Of course not, as we have often noted in these pages.
James Davison Hunter’s and Paul Nedelisky’s Where the New Science of Morality Goes Wrong is a great primer on the subject. Their take down of Sam Harris is especially good:
The new moral scientists sometimes provide certain examples that they think illustrate that science has demonstrated (or can demonstrate) that certain moral claims are true or false. A favorite is the health or medical analogy. Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris, for example, employs the health analogy to argue that science can demonstrate moral value. A bit more circumspect than some who use the analogy, he recognizes that he’s assuming that certain observable properties are tied to certain moral values. Harris puts it this way:
Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value health. But once we admit that health is the proper concern of medicine, we can then study and promote it through science…. I think our concern for well-being is even less in need for justification than our concern for health is.… And once we begin thinking seriously about human well-being, we will find that science can resolve specific questions about morality and human values.12
Harris makes two assumptions—first, that well-being is a moral good, and, second, that we know what the observable properties of well-being are. Yet he doesn’t see these assumptions as problematic for the scientific status of his argument. After all, he reasons, we make similar assumptions in medicine, but we can all recognize that it is still a science. But he still doesn’t recognize that this thinking is fatal to his claim that science can determine moral values. To make the problem for Harris more vivid, compare his argument above with arguments that share the same logic and structure:
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Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value the enslavement of Africans. But once we admit that slavery is the proper concern of social science, we can then study and promote it through science. I think our concern for embracing slavery is even less in need for justification than our concern for health is. And once we begin thinking seriously about slavery, we will find that science can resolve specific questions about morality and human values.
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Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value the purging of Jews, gypsies, and the mentally disabled from society. But once we admit that their eradication is the proper concern of social science, we can then study and promote it through science.
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Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value a prohibition on gay marriage. But once we admit that such a prohibition is the proper concern of social science, we can then study and promote it through science.