry Coyne, who, in a recent post (April 27, 2013) over at Why Evolution is True, wrote:
He seems to mistake explanation for apology, and I think his only regret is that he got caught…
Stapel gives a lot of excuses but his apologies sound lame…
I don’t blame the system nearly as much as I do Stapel here. I think his students are also at fault: how can you put your name on a Ph.D. dissertation if you didn’t collect the data yourself?
…Yes, Stapel became depressed, but it seems more because he was found out, not because he committed fraud and ruined the careers of many of his students.
Coyne on why hard determinism entails that we are not morally responsible for our actions
What I find curious about Professor Coyne’s comments is that he blames Stapel for his actions, despite the fact that he is a “hard” determinist who denies the very notion of moral responsibility. In an article for The Chronicle Review entitled, You Don’t Have Free Will (March 18, 2012), Coyne spelt out with admirable lucidity the consequences of his deterministic philosophy:
So what are the consequences of realizing that physical determinism negates our ability to choose freely? Well, nihilism is not an option: We humans are so constituted, through evolution or otherwise, to believe that we can choose. What is seriously affected is our idea of moral responsibility, which should be discarded along with the idea of free will. If whether we act well or badly is predetermined rather than a real choice, then there is no moral responsibility — only actions that hurt or help others. That realization shouldn’t seriously change the way we punish or reward people, because we still need to protect society from criminals, and observing punishment or reward can alter the brains of others, acting as a deterrent or stimulus. What we should discard is the idea of punishment as retribution, which rests on the false notion that people can choose to do wrong.
In an exchange last year with “soft” determinist philosopher Russell Blackford, who thinks determinism is compatible with moral responsibility, Coyne discussed Blackford’s hypothetical case of a child who drowns in a pond while he stands by and does nothing to help the child. Are the child’s parents entitled to blame him, even if he insists that he couldn’t have done otherwise? Blackford certainly thought so: he argued that if he had wanted to, he could have saved the child, and for this reason, the parents’ anger against him would have been entirely justifiable, in this hypothetical scenario. Coyne pointed out (with perfect consistency) that if Blackford’s wants were determined by his genes and his environment, then there was no meaningful sense in which he could have done otherwise, and that therefore he was not to blame for his failure to save the child:
Yes, of course if you change the “desire-set” construed in that way, then your actions would have been different. But, Russell, your desire-set is fixed by your molecules: by your genes, physiology, and the determined environmental factors that impinge on them…
What it appears to boil down to … is whether or not the parents of the drowned child have a right to reproach Blackford for his dilatory and selfish behavior…
But in what sense are they “quite right” to complain that Russell didn’t save their child? They certainly feel aggrieved about this, for such feelings are evolved and powerful, but in my view Russell had no “moral responsibility” to save the child: he could only do what he did.
Coyne went on to add that the parents could express disapprobation at Blackford for his negligence in failing to save the child:
Yes, the parents could complain about what he didn’t do, and that, indeed, may affect not only Russell’s future behavior, making him more altruistic, but influence others to act more altruistically in the future. (Nobody — even pure determinists — deny that social approbation or disapprobation can influence people’s future behavior.)
But as Coyne explained in a follow-up response to Blackford (April 9, 2012), what made no sense, in his view, was their expressing moral indignation:
But he [Blackford] later argues that one can rightly blame someone for failing to save a drowning child. Note the word “rightly,” which assumes not just responsibility (which is okay with me, as blame changes future behavior, both of the “blamee” and onlookers), but moral responsibility. Russell certainly favors the idea of moral responsibility. But if he sees difficulty in understanding how one can be responsible for one’s own character (and he’s right: how could we be?), then whence the concept of moral responsibility?
To recap: Professor Coyne believes that we are not morally responsible for our actions, and that righteous indignation at people who engage in anti-social behavior is a misplaced emotion, which makes no sense as each of us is a biological automaton. We can express disapproval, and even “blame” people for their actions, if our aim is merely to prevent future recurrences of this behavior on the part of the individual concerned – or other individuals who might be inclined to imitate him. But what we cannot do, if we are consistent determinists, is express moral outrage at the offending individual.
