http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2009/12/1061 Mon, 06 Feb 2012 01:32:57 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 hourly 1 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2009/12/1061/comment-page-1#comment-103 Darwin’s Disciples Today « Public Discourse Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:19:06 +0000 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/?p=1061#comment-103 [...] 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. Carson Holloway is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author of The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy and a contributor to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question. This article is the second of a two-part series. Read the first installment here. [...] [...] 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. Carson Holloway is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author of The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy and a contributor to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question. This article is the second of a two-part series. Read the first installment here. [...]

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