How To Be Humanyou are but the outworking of your DNA – a reproductive
machine driven by selfi sh genes – and even if you insist it’s just
a metaphor, the metaphor is likely to take over and shape your
understanding of life.
Policies for happiness
Not everyone engaged in science is a follower of such scientism,
of course. However, in terms of public discourse, you can see that
it holds great sway. There’s a struggle on, with some arguing that
science’s contribution to moral matters should not be ancillary
but axiomatic. Even for those who sense the dangers of Atiyah’s
Faustian pact, a weaker version of scientism, sometimes called
naturalism, might well appeal. While appreciating that full-blown
scientism is overblown, naturalism places great store on empirical
discovery, saying that it overshadows other forms of knowledge
as a way to certainty and truth. But Socrates’ challenge was aimed
at naturalism as much as scientism and is still pertinent today.
Consider as an example some of the hopes and expectations
people have for contemporary neuroscience. Anyone who reads
a newspaper will be familiar with reports of brain scans reveal-
ing the secrets of anything from consciousness to altruism,
often reported as if no one before had anything much to say on
the subject. Wild headlines are often misleading, of course (as
headlines about genes being discovered for this or that are too).
However, there is more substantial evidence that the philosoph-
ical mistake identifi ed by Socrates is being made again: science
is being treated as if it can tell us how to live.
A case in point is the science of happiness. This new discipline
stems from the identifi cation of regions in the brain that are
associated with good and bad feeling. Place individuals in brain
scanners, and instruct them to perform certain tasks, and you can
show that there is a part of the left frontal lobe that fi res when
good feelings are experienced and a part of the right frontal lobe
that fi res when bad feelings arise. The result has been interpreted
by some as of key interest not only to brain scientists but to moral