Coyne’s inconsistency
Coyne’s latest comments in his recent post (April 27, 2012) on the scandal involving Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel thus appear to be totally at odds with his declared views on determinism and free will, as he vents his spleen on a respected academic who faked his research data. There is an undeniable tone of indignation in Coyne’s remarks about Stapel: “He seems to mistake explanation for apology, and I think his only regret is that he got caught,” and he adds: “I don’t blame the system nearly as much as I do Stapel… Yes, Stapel became depressed, but it seems more because he was found out, not because he committed fraud and ruined the careers of many of his students.”
Professor Coyne seems to be implying here that Stapel should have thought about how his acts of deceit would impinge on the lives of others, and that he deserves blame for not having done so. “Should have” implies “could have.” But if Stapel’s thoughts and desires are the product of his genes and his environment, then in what sense could he have done otherwise than what he did, and how can he be blamed (in any moral sense of the word) for failing to advert to the effects that his act would have on other people? On Coyne’s account, Stapel’s failure to think of the needs of others ultimately reflects either a failure in his upbringing or a flaw in his genome. He couldn’t help that, so why reproach him for it? I can see why Coyne would want to reprogram Stapel’s stunted psyche, but I cannot for the life of me understand how Coyne, as a hard determinist who denies moral responsibility, could complain about Stapel’s thoughtlessness in committing acts which “ruined the careers of many of his students.” If Stapel couldn’t have refrained from committing those acts, then it makes no sense to say that he shouldn’t have done them. All that Coyne can consistently say is that acts like Stapel’s shouldn’t happen, insofar as they harm the interests of others and of society as a whole. But that’s simply tantamount to saying that society should try to prevent such acts from occurring – which is quite different from saying that the perpetrators of such acts shouldn’t have done them.
Why Charles Darwin would not have blamed Stapel for his actions
Coyne’s inability to justify the feeling of moral indignation which we commonly experience reflects a failing, not only in his own deterministic philosophy, but of Darwinism in general. Few people are aware that Darwin was a thorough-going determinist who denied the notion of moral responsibility as far back as 1837, some 22 years before the publication of his Origin of Species.
In his Notebook C: Transmutation of species (2-7.1838), Darwin espoused a mechanistic account of the human mind. The mis-spellings and grammar and punctuation errors are Darwin’s:
Thought (or desires more properly) being heredetary.- it is difficult to imagine it anything but structure of brain heredetary,. – analogy points out to this.- love of the deity effect of organization. oh you Materialist! …
Why is thought, being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? – It is our arrogance, it our admiration of ourselves. (Paragraph 166)
In his Notebook M [Metaphysics on morals and speculations on expression (1838) CUL-DAR125], which was marked “Private”, Darwin recorded his decision not to go public with his materialism. He resolved:
To avoid stating how far, I believe, in Materialism, say only that emotions, instincts degrees of talent, which are heredetary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock. (Paragraph 57)
In addition to being a materialist, Darwin was also a consistent determinist. In his other metaphysical writings from that period (c. 1837), Darwin made it clear that he did not really regard human beings as morally responsible for their good or bad choices. He also held that criminals should be punished solely in order to deter others who might break the law:
(a) one well feels how many actions are not determined by what is called free will, but by strong invariable passions — when these passions weak, opposed & complicated one calls them free will — the chance of mechanical phenomena.— (mem: M. Le Comte one of philosophy, & savage calling laws of nature chance)…
The general delusion about free will obvious.— because man has power of action, & he can seldom analyse his motives (originally mostly INSTINCTIVE, & therefore now great effort of reason to discover them: this is important explanation) he thinks they have none.—
Effects.— One must view a wrecked man like a sickly one — We cannot help loathing a diseased offensive object, so we view wickedness.— it would however be more proper to pity them [than] to hate & be disgusted with them. Yet it is right to punish criminals; but solely to deter others.— It is not more strange that there should be necessary wickedness than disease.
This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything. (yet one takes it for beauty & good temper), nor ought one to blame others.—
(See Darwin’s Old and USELESS Notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points written about the year 1837 & earlier, pp. 25-27. For original transcription, see Paul Barrett, et al., Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844, New York: Cornell University Press, 1987, p. 608.)
