Slate - Science won't tell us what to do about climate change, but it can make the controversy worse.

A dangerous idea has taken hold in modern politics, and the sooner it is discredited, the better. The idea is that political disagreements can be resolved by science. Its basic logic seems sensible: As good children of the Enlightenment, we should turn to science to establish the facts about problems such as climate change before deciding what policies to implement. Yet the types of things that scientists are good at figuring out don’t have much to do with the types of things that politicians need to decide.

The article makes a fair point about exact climate change research not being a necessary precondition of policy making, but we could figure as much just by using elementary decision theory. I take it that the larger argument being made here is that “science is value neutral but to make decisions means to prioritize values, so political considerations should be (given the state of our knowledge at this point) primary.” I have a couple of different reactions to this.

First, the crack about “good children of the Enlightenment” brings to mind the modernist dream of finding a way of reducing values to facts. Think, for example, of Rawls’ veil of ignorance. Rawls wants us to say that it’s an objective fact that anyone behind the veil would choose to be born in a liberal society, therefore that we ought to choose liberal government is an objective fact. It’s objective because this is what anyone (rational) would choose. We should do it because it’s the objective thing.

Of course, it’s pretty obvious that the veil of ignorance argument only has force to you if you already accept the central tenets of liberalism (there’s no one Good; everyone should be happy; etc.; etc.). So, one might say the high modernist ideal of values emerging from facts is dead. Instead we must descend into the post-modern pit in which different people have different values and there’s no commensurability between them. At best, given a set of values, there might be a way of telling more and less optimal way of fulfilling those values apart (so says the non-radical version of post-modernism advocated by the article). At worst, there’s just what one likes and the only way to argue for anything is through rhetorical violence that conceals the coursing of power relations (more radical post-modernism). (See Stanley Fish questioning the existence of “secular reasons”.)

I think though that I’m not quite on board with modernism or the post-modernisms. I would say the problem with the initial formulation is that science is not value neutral. By this I don’t mean that the high post-modernists are right to suggest that science is just about covering up power relations. Yes, it does that too, but that’s not all it does. What I want to argue is that science and other means of investigating facts are based on and reinforce certain moral preconceptions. However, at the same time, learning the facts also us to evolve iteratively (hermeneutically) our moral understandings in an open ended way.

I take it that the old pragmatists and secular humanists were optimistic about a similar process of interchange between fact and value, but I think they tended to put fact in the driver’s seat. My own inclination is to put value in the driver’s seat. In particular, the feeling of “beauty” in the larger sense is what drives us forward. The process might be explained something like this:

1. Someone suggests a new ideal. This ideal is beautiful and so is immediately appealing.
2. We attempt to make the ideal real.
3. In the process of realizing the ideal, we learn things about how the world can be made to fit the ideal.
4. We start to see however that in certain cases the ideal needs to be slightly shifted to fit the facts.
5. We continue to adjust our facts and ideals, but it seems increasingly unlikely that they can be made to fit.
6. The accumulation of new facts, however, has made it apparent to some farsighted genius that by shifting our ideal in a radical new direction, a whole new vista will open up.
7. Go to step one.

How does this relate to climate change? Essentially, the facts of environmental damage started to become apparent in the ‘60s thanks to use of the mindset of scientific progress. What it is increasingly being revealed, however, is that there is a new ideal more beautiful than just flying cars and capsule diners. The new ideal is still evolving, but we can call it, “sustainability.” As more people are turned on to the new ideal of sustainability, it is giving them new places to look for facts and opening up new avenues of political action, etc., etc. (It also leads to a lot of yuppy posturing, like urban chickens and whatnot.)

So, how do we get more people to agree that we ought to be working with sustainability as the goal rather than rocket boots? The post-moderns would say that we can only do this through rhetoric and power. I say however that the goal is finding the beauty in the new ideal and making that beauty more apparent by presenting the facts that this ideal allows us to uncover. I will show you a hyperbolic way.