the human tendency to apply the labels “good” and “bad.”, A Human Strategy, Matt Berry, aphorism 269
269
We consider science to be amoral. It does not act according to self-interest. It sees what it sees regardless of whether it is “Good” or “Evil.” Its observations are grounded by solid reasoning and not distorted with human vanity, fear, or fancy. There is no place for the loss of pride when the scientist is in error, nor for the abundance of pride when his experiment is proven correct.
However, science is still a type of morality and can never be fully severed from the human tendency to apply the labels “good” and “bad.” Consider: if empirical science precludes the “Ideal,” it must then preclude “perfect objectivity” as well. In fact, the very rigidity of the scientific discipline implies our imperfection in this regard — not to mention our method of “trial and error.” We are subject to sensory distortion, human drives, “paradigm shifts,” cultural borders, etc. Next, consider that the scientist is still a herd animal ... a member of his own community, the members of which are more or less competent. Some manage to transcend their herd’s presumptions better than others. Consequently, there is “Good” science and “Bad” science. Some scientists are condemned; others are praised. As scientists, we wish to “better” ourselves and so on. Thus, our community dependent science will always be a moral process. No matter what our assertions to the contrary, we blunder, and it is never long before “Professional Ethics” or “Scientific Method” becomes a backdoor through which the inherited morality makes its entrance in order to “save” or “correct” ... even “to interpret the data for the rest of us” — for our “scientific community” is at stake.
In all honesty and in respect for the term, “Morality,” it is impossible for a human to be amoral — since to be human is to presume “Good” and “Evil” as a consequence of one’s inheritance (yet hopefully with the simultaneous examination of that inheritance). Morality is a human reflex, and reflexes, by definition, are unavoidable. Changing the words “Good and Evil” into “right and wrong,” “beneficial and harmful,” “strong and weak,” “scientific and unscientific,” or whatever two opposites are chosen, is more of a repression of the moral phenomenon than an elucidation. Besides, such name-switching resembles, too keenly, the aforesaid attempts to “correct,” “save,” and “interpret” scientific findings.
We have worn the clothing of a superficial “morality” for so many millenniums that it is now a cause for shame to strip ourselves in public. The natural recognition has become a humiliating recognition. There is some irony here: for only when I value an “objective amorality,” do I experience the humiliation. I do not rejoice in the loss of a false morality. Rather, I suffer from the loss of godly peers and feel my distance from the beasts closing ... yet I have already admitted to the impossibility of attaining the “objective viewpoint”! Such a “perfect amorality,” along with the foisted ideal, is a human delusion. On the other hand, my cultural presumptions, too, are delusions.
What remains in reality? What do I really want? When I value my own experience ... my own condition, when I appeal to nothing beyond myself ... why do I not rejoice at my personal communion with nature? Why prefer a glittering but false morality to a plain but true one? Human nature. We want our morality to “let us out of the prison of the real” ... and not to affirm this reality.
There can be no legitimate good without honesty, and in all honesty, we cannot reach farther than our own experience. A “true” morality, then, can only be a private morality. Additionally, only morality is possible ... and this constitutes our problem insofar as we think of it as something either 1) External and social, like a debt passed down to us by our ancestors and toward which we must make our payments without question ... or as 2) Internal and private, something which we can actually experience ... something more than “objectively real” ... and certainly more than any conceptual equation.
A genuine Morality, even on this necessarily private level, can not alter its nature on our account, for Morality is in part our relationship with our own inexorable reality. “I am here to be worked upon,” as Emerson said. But this private morality is only completed by the development of navigational procedures and skills which have only now been made necessary. Just so, objectivity is not a realistic objective, though it serves as a convenient reference point. As a metaphor, the North Star is not a destination. It, in itself, is not even a direction ... until the human first takes his own position as the point of reference. This was the beginning ... when the human eye then fixed the star to one spot in heaven and thereby charted his world. What must I take as my reference point? “I am a machine.” Morality begins here ...