Two hundred years ago the news of a famine in China created no duty for Englishmen. They could take no possible action against it. To-day the telegraph and the steam-engine have made such action possible, and it becomes an ethical problem what action, if any, is right. Two hundred years ago a workman generally owned his own tools. Now his tool may be a crane or steam-hammer, and we all have our own views as to whether these should belong to shareholders, the state, or guilds representing the workers.
Science affects our whole ethical outlook by influencing our views as to the nature of the world—in fact, by supplanting mythology.
Agnosticism, being a refusal to make up one’s mind at all, is surely the very opposite of prejudice, which is the making-up of one’s mind before hearing the evidence.
Shall I buy a glass or a pottery bowl for my flowers? I turn to the occupational mortality statistics, and find that, though the mortality of glass workers is above the average, that of potters is still higher. Other things being equal, I ought to buy glass. If we knew enough no choice would be trivial, and it is our duty to acquire the knowledge which will enable us to moralize our everyday actions, both by the study of available statistics and by encouraging statistical inquiry elsewhere.
Does science reduce ethics to mere calculation?
A study of the effects on the mind of brain injuries makes it fairly certain that consciousness depends not on any one cell, which might be at the seat of the soul, but on a very large number. Yet every attempt to find forces other than those of ordinary physics operating within the organism has been a complete failure, and the success of modern medicine, and animal and plant breeding, are at least pragmatic justifications of that point of view. The mutual relations of the atoms constituting the cell seem also to be describable in terms of physics and chemistry. Nevertheless, life, organic unity, and consciousness are facts a good deal more certain than the existence of cells and atoms. It is clear that aggregates of a certain kind do manifest qualities which we cannot observe in their components.
The doctrine of emergence, which is widely held to-day, is that aggregates may have qualities, such as life or consciousness, which are quite foreign to their parts. This doctrine may conceivably be true, but it is radically opposed to the spirit of science, which has always attempted to explain the complex in terms of the simple, and has on the whole succeeded. We do not find obvious evidence of life or mind in so-called inert matter, and we naturally study them most easily where they are most completely manifested; but if the scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately find them, at least in rudimentary forms, all through the universe.
If the co-operation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the co-operation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte called a Great Being.
But just as, starting from the basis of chemistry, biochemists are gradually explaining the phenomena of life, so from a basis of psychology our descendants may build up a scientific ethics which may perhaps be at the same time a scientific theology.
They made unlimited demands on the human spirit, and it does somehow respond to such demands. I doubt if any morality which does not do so will get the maximum response from man.