When Science Goes Offside
Date: May 22, 2007
Time: 6:52am est

Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'offside' as "not in the proper position for play." In the world of sports, the term generally names a special kind of foul incurred when one or more players transgress the opponents' area on the field, engaging in play ahead of the ball or puck.

The world of sports is not the only place where one can incur an offside foul.

Players in the arena of ideas can do so transgressing each other's respective field of knowledge. One area in particular today-the broad interdisciplinary field of neurophysiology and the philosophy of mind-often merits an intellectual offside call.

I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago when I read a column by Lee Hotz, science writer for The Wall Street Journal . Hotz reflected on a new trend in neuroscience: the quest to map what some would call the "neuro-anatomy of moral judgment." From Harvard to Caltech, neuroscientists believe they are hot on the trail of figuring out how humans are "wired for morality."

Recent research has found, for example, that interruption to the normal functioning of the right prefrontal cortex of the brain seems to inhibit certain kinds of emotional responses (such as empathy) which, in turn, are believed by these researchers to play an important role in the process of normal moral reasoning. With normal function, the average person finds it difficult-in an experimental test session-to embrace the prospect of killing an innocent person in order to save the lives of others (as for example, when presented with the possibility of release from captivity for himself and a dozen fellow hostages if only he would pull the trigger and kill another hostage). Inhibit proper functioning of the right prefrontal cortex, however, and those moral "inhibitions" go out the window.

"Bringing medical tools to bear on moral questions," wrote Hotz, "cognitive scientists are invading the territory of philosophers, theologians and clerics."

Invading territory, indeed.

The scientific offside does not consist, however, in neurobiologists attempting to add to our understanding of how the brain relates to mind and morality-nothing wrong there, and it's all very fascinating. Neurobiologists run afoul, however, when their drive is not merely to contribute to a whole of knowledge, but to reduce entire fields of human understanding (in this case moral knowledge) to "nothing but" the stuff of neurological function.

I have no particular knowledge that such was the motivation of any of the scientists highlighted in the Hotz article. But I have had sufficient enough exposure to the world of cognitive theory, philosophy of mind, and evolutionary biology to know all too well that this is often precisely the motive at work.

The field is imbued with a generalized fixation on the idea that brain function, and nothing but brain function, will one day explain away just about everything-most especially that (ever troublesome) realm of morality.

The champions of this idea would have us conclude that morality-not withstanding the inexorable place it has in our lives and in society, trans-culturally and throughout the whole of human history-is ultimately explainable in empirical terms (arrays of neuron firings and chemical exchanges at neural synapses) and little or nothing more.

This is typical of a field which prides itself on the "nothing but" reductions.

Historically such reductions have, indeed, been valid at times: speculations about a geo-centric solar system were proven to be nothing but speculations about a heliocentric solar system; conjectures about "phlogiston" turned out to be, in reality, conjectures about the properties of oxidation (otherwise known as combustion); and "caloric fluid" turned out to be nothing but the average kinetic energy of particles (otherwise known as temperature).

On such historical precedents, certain philosophers of mind, cognitive theorists, evolutionary biologists and neurophysiologists have based their hopes of explaining away any number of heretofore common facets of the human experience, such as consciousness, desire, intentionality, and, to be sure, morality.

Not only do these thinkers hyper-value the place and role of scientific knowledge in human affairs, they fail to admit the Quixotic nature of attempting to reduce and explain away irreducible features of our human experience. When Galileo explained away the geo-centric solar system, he had to bracket a whole history of human subjective prima-facie experience-all of which at the time must have seemed extraordinarily counter-intuitive. History has correctly shown time and again that our subjective experience is certainly not infallible, and that the truth about things often requires us to set-aside prior perceptions.

But when the object of a scientific endeavor becomes that of explaining away human subjectivity itself -(consciousness) and the related dimensions of inter-subjectivity, desire, intentionality, volition, the call of conscience and the like-there is no such thing as bracketing human subjectivity in order to get at what these things "really are in themselves." Bracket consciousness, intentionality, and morality, and you have bracketed off the very object you intended to explain in the first place.

Aside from this philosophical objection to such an endeavor, perhaps most of us see through such pretensions rather quickly with a good dose of common sense. The brain certainly has an impact on morality-have no doubt. But anyone who has ever been admitted to the sanctuary of another person's conscience knows evidently that there's a whole lot more going on in there besides a bunch of neurons firing, or misfiring.

Perhaps this too is why, when confronted with the musings of learned persons about the "potentially licit" uses of human beings for utilitarian ends-fetuses and PVS patients for the harvesting of organs, human embryos for the testing of new drugs-we suspect there is more amiss than a faulty right prefrontal cortex. Science does not have the corner on the market of "true knowledge" about "what is real" in the world. We expect science to continue being a key contributor to the broader domain of the truth of our human existence, while respecting the many other valid domains of human knowledge-each domain carefully avoiding offside violations.

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Fr. Thomas Berg is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.