Truth and Justice ( A Bit of Philosophy)
First of all I want to begin by encouraging everyone to please comment on what you read. This website is about establishing a thoughtful community of politically engaged people and helping them to dialogue about how best to effect change in the world around (UK, Lexington, Kentucky, etc). Communication is the key here.
On to today’s post… The other day I was talking to my brother and he suggested that my criticisms of the sciences (biology in particular) were motivated by a concern for justice rather than truth. The job of the scientists, he said, is to get the facts and this for them is a passion. We should try to convince politicians not to misuse the facts and help to make sure that the statement of the facts isn’t sexist, racist, etc. But, ultimately we shouldn’t criticize them on the grounds that their work is unjust or promotes injustice. Scientists don’t promote sexism or racism and they don’t start or fight wars even though their ideas may be used for that purpose.
Now the first thing to say is that this is historically untrue. Oppenheimer was trying to design an atomic bomb and his research in “pure physics” was ultimately intended to be put to this use. Genetics work may have an even worse background. Psychology in America was funded and developed by the CIA after WWII. So, as a matter of fact, scientists have often (if not generally) done their work as a means to some nefarious end. But, of course, everyone objects: “Those were different times and different people. They didn’t know they were sexist or even what sexism was. They didn’t understand why war and racism are bad. But we do. So the scientists of today are able to do ‘pure science.’ Sure they used to get the facts only in order to do bad things with them. But now, we know better.”
All I can say is look around you. Listen to the news. Pay attention to your parents and neighbors. Pay attention to yourself. Are you so sure that we “know better?” I’m pretty positive we don’t. Researchers at UK still do a great deal of work for the US military and on UK’s campus right now we allow the military to have a building and teach classes (filled with propaganda I’m sure) about war and how to fight it (all the while discriminating openly against gays and lesbians). These things simply cannot be thought of as aberations.
My other major problem with the idea presented by my brother is the thought that truth and justice are distinct. The entire tradition of philosophy (with the notable exception of 20th Century Analytic Philosophy which models itself on some scientific ideal) thinks otherwise. Truth and knowledege have for the most part been thought of as states of the human being in which she takes on the form of nature. This doesn’t mean simply that she says how the world really is, rather she embodies personally and in her life the harmony, order, and balance found in nature. Traditionally, this harmony, order, and balance has been thought of as justice. A person is unjust when he is ignorant and, therefore, lacks justice - the proper harmony or balance of the soul.
In “modern” philsophy, this tradition is reworked so that truth and justice come to have more to do with freedom than harmony. According to Descartes, for instance, a person lacks knowledge precisely to the degree that she is controlled by passion and desire rather than intellect and led therefore to make judgements about matters concerning which she is uncertain. Truth is certainty - the state of being in which a person only makes judgements about matters concerning which there is absolutely no doubt. In the German Romantics all the way through contemporary Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, truth is only expressed in art - the highest form of human freedom in which the fetters of society are thrown off. In this whole tradition, justice is identified with freedom.
The moral of the story: Don’t be convinced by technocrats who claim to be out for the “truth.” Many of them have other aims entirely. Science cannot “purify” itself of the social world in which it exists. And, I don’t think this is something that we should even hope for. A more human hope would be that “science” could ally itself with the real truth which is freedom, peace, and justice.
Brandon