Following Foucault, let’s use the word “spirituality” for this cluster of ideas: What is true (i.e., most actually real) is the same as what is most right and most beautiful. To know this truth requires being a better person; truth comes to one whose mind or soul is in an appropriate condition. In turn, perceiving the truth improves the perceiver.

Several modes of spirituality have been taught (and sometimes combined). In the ecstatic mode, the seeker loves truth, longs for it, and expects ecstasy from its attainment. In the ascetic mode, the seeker renounces ordinary desires and comforts to merit truth. In the diligent mode, the seeker labors for years at ritual or memorization–or literal labor–until rewarded with truth. In the mode of faith, the seeker ignores the evidence of senses and the pull of desires to believe in what is not directly known.

Seekers may be solitary or may benefit from community, but the spiritual seeker’s encounter with the truth is ultimately private and direct.

Although spirituality encompasses–and sometimes encourages–tensions, struggles, and paradoxes, the whole package is neat. Truth, goodness, and beauty cohere; improving the soul yields knowledge, which further improves the soul.

Now consider science, viewed as this cluster of ideas: There is a real world, and it is strictly a domain of causes and effects (“nature”) which is not moral or beautiful in itself. Goodness and beauty are our subjective categories. In seeking to know nature, we are hampered by biases. However, we can use impersonal techniques and tools, such as careful quantitative measurement, to counter our biases. Moral and aesthetic preferences are among the many biases that interfere with our grasp of nature if we don’t control for them.

Since the truth is replicable, it will be known just the same by a bad person and a good one. Instead of putting ourselves in maximally direct contact with the truth in order to improve or save ourselves, we should generally put instruments in direct contact with nature and review the data that they yield. (Instruments may be as simple as rulers or as elaborate as particle accelerators). The data should then be made available to as many people–and for as many uses–as possible. Whether these uses are good is not a scientific question, and possibly not an answerable one.

Are hybrids possible? Some famous scientists have testified to their own spiritual inclinations. Einstein is the most obvious example: “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe.” Such combinations shouldn’t surprise us, since both the spiritual and the scientific traditions are prominent and influential. The same person can be affected by both. Having a spiritual side may help some scientists to be happy and may motivate them to be devoted scientists.

However, other scientists are successful without being happy or are happily motivated by non-spiritual factors, such as fame, power, competitiveness, or even wealth. If spirituality correlates with scientific acumen, that is an empirical generalization, not a law–and it may not even be a valid generalization. Claims that science and spirituality are intrinsically or logically related are romantic and naive. Their logics (as described above) are incompatible. Some individual scientists manage to hold them together, but some individuals also combine kindness to family with cruelty on the battlefield, or love of country with love of money. We can contain multitudes.

Still, it is important to avoid the Hobson’s Choice of either science or spirituality. We need a robust discussion of what is right, both for individuals and for institutions and societies. That discussion is not helped by the widespread scientific premise that answers to the question “What is right?” are merely subjective.

This premise doesn’t damage the conversation as much as you’d expect. Plenty of people claim that moral beliefs are subjective and relative yet strongly endorse actual moral principles and exchange reasons about them. A student last semester wrote an impassioned paper in favor of affordable housing, and ended it: “Overall, what makes a policy ‘good’ is completely subjective–in this paper, however, I have argued that in my view, …” No harm done; again, we contain multitudes. But there is harm at a more institutional level, where we fail to invest in the normative disciplines and in public deliberation while we pour resources into applied science.

Science does have an ethic of its own, including the obligation to make findings public, the principle of blindness to scientists’ personal identities, and cosmopolitanism. The fact that actual science violates these principles does not invalidate them; it just means there is important work to be done.

But the ethics of science is insufficient. Even if science worked exactly as advertised, it would still have little to say about what makes a good life or a good society, particularly for non-scientists.

Here’s where spirituality offers resources. Especially important is its insistence that you probably won’t be good just because you know what is good, intellectually. Since people are habitual and reflective creatures, we need methods for self-improvement–things like rituals.

The problem, for me, is spirituality’s premise that truth and goodness cohere. I see no reason to assume that, and therefore no reason to presume that what is good is also true. If that premise is false, then the tools of science are likely more reliable than those of spirituality–if our goal is to understand nature. But understanding nature should not be our only goal.

See also: adding democracy to Robert Merton’s CUDOS norms for science; is all truth scientific truth?; Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot); Foucault’s spiritual exercises; notes on the social role of science: 1. the example of fetal ultrasounds; and science, UFOs, and the diminishment of humankind.

We reflect on–and we argue about–the point at which human beings become persons with rights, how (if at all) gender relates to biological differences, the degree to which people are interdependent versus free, the rights of disabled persons, and the roles of mothers and other parents.

Meanwhile, we are surrounded and supported by tools and technologies that obtain data and information to guide decisions and judgments. Methods for obtaining and analyzing data have high prestige. But methods for reflecting on moral and metaphysical issues attract widespread skepticism, except among people who are deeply committed to particular moral/metaphysical views (often, religions).

In this context, we have a tool–fetal ultrasound imagining–that purports to peer into the womb and provide data about the developing organism, including its viability and its genitalia, as well as the prospective mother’s health. People may suspect that this scientific tool will shed light on personhood, sex, disability, and motherhood, not to mention such specifically contested questions as abortion and gender attribution.

The tool is used in specific, culturally resonant ways. Often prospective parents go into the medical facility together. The prospective mother is prepared and treated as a patient–in a blue gown, and so on. The room where the procedure is conducted is private, separated by a closed door from the waiting room. A large, precise, moving image appears on a screen. The parent or parents are asked whether they want to know whether the child is/will be a boy or a girl, which determines whether they are shown the genital area. At least some pregnant women report that the image compels everyone’s attention to the fetus and negates the woman, since she is literally made invisible (Barad 1998). Prospective parents of “normal” or “healthy” children are congratulated and offered good wishes. They can take still photos or even videos home with them.

If we ask “What is a fetal ultrasound session?” (as Clifford Geertz asked, “What is a Balinese cockfight?“) we might consider several answers:

1. “A fetal ultrasound (sonogram) is an imaging technique that uses sound waves to produce images of a fetus in the uterus. Fetal ultrasound images can help your health care provider evaluate your baby’s growth and development and monitor your pregnancy. In some cases, fetal ultrasound is used to evaluate possible problems or help confirm a diagnosis” (The Mayo Clinic). Note: “your baby” as a description of the object. Not “the baby,” not “the fetus,” not “you.”
2. An apparatus that uses a piezoelectric transducer, a crystal that both receives and produces ultrasound waves in complex interactions with the mother, the fetus, the computer, the video screen, and the viewers (Barad 1998).
3. A “bonding scan” also known as a “recreational” or keepsake” ultrasound, meant to produce pictures or videos to save and share with friends and family or even with the child later on (per LiveScience.com, which does not endorse such uses).
4. An application of SONAR technology, