Ethics and Epistemology in the Twenty-First Century.

Keith Ashman and Philip Baringer, eds. After the Science Wars. London: Routledge, 2001. 224pp. $25.95 (paper).

Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 187pp. $19.95 (cloth).

Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. 189pp. $24.00 (cloth).

Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. 416pp. $32.00 (cloth).

Jon Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and Secular University Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. l84pp. $24.95 (cloth).

Ullica Segerstrale, ed. Beyond the Science Wars. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 238pp. $19.95 (paper).

Robert Veatch, Transplantation Ethics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2000. 427pp. $65.00 (cloth).

Alan Wolfe, Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 256pp. $24.95 (cloth).

Alan Wolfe's Moral Freedom explores trends in moral thinking over the last quarter of the twentieth century and makes the perfect starting point for reflection on the state of morality that will characterize the twenty-first century. It combines Wolfe's own reflections with material drawn from polls and interviews. Concerned primarily with the moral outlook of contemporary America, Wolfe argues that "moral freedom means that individuals should determine for themselves what it means to lead a good and virtuous life by considering who they are, what others require, and what consequences follow from acting one way rather than another" (195). Wolfe's notion of moral freedom is based on an optimistic view of human nature that functionally denies the notion of original sin in its Calvinist and Freudian versions.

Wolfe recognizes the unsettling implications of moral freedom. Since individual decision-making is at the center of morality, everything seems to be up for grabs. Kant's categorical imperative and Durkheim's collective conscience would find little support among those Wolfe interviewed. Moral anarchy seems the likelier outcome. But the danger of moral anarchy is not as great as it might appear because Americans distinguish between "the freedom to choose how to live" and "the freedom to consider oneself unbound by moral rules.... The former, they usually insist, is something worth having. The latter, most of them feel, is something worth avoiding" (224). Anarchy and excess are seen as problems caused not by individuals but by institutions that have become morally corrupt. Americans follow Rousseau not Calvin and "do not think of themselves as escaping from society's obligations as much as they feel that society's institutions have escaped from them" (225).

Wolfe concedes that moral freedom, like economic freedom that led to a consumer society and political freedom that led to voter apathy, can lead to negative outcomes. But the twentieth century has habituated Americans to choice: "Once people are free to choose their cars and their candidates, they will not for long be satisfied with letting others determine for them the best way to live" (230). We cannot retrace the steps of the journey of the last century. The common framework that led to general agreement in matters of ethics and epistemology has long since disappeared. We are left with an ethics of choice and an epistemology of interpretation.

The emphasis on an ethics of choice began most decisively in the area of medical ethics. In the 1970s, the patient supplanted the doctor as primary decision-maker in medicine. Even though the doctor was the expert in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, the patient was the one most affected by any decisions about what to do. Therefore, the consensus was that the patient should be the one to make those decisions. Transplantation Ethics by Robert Veatch, one of the founders of this approach to medical ethics, exhaustively covers the religious and philosophical issues involved in organ transplantation. Veatch argues that religion enters into decisions because individuals who are shaped by religious values can bring them to bear on decisions about how to treat or not treat a medical problem. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses may refuse a transplant if it means the transfusion of blood because their religious beliefs preclude such a course of action. Veatch notes that the force of these religious beliefs in deci ding against a transfusion does not derive from religion but from the willingness of patients to commit themselves to those beliefs.

That is, religion enters the discussion through the exercise of patient autonomy.

Veatch's approach is also based on a suspicion of expertise. Not only is it inappropriate for doctors to make decisions for patients, the basis on which they do so -- their scientific expertise -- can be questioned. The ethics of choice has flourished in a period that makes interpretation more important than truth in developing an epistemology. And this is nowhere better noted than in the changing attitudes toward science during the last decades of the twentieth century. The Tuskegee experiments, which subjected many African-Americans to needless suffering in order to conduct scientifically questionable research, is a glaring example of science gone wrong. As a result of such excesses, science has come to be regarded more negatively during the waning years of the twentieth century. But this suspicion and distrust of science has its roots in earlier times.

Since the nineteenth century science has tried to drown out the voices of religion and the humanities in public policy debates. Based on its claim to expertise and its contribution to our well being, science assumed a position of privilege and authority. The resentment and envy engendered by science has been given a loud voice since the outbreak of the so-called Science Wars. Science has been attacked as an enemy of pluralism and diversity because it insists on ruling out nonscientific interpretations of reality. The disinterestedness and neutrality of science are more and more suspected and even discounted as hypocrisy by a confused and hostile public. These attacks come at a bad time. Research funding is down, while misuse of funds, plagiarism, and fraud are up. Many scientists blame the cutbacks in funding on these antiscience critics. Scientists have struck back at their critics, and the exchanges have been shrill. Its supporters insist that since science is the most rational and ethically disinterested means for attaining knowledge, it should be accorded respect and authority.

Read together Beyond the Science Wars and After the Science Wars give a fair account of the debates that make up the Science Wars. Beyond the Science Wars explains what is at stake and usefully distinguishes between weak and strong constructivism. Weak constructivism is the relatively uncontested position "that science is influenced by social factors" (8). A strong constructivist sees basic laws of science like gravity not as reflections of what is out there, but as cultural constructions; science is more of a postmodern interpretation of nature then a picture of the way things are. After the Science Wars argues that science is only one way of knowing and should not be privileged as the only way of knowing. Critics often refer to this as "demystifying science" by integrating "science into larger intellectual currents, institutional practices, and personal lifestyles" (183).

While Prometheus Bedeviled is an unabashed and vigorous defense of science, it also supplies powerful ammunition to critics of science. It reveals the extent to which science has assumed, at least from the point of view of scientists, cultural dominance. Norman Levitt believes "that science is an enormously strong and stunningly accurate way of finding out how the natural world works" (11). Furthermore, "if science is contradicted by other ways of knowing--religion for example--science should be believed in the absence of a mountain of contravening evidence" (12). Levitt arrogantly maintains "that only the scientifically trained are intellectually mature enough to take political responsibility" and that "to speak of any knowledge claim as 'unscientific' is to disparage it" (307). He baldly insists "that science must automatically be declared the outright winner whenever it comes into conflict with contradictory belief systems" (276). He flirts with fascism when he demands that society "must recognize the nece ssity for order, hierarchy, and authority, both within science and in the interactions of science with the wider culture, if science is to function well in its own terms and maximize its usefulness to everyone else" (309). With a friend like Levitt, science doesn't need enemies.

In a sense, the power of science comes from what Marjorie Garber in Academic Instincts calls the discipline envy that results from differences between disciplinary fields. Science gave birth to the first disciplines or specialized areas of knowledge in the early nineteenth century when chemistry, physics, and astronomy emerged as distinct areas of science. Nonscientific fields emulated the scientific trend toward specialization, and soon there were disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. This happened because these other areas envied the success of science and wanted to share in its prestige. As Garber explains: "The prestige and power of individual disciplines vary over time. New disciplines develop; others fade away. Envy, or desire, or emulation, the fantasy of becoming that more complete other thing, is what repeats" (67). The breakdown of knowledge into disciplines meant jettisoning any unified framework that could both connect the various disciplines and resolve disputes between them.

A useful account of how the disciplinary structure of knowledge achieved dominance and how science pushed the unifying framework of religion from the center to the margins is found in The Sacred and the Secular University. The authors, Jon Roberts and James Turner, point out that various disciplines and subdisciplines emerged over time to accommodate the research interests of scientists so that science eventually achieved a "disciplinary autonomy" (25). The development of disciplines and the compartinentalization of the intellectual life grew out of the tacit agreement of the partisans of science "that the key to doing science was to think small: to ask questions for which there were determinate and publicly verifiable answers" (36). Thinking small led to "disciplinary isolation" (86).

Disciplinary specialists "started to erect methodological fences hard for nonspecialists to scale. They declared that knowledge does not form a whole but, on the contrary, properly divides itself into distinct compartments, and that unique methodological principles and scholarly traditions govern life within each of these boxes. The implication, seen only dimly by many academics even in the early decades of the twentieth century, was that a specialist in any one discipline could work satisfactorily in another only by a strenuous feat of reacculturation. This emerging urge to repudiate the unity of knowledge both prefigured the more radical antifoundationalism of the next fin de siecle and mirrored the nineteenth century's larger flight from universalism" (87).

For a time, the humanities tried to replace the framework supplied by religion that has been shattered by the disciplinization of knowledge originated by science. But in the end the disciplinary impetus led the humanities to lose their universalistic ambitions and become part of the disciplinary structure of knowledge. Today the humanities have eschewed any pretensions to special insights into the meaning of life. Postmodernism in its various guises shuns grand narratives because all meaning is an interpretation; to insist on anything more is to enter the realm of fantasy, a topic taken up by Jonathan Lear.

With religion marginalized and with science made to carry more epistemological and ethical weight than it can bear, many are at a loss to find the meaning of life. In Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life, Lear speculates that pursuing the meaning of life is like pursuing a fantasy. Lear invokes Plato's famous image of the cave to show how people are "trapped by fantasies that captivate and mislead them" (163). One of the fantasies is "that there is a remainder to life, something that is not captured in life as it is so far experienced" (163). If you are lucky, like Socrates, you can escape from the cave and share your good fortune with those still trapped by fantasies. By contrast, Freud saw that the cave -- human fantasies and aggressions -- could not be escaped. The postulation of a world outside was at best heuristic, not metaphysical. There is nothing outside of the cave or of life. To think otherwise is to pursue a fantasy.

In the end, we are, as Sartre proclaimed, condemned to be free. Epistemologically, we create disciplinary narratives that offer certainties limited by the assumptions of those disciplines. Science, which had much to do with creating a discipline-based epistemology, has been subject to criticisms based on the recognition that disciplines are not grand narratives and have limited range. Science's earlier attempt to substitute its grand narrative for that of religion was thwarted by the postmodern recognition that all knowledge is a construct, even scientific knowledge. As Wolfe points out, we cannot return to earlier days without repudiating the twentieth century. Twenty-first-century individuals will not give up moral freedom, nor will they give up epistemological interpretation. On the basis of these books, unless something causes a resurgence of interest in grand narratives, it looks as if the twenty-first century will be devoted to developing an ethics and an epistemology of limited range and persuasiveness . It will be an interesting century.

James E. Giles is a member of the Editorial Board of CrossCurrents.