“The scientific account of what it means to be a person provides the conceptual underpinning for the modern commitment to individualism.” {Barry Schwartz}
Barry Schwartz, from The Battle for Human Nature (1987):
A century ago, a college education entailed a rather fixed course of study. One of its principal goals was to educate people into their communities of memory—to make them citizens, with common values and aspirations. It was the task of moral philosophy, a required course in the senior year, usually taught by the college president, not only to integrate the various fields of learning, including science and religion, but even more importantly to draw the implications for the living of a good life individually and socially.
This is no longer true. There is no fixed program of study. There is no required course in the senior year. There is no attempt to teach people to live the good life, for who is to say what the good life is? College professors teach what they know and hope that somehow each pupil will turn those lessons into a personal vision of the good life.
Furthermore, a significant part of what used to be taught as moral philosophy is now taught under a different name: social science. Social sciences like economics, sociology, and psychology hardly existed as disciplines a century ago. Today, they have a prominent place in every university. And the change from moral philosophy to social science is more than just a new name for an old subject. Along with the name change has come a change in content. Specifically, the moral component of moral philosophy has been removed. While moral philosophy attempted to teach people how they should live, what they should value, what roles they should play in their communities, social science teaches people how they do live, what they do value, what roles they do play in their communities.
This transformation, from moral philosophy to social science, [entails] a struggle between the language of science and the language of morality for hegemony in describing what it means to be a person. It is a struggle that the language of morality is losing. The scientific account of what it means to be a person provides much of the conceptual underpinning for our modern freedom of choice. It claims to have much to say about how people do live their lives. But it also claims that neither it, nor any other discipline, has much to say about how people should live their lives. Matters of “should” are very much up to the individual. Thus, the modern citizen experiences a very extensive, and very real, freedom of choice.
The task before us is to examine carefully the scientific account of what it means to be a person: the conflict between the language of science and the language of morality; the consequences of embracing the language of science; and the extent to which the language of science has earned our genuine allegiance. This examination is important because, increasingly, it is the language of science to which today’s college students must turn for lessons about how to live their lives. It is therefore critical to know what those lessons are, and whether they are the lessons that students should be learning.
Although we live surrounded by scientific-technological wonders, there is good reason to doubt the power of the language of science when it is turned to human affairs. The trail [today’s students] are on was largely blazed by their parents. And the first generation of truly liberated Americans appear not to have done too well with its freedom. As has been widely reported, many members of the first generation of liberated Americans are experiencing—no, have invented—a collective midlife crisis. Their jobs are not all they had hoped they would be. The material rewards of their jobs do not yield satisfactions that quite match expectations. Their marriages are coming apart. They are not enjoying the close, friendly relations with their children that they thought would be the product of modern, enlightened childrearing. Home is no longer, as it was for Robert Frost, “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” They feel disconnected from their communities and find themselves with many acquaintances, but few friends. They are distrustful of their political leaders and cynical about the moral principles for which their country stands. It is not so much that they are unhappy as that they are unsure. They don’t seem to know where they belong. They don’t seem to know that they are doing the right things with their lives. They don’t seem to know what the right things are.
How should society be organized? How should the resources of society be distributed among its members? How much should individual freedom be restricted, and in what ways? What is the extent of our responsibility to other human beings, and to the society to which we belong? What is the proper mode of human conduct, and how should it be instilled in people?
What these questions have in common is that they are all moral questions. They all involve figuring out how people, families, schools, communities, and states should act. They are all concerned with spelling out right and wrong, good and bad. A truly distinctive thing about human beings is that it is they, and only they, about whom it makes sense to ask moral questions. It doesn’t make sense to ask whether planets ought to revolve around the sun, whether plants ought to grow green leaves, whether bees ought to sting intruders at the hive. Planets simply do revolve around the sun, plants do grow leaves, and bees do sting. That’s all there is to it. But in the case of people, knowing what they do isn’t enough; we also want to know whether they ought to be doing it.
Unfortunately, like work, friendship, the family, and the church, college has fallen victim to the language of individualism. College professors have no clearer idea of what the good life is than the rest of society. They offer the language of science rather than the language of morality.
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