In confirmation of the view that there is no such thing as personal moral responsibility for one’s actions, one has only to shift from a commonsense context to the perspective of contemporary science. Generally speaking, in modern psychology and sociology, to say nothing of physiology and biology, notions like “free will” and “personal responsibility” are not employed at all; they make no sense in the context of a scientific explanation. Nor is this surprising. For while the older schemes of a rigorous, mechanistic determinism may not b compatible with many of he recent developments in quantum physics, we are still not justified in reintroducing concepts like “freedom” and “moreal responsibility” into the scientific domain.
Henry Veatch, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics
The natural sciences hold forth and are even held forth by politicians as the final authority on matters of knowledge. Only what they tell us can be known. What poets and mystics have to say can be enjoyed in private, but don’t try to impose their morals and insights in the public domain.
In this post, I want to suggest (perhaps to demonstrate finally, clearly, and once and for all in a later post) that this path is the way of folly and that it cannot possibly work.
My argument is not complicated. It is this.
The natural sciences as practiced today base their conclusions on what can be determined on the basis of materialistic assumptions. Materialistic assumptions cannot even raise the question of, much less discuss the application of, matters like truth, freedom, or morality, each of which must come from non-material concerns.
As a result, the materialistic assumptions that drive virtually every agency of the post-human world we inhabit have established a world that is post-truth, post-freedom, and post-morality.
Most particularly, I want to suggest that we cannot be free on the basis of the ideas that control our political discourse and that the hypocrisy that permeates it is an unavoidable consequence of a domain that cannot possibly be anything other than pretense and empty rhetoric because of the assumptions we have built it on.
In other words, we have seen the foundations of our liberties undermined by the natural sciences and the walls are about to collapse.