A true disciple of Darwin, then, would find it impossible to blame Diederik Stapel for his acts of academic fraud. On Darwin’s view, a man like Stapel is simply “a diseased offensive object,” whom we should pity rather than blame – even if we feel the need to punish him, in order to deter others from imitating his example.
While he may have concealed his philosophical views from the public at large, Darwin was scrupulously honest in his scientific research. He believed that science is a quest for Truth with a capital T, and he also believed in carefully setting forth the objections to a theory before proceeding to refute them. On this point, his views diverged sharply from the recently expressed views of Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, who revealed in his New York Times interview with Yudhijit Bhattacharjee that it was his purely pragmatic notion of “truth” that enabled him to rationalize his deed:
Several times in our conversation, Stapel alluded to having a fuzzy, postmodernist relationship with the truth, which he agreed served as a convenient fog for his wrongdoings. “It’s hard to know the truth,” he said. “When somebody says, ‘I love you,’ how do I know what it really means?” At the time, the Netherlands would soon be celebrating the arrival of St. Nicholas, and the younger of his two daughters sat down by the fireplace to sing a traditional Dutch song welcoming St. Nick. Stapel remarked to me that children her age, which was 10, knew that St. Nick wasn’t really going to come down the chimney. “But they like to believe it anyway, because it assures them of presents,” he told me with a wink.
Apparently Stapel defines truth as “whatever works.” And it was this pragmatic notion of “truth” that enabled Stapel to rationalize his original act of academic fraud, as he acknowledged in his interview:
The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me.
The Darwinist conception of truth
What Stapel did raises an important ethical question, however: is there a fundamental contradiction between Darwin’s conception of truth with a capital T and Stapel’s pragmatic notion of truth? In particular, can a Darwinist consistently condemn falsifying research data, or for that matter, concocting bogus arguments, in order to persuade people that Darwinian evolution is true? I am not asking here whether Charles Darwin would have approved of such acts of deceit; I think we can all agree that he would have condemned them unequivocally. The question I am asking is whether Darwin’s philosophical worldview could legitimize deceit (the telling of small untruths) in the service of a “higher truth.” And I think the answer is “yes.” My grounds for this conclusion have to do with the nature of truth itself, as Darwinism (and more generally, scientific naturalism) conceives it.
Darwinism is wedded to a notion of methodological naturalism, which Darwin originally espoused because he believed that the only good scientific explanation is one which explains everything in terms of physical laws, which enable scientists to predict effects from causes, in a deterministic fashion. Darwin set out the conditions that he believed a good scientific explanation must satisfy in a short essay which he jotted down while he was reading selected passages from Dr. John MacCullough’s book, Proofs and Illustrations of the Attributes of God (London, James Duncan, Paternoster Row, 1837). For those who are interested, here’s the reference: Darwin, C. R. ‘Macculloch. Attrib of Deity’ [Essay on Theology and Natural Selection] (1838). CUL-DAR71.53-59. Viewers can read it here at Darwin Online.) Darwin’s essay contains a telling passage in section 5, which succinctly summarizes why Darwin believed that appeals to “the will of God” explained nothing:
N.B. The explanation of types of structure in classes — as resulting from the will of the deity, to create animals on certain plans, — is no explanation — it has not the character of a physical law /& is therefore utterly useless.— it foretells nothing/ because we know nothing of the will of the Deity, how it acts & whether constant or inconstant like that of man.— the cause given we know not the effect.
Darwinism’s implications for ethical truth
What, the reader will ask, does this have to do with the moral legitimacy of lying in the cause of science? The implication follows once we realize that on a naturalistic worldview, there can be no autonomous domain of objective ethical truths. Ethical principles are simply rules which allow us all to get along. Few Darwinists have articulated this point more perceptively than Professor Jerry Coyne. As he put it in a post entitled, Uncle Eric on scientism (December 12, 2012) in response to fellow atheist Eric Macdonald, Coyne took issue with Macdonald’s expressed belief that there are some actions which are objectively wrong. Coyne answered that while he also condemned certain barbaric actions as wrong, he could do so only in a subjective sense:
Now I agree, of course, that throwing acid in the face of Afghan schoolgirls for trying to learn is wrong. But it is not an “objective” moral wrong — that is, you cannot deduce it from mere observation, not without adding some reasons why you think it’s wrong. And those reasons are based on opinions. In this case, the “opinion” is that it’s wrong to hurt anyone for trying to go to school. In other words, Eric claims that moral dicta are objective ones, on the par with the “knowledge” of science.
But such dicta are not “truths,” but “guides for living”. And some people, like the odious Taliban who perpetuate these crimes, do disagree. How do you prove, objectively, that they’re wrong? You need to bring in other subjective criteria.
The problem with “objective” moral truths is much clearer in less clear-cut cases. Is it objectively true that abortion is wrong, or that a moral society must give everyone health care? You can’t ascertain these “truths” by observation; you deduce them from some general principles of right and wrong that are, at bottom, opinion. (Of course, some opinions are more well-founded than others, and that’s what philosophy is good for.)
In other words, Eric is committing here the very sin he decried (as I recall) in Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape: he is saying that there are scientifically establishable truths about ethics. And if that’s true, then let Eric tell us what those truths are — without first defining, based on his taste, what is “moral” and “immoral.” Let him give us a list of all the behaviors he considers objectively immoral.
Now, I maintain that there is no objective morality: that morality is a guide for how people should get along in society, and that what is “moral” comports in general with the rules we need to live by in a harmonious society — one with greater “well being,” as Harris puts it. A society in which half the inhabitants are dispossessed because they lack a Y chromosome is not a society brimming with well being, and I wouldn’t want to live in it. And yes, what promotes “well being” can in principle be established empirically. But that still presumes that the best society is one that promotes the greatest “well being,” and that is an opinion, not a fact.
Could a consistent Darwinist morally condemn deceit in the cause of Darwinism?
Which brings us to the question: Is a society which indoctrinates children with deceptively simple or fallacious arguments for Darwinism (say, arguments of the kind described in Dr. Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution) doing a bad thing? On Coyne’s logic, a Darwinist cannot consistently condemn such behavior. Here’s why.
If you are totally convinced that:
(i) truth is a scientific notion;
(ii) truth can only ascertained by either logic or observation;
(iii) Darwinism is objectively true in a scientific sense of the term; and
(iv) a society which recognizes the reality of Darwinian evolution, is “better” – or at least, works better – than one that doesn’t,
then it seems to me that the logic of engaging in deceptive persuasion, in the cause of Darwinism, is inescapable.
I am not referring here to a scientist publishing data which could impede future scientific research, or that would be liable to be exposed, bringing science itself into disrepute. Let’s suppose instead that the deception is more subtle: say, a published study that serves to “refute” a popular scientific objection to Darwinism (e.g. is there enough time available for evolution?), and make creationists or Intelligent Design proponents look silly; or for that matter, continuing to publish, in children’s science textbooks, an old argument for Darwinism that’s been trotted out for decades (e.g. Haeckel’s embryo drawings) but which scientists now know to be false. If you passionately believed in the truth of Darwinism, and if your notion of truth were a naturalistic one, then I do not see how you could morally condemn such actions.
And I haven’t even mentioned the propaganda for the materialistic view of mind that pervades high school and university science textbooks. When was the last time you saw one that gave a fair hearing to scientific arguments for dualism, or exposed the fallacies (which I have written about here) in “scientific” claims that free will is an illusion? And when was the last time that students were exposed to rebuttals of fallacious arguments for materialism – despite the fact that even materialist philosophers such as William Lycan have acknowledged that there are no good arguments for materialism? Once you accept materialism, of course, then Darwinism becomes a much easier pill to swallow.
But it is materialism itself – a fundamentally false notion that clouds one’s entire view of the world – which is the ultimate deception. The story of Santa Claus pales in comparison.
P.S. For those readers who may have been wondering what I’ve been doing for the past month or so, I should explain that I’ve been working on a reply to a recent online essay on humans and animals, that’s somehow turned into a 30-chapter book! My apologies for the long delay. My book should be ready in a week or two.