Abstract
What should the reader expect from a book entitled Science and Christian Ethics? The title could suggest various different things. Some readers might expect ethical casuistry about controversial areas of science like gene editing or chemical weapons research. Others might anticipate a discussion of how science can inform Christian moral reasoning, or a response to scientific challenges to theological ethics.
Paul Scherz's fascinating and important book does none of these things, but instead offers a Christian ethical analysis of the practice of science. The book begins with a survey of three serious problems confronting contemporary science. The first is the ‘reproducibility crisis’: a worryingly high proportion of published studies prove unreproducible because of fraud, carelessness or bias affecting the original research. The second is the lack of genuine innovation. The third is the problem of retention, as many early-career scientists turn their backs on the struggle to find jobs and secure the necessary research grants.
These problems are widely recognized and have attracted various institutional responses, such as policies and codes of practice to promote research integrity. While Scherz does not dismiss such measures, he believes they will prove ineffective, because the crisis has deeper roots in what he calls ‘the rise of the scientist entrepreneur’ (p. 37). Since the 1970s, widespread changes in policy, law and institutional culture have driven scientists to become entrepreneurs who support their research by commercializing it: taking out patents, attracting commercial funding, forming start-up companies to profit from their discoveries, and so forth. The wider context of this entrepreneurial shift is the rise of neoliberalism, so that the scientist entrepreneur has become a distinct ‘character’ (in the MacIntyrean sense) of a neoliberal social order. Various distorting effects on the practice of science follow. For example, scientists are encouraged to be competitive rather than collaborative, to tailor their research to the needs of the market rather than genuine scientific innovation or the common good, and to see knowledge and nature as resources for use and profit. Scherz frames the basic problem as one of character, virtue and moral formation: through their training and apprenticeship, young scientists are formed as entrepreneurs following in the footsteps of their teachers, mentors and exemplars.
If this is correct, then the heart of an effective response must be a different moral formation that enables scientists to resist the entrepreneurial ideal. The central chapters of the book explore two alternative approaches to such formation. One is an Aristotelian-MacIntyrean model, in which virtuous character is formed in moral communities through practice, habit and the availability of moral exemplars. Scherz, however, finds this ill-suited to addressing the problem of entrepreneurialism in science because scientists' most formative moral community is the scientific community, itself deeply shaped by the entrepreneurial ideal. Indeed, he argues that since its beginnings, modern science has been characterized by the denial of teleology in nature and a reductionist and instrumentalist view of the natural world, and these features helped prepare the way for the rise of entrepreneurialism. (I was surprised, incidentally, that Francis Bacon did not feature in this genealogy of reductionism and instrumentalism, given his importance in advocating the expulsion of teleology from natural philosophy and the subjection of nature for human benefit.) A scientific formation in which ‘this reductionist, anti-teleological worldview becomes embodied in the character of the researcher [will predispose] her to accept the commodification of the world’ (p. 81).
In preference to an Aristotelian model of moral formation, and guided by Foucault's later work, Scherz turns instead to a Stoic approach. In this model, moral transformation is fostered by individuals' ‘care of the self’ through practices such as ascetic disciplines and meditative techniques. He even makes the general claim that this Stoic model is more congenial to Christian spirituality than the Aristotelian, despite the latter's dominance in religious ethics (p. 114). Having established his preference for the Stoic approach and defended it against various criticisms, in the final part of chapter 5, Scherz offers an account of the care of the self needed to ‘transform the character of the entrepreneurial scientist’ (p. 143). This account draws on Max Weber's essay ‘Science as a Vocation’, but the main source is the French Dominican Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life.
Chapter 6 offers an extended account of truth-telling as a concrete example ‘of how the care of the self forms qualities essential to the contemporary scientist’ (p. 152). After a depressing but all-too-familiar survey of the strategies used by corporations to suppress or distort inconvenient scientific truths, Scherz develops an account of the virtue of parrhesia, ‘the courage to speak the truth in situations of danger’ (p. 151), as a philosophical and Christian virtue. He offers some reflections on how this might work for Christians in science, drawing on various examples including Catholic and scientific opposition to twentieth-century eugenics. (In this connection, it seems odd to see Julian Huxley—Vice-President and later President of the Eugenics Society—included in a roll-call of scientists who opposed eugenics. If he has earned a place in this roll of honour, it might be helpful to have an explanatory footnote indicating how.) The final chapter, ‘Subjectivity, Truth, and Theological Anthropology’, is more wide-ranging, addressing Christian criticisms of the Foucauldian practice theory at the heart of Scherz's account, and arguing that Christianity offers a substantive ethic that can fill out the formal structure of practice theory.
As a developmental biologist turned moral theologian, Scherz knows whereof he writes when analysing the crisis in contemporary science. As a lapsed molecular biologist myself, one of the things I particularly appreciated about his book was the solid grounding of his analysis in his own scientific experience and his insider's knowledge of biomedical research. The book has many other virtues besides. The argument is set out lucidly and coherently, and each step is developed with care and rigour, in dialogue with an impressively wide interdisciplinary range of scholarship. The resulting account makes a persuasive case for Scherz's analysis and proposed remedy, and leaves the reader in no doubt about the importance of the issues addressed in the book.
In the context of this positive appreciation, I have a few critical questions and reflections to offer. First, what is meant by ‘science’? With a few exceptions, most of Scherz's examples are drawn from his own research experience and the world of biomedical research: the book could almost have been entitled Biomedical Science and Christian Ethics. While this solid grounding in the author's own scientific practice is (as I have already suggested) a real strength, science is not just one thing. I found myself wondering how different the analysis and argument might have looked had they been written by a geochemist, meteorologist or astrophysicist. No doubt some aspects would be much the same, and indeed might extend beyond the sciences: the problem of poor-quality work resulting from the pressure to publish, for example, is hardly unknown in the humanities. Others, such as the corrupting effects of the publication management process in clinical trials (pp. 20–24), seem much more discipline-specific.
Second, it is worth asking how deep Scherz's analysis cuts. At the heart of the problem, he maintains, is a reductionist and anti-teleological view of nature that has a long history in modern science and is embodied in much day-to-day scientific practice. He recommends practices of the self that will enable individual scientists to reject this reductionist and anti-teleological stance, and so help them to resist the influence of entrepreneurialism in the scientific community. Yet, as his historical analysis shows, this view of nature has been central to the practice of science throughout modernity; maybe it is an essential feature of how modern scientific methodologies work. If scientists train themselves to resist this view, will they effectively be training themselves to stop being scientists? Scherz evidently does not think so, and I hope he is right, but his analysis does seem to open up this troubling question.
Third, in his preference for individual over communal moral formation, does Scherz downplay too far the importance of the Church in the moral formation of Christians who are scientists? Of course, he does not deny the Church's part in this, and indeed offers some insightful reflections on the struggle of living a scientific vocation between the communities of science and Church (pp. 148–49). But at times the Church's role seems to be acknowledged rather cursorily. Perhaps there is more to be said about the value of communal Christian practices of worship, preaching and service in forming the moral vision and character that will equip Christian scientists to resist reductionist and entrepreneurial worldviews.
Finally, given the emphasis Scherz places on the importance of practices of the self for resisting entrepreneurial character formation, I found myself wanting a more fully developed account of what those practices look like. Chapter 5 offers a few examples, such as the ars moriendi and the Stoic practice of praemeditatio malorum or the ‘anticipation of evils’ (p. 141), but I think that if I were still a practising scientist who had read this far and become convinced by the argument, I would want to know more about how I was supposed to practise the necessary care of self. The fullest guidance offered in the book is drawn from Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life, but this seems to me a problematic guide. Scherz acknowledges Sertillanges' misogyny in a footnote (p. 147 n. 131), but the problem, I think, goes deeper: the summary of Sertillanges' vision of the intellectual life (p. 144) suggests a relatively privileged, characteristically male way of life, whose freedom from distractions and cares depends on the hidden labour of others. I am not yet persuaded that Sertillanges has as much to offer as Scherz suggests to those pursuing a scientific vocation in our time and trying to balance it with their other commitments, responsibilities and callings.
As I have indicated, these critical comments and questions should be read in the context of a very positive appreciation of this book's quality and importance. I have already begun recommending it to colleagues, doctoral students and scientists with an interest in ethics. It is a valuable contribution to a neglected aspect of the literature on science, theology and ethics. For anyone concerned about the malaise of contemporary science diagnosed by Scherz, it will be troubling and challenging, but essential, reading.