How To Be An Agnostic

How To Be Human

of such experiments, namely that human moral sensibilities
are just more intense, or perhaps refi ned, versions of primate
moral sensibilities. But these monkeys, at least, may well not
display moral behaviour. They just know what they like. There’s
a moral break between us and them. In a paper for the scientifi c
journal Nature, biologist Johan Bolhuis and psychologist Clive
Wynne, put it like this: ‘A close look at many of these studies
reveals, however, that appropriate control conditions have often
been lacking, and simpler explanations overlooked in a fl urry of
anthropomorphic overinterpretation.’
The scientists will fi ght on. But the wider point for us here is
that the evolutionary story that underpins this kind of natural-
ism, and the ethical speculations that follow from it, are far from
secure. The science is likely to change. And if it’s overly relied on,
the Faustian pact will come back to haunt us: with no offence to
the monkeys, it’ll be reductive of our humanity. We will sell our
moral soul for the sake of a deluded scientifi c certainty.
To state the obvious, though it’s often overlooked, the human
predicament is always more complicated than fi rst meets the
eye. ‘There is indeed much talk about the relevance of all this
for understanding morality,’ Frith continued with reference to
empathy, though making the wider point too. ‘I believe the new
science may well help us to understand people’s feelings about
morality and how they choose when confronted with moral
dilemmas. It may well help us to understand why people feel that
some actions are more moral than others, but it does not help us
to decide whether some actions are more moral than others.’
But if it’s really quite straightforward to show that science
can’t provide us with a basis for ethics, something that people
have known about at least since Socrates, then why are there
still projects determined to demonstrate otherwise?

A scientifi c basis for ethics

The worry that lies behind the desire for a new ethics is a per-
ceived failure of the way we’ve done ethics until now. The old