THERE'S A REASON AMERICANS REJECT SCIENCE:

Darwin’s disciples today: Political theorists of all hues claim that Darwin gives scientific credibility to their own theories. One of these is Peter Singer. (Carson Holloway, 28 December 2009, MercatorNet)

Why, we may wonder, have efforts to find political prescription in Darwinian biology so consistently foundered? I would suggest that the difficulty is inherent in the undertaking, and not merely the result of secondary errors in reasoning that future Darwinian political theorists might avoid. As John Dewey correctly observed, modern science, of which Darwinism is a part, emerged as a rejection of an older natural science concerned with the natural purposes or ends of things, and hence with what could be considered their natural flourishing. The founders of modern science thought this older quest had proven futile, and so they set out instead to acquire a humbler but more certain knowledge—knowledge of where things come from and what they are made of. Modern science has in fact achieved an impressive mastery in this realm, and its success has given it great social respectability.

It is understandable that we would be tempted to get the authority of modern science, including Darwinism, on the side of our preferred political positions. The attempt to do so, however, involves using scientific data to draw conclusions about matters—the just and the good—about which modern science expressly disclaims any pretensions to knowledge. Biological nature as empirically observed necessarily includes phenomena that we find good as well as phenomena that we think bad. Thus efforts to derive moral guidance from modern empirical science’s account of biological nature necessarily involve preferring, on non-scientific grounds, some aspects of nature to others. This results in the formulation of normative political theories, on both the left on the right, that claim a scientific status that they in fact only appear to possess. Such false appearances introduce not scientific enlightenment but philosophical and moral confusion into our public discourse, and so both liberals and conservatives would do better to resist the temptation to seek such “scientific” credibility for their policy recommendations.