How To Be An Agnostic
So wrote the philosopher Dominique Janicaud in his book, On
the Human Condition. His aim was not to knock the science but
to point out the dangers of being led by utopian talk of a post-
human future, nourished by a myth of ethical conundrums
solved. The fear is that the ethical naivety that can exist in the
scientifi c worldview leads us into a future that, far from improv-
ing our wellbeing, will actually diminish us.
In fact, life’s complex: we are essentially many-sided. And
we know that really. Think of a game of football. Physics can
tell you a lot about the dynamics of the ball, but it can tell you
nothing about the dynamics of the team; you need psychology
for that. How much more do you need when it comes to life.
The issue at stake is that while science is good at what is the
case, it can tell us little about what ought to be the case. To
assume otherwise is known as the naturalistic fallacy, which is
the tendency is to support your pre-existing moral values with
your scientifi c evidence of choice. Hence good liberals quote
research on empathy, more or less reinventing the golden rule
about doing well by others. But the golden rule doesn’t actually
follow from empathy alone: it is a moral imperative precisely
because it is often quite unnatural, irrational and unpleasant to
defer to strangers and enemies.
What would work better, because it would refl ect our nature,
would be to take ourselves as objects of ‘complex and diffi cult
elaboration’, as the philosopher Michel Foucault put it. We must
invent ourselves, not in the sense of just making it up, but by a
treating ourselves like ‘obscure texts’ to be worked upon, whose
secrets may be discovered. The implication is that we today need
more of the mystery about what it is to be human, and it’s only
when taking account of that, that we may build an ethic that is
both intellectually satisfying and humanly enriching. It’s what the
Christian revolution brought to our culture, though its resources
feel rather depleted now, at least to agnostics. So if you’re serious
about the good life, how are you going to go seriously about it?
Virtue ethics is a vital start. But there’s this troublesome spiritual
dimension too. We’re coming back to the question of religion.