Indeed, on virtually every issue we encounter, we find arguments started (and, curiously, never finished) by statements like 'studies have shown...' or 'Leviticus states...,' statements meant to be conclusive and authoritative, but that nevertheless only generate more arguments from other authorities. While we are wise to rely significantly on scientific expertise for questions of fact about the natural world--like 'to what extent is climate change happening, and to what extent is it anthropogenic'--we are living in an historical moment in which we regularly and, I think, shortsightedly confuse questions of fact with questions of value. In other words, that the scientific consensus on climate change provides an answer to a question of fact is actually not enough to address the associated questions of value: what sacrifices are we willing to make, for whom, how, and why, in light of this fact?
Of course scientific experts or authorities can and should guide us on addressing these followup questions of value; but we must understand that when it comes to value, authorities can only guide. Indeed, no one would be content to accept the dictates of an authority for a question of value when the authority disagrees with our own position. We only appeal to authority when it backs up what we already think or want to think. Otherwise, we rely on other ways of determining our values, like affinity, emotion, or reason.
Consider, further, questions of value for which scientific authority is perhaps more difficult to apply: is this politician a trustworthy and moral character? Is it ethical to slaughter animals for food? Should abortion be legal? Indeed, experts and authorities can tell us a great deal about whether a statistically significant number of people think a politician is trustworthy and moral, whether certain animals are likely to experience consciousness in such a way that we might not want to raise them for food, or whether a fetus can experience pain. But these guiding facts are not solutions to these value problems. We may want to factor in considerations like how politicians might manipulate public opinion (and public opinion studies), whether it's possible to know animal consciousness anymore than to know the experience of another human, or whether the rights and autonomy of the mother mitigate our concerns about fetal pain.
Our crisis of value lies, then, with the very fact that we have largely abandoned rigorous and expert ways of making value distinctions. The unintended and counterintuitive consequence of our desire to drag scientific, quantitative, and 'big data' methods of inquiry into value debates, not as guides, but as authorities, is that we have sterilized our ability to reason through value problems. Hence, the more aggressively our proponents of Scientism promote the authority of science over questions of value, the more thoroughly they push reason and critical thinking out of these debates. The more frequently we turn to scientific studies not as information with which to help make complex value distinctions, but as trump cards that replace reasoned arguments, the more we court that other authority--religion--to fill the void. This is how we arrive at absurd 'debates' between science educator Bill Nye and religious science denialist Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, conversations that amount to little more than one side stating a fact backed by the authority of science, and the other side stating a belief backed by the authority of religion. When it comes to actually expressing reasoned justifications for our positions, we falter when we can't rely on some authority to back us up.
Prominent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has recently promoted a similar idea, what he calls 'moral dumbfounding': that we intuitively or instinctively take moral positions on things like why incest is wrong, yet when pressed to explain why, we struggle. If you ask your friends and family why they think incest is wrong (or any number of value questions), I expect you would find, as Haidt has in his work, that people would absolutely struggle to provide reasons. Yet as Paul Bloom argues, it's not that we don't have the capability to reason this way--that we're simply irrational machines programmed instinctively to take moral positions--but rather:
the existence of moral dumbfounding is less damning that it might seem. It is not the rule. People are not at a loss when asked why drunk driving is wrong, or why a company shouldn’t pay a woman less than a man for the same job, or why you should hold the door open for someone on crutches. We can easily justify these views by referring to fundamental concerns about harm, equity, and kindness. Moreover, when faced with difficult problems, we think about them—we mull, deliberate, argue. I’m thinking here not so much about grand questions such as abortion, capital punishment, just war, and so on, but rather about the problems of everyday life. Is it right to cross a picket line? Should I give money to the homeless man in front of the bookstore? Was it appropriate for our friend to start dating so soon after her husband died? What do I do about the colleague who is apparently not intending to pay me back the money she owes me?Here I think Bloom is correct to point out that when it comes to 'everyday' value distinctions--the kind for which it would be odd and maybe even suffocating to look to an authority to make our decisions for us--we do apply reason and deliberation.
The big question, then, is why we don't apply reason and deliberation when we form positions on larger and perhaps more consequential questions (like abortion, gay marriage, animal rights, environmental policy, etc.). In some ways this question answers itself: these questions are difficult, and it's too often easy to find an authority on each of them, ever ready to take up new followers. Our third kind of authority--experts in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who tackle questions of value with rigor, evidence, reasoned argument, and (I wish) clear and careful articulation--become lost in this perpetual exchange between fact and belief. Perhaps this is because we're very much in the business of teaching how to approach questions of value more rigorously and reliably, rather than what to think or whom to grant authority. But one need not be a humanities scholar to acknowledge or benefit from a more rigorous approach to questions of value. Every semester I tell my students that at any given moment they should be prepared to deliver a thorough, clear, logical, and evidence-based articulation of everything they believe, every political stance they take, every value they hold. The point of this exercise is to prompt them to examine their beliefs not through me as an authority, but in their own minds, for themselves. The great conservative fear of liberal humanities professors indoctrinating students in the classroom is premised on the idea that students can't critically evaluate the positions of themselves and others; that they can only accept value distinctions from figures of authority. But if such passivity is really a problem, it's less a problem of the personal stances of faculty than the wider culture of argument from authority rather than reason and evidence.
As technologies that track our preferences and make our decisions for us emerge as yet another kind of authority that relies on deference rather than active thinking and reasoning (hence 'automated reasoning'), we find ourselves with fewer and fewer inclinations (if not opportunities) for tackling questions of value. From quotidian decisions about which movies to buy or which news will appear on our Facebook feed, to our authority-based denial of the ways in which larger political and policy issues require us to make careful value distinctions, we are becoming entirely too accustomed to the idea that we live in a post-value, post-ideological world, where everyone who agrees with us is a fact-based authority and everyone who disagrees is an 'ideological' person with 'bad data,' 'flawed studies,' or 'bias.' The only way out of this mess is to reclaim reason and critical discourse as ways of making value distinctions; which first requires us to acknowledge that value distinctions still exist between the authorities of fact and opinion.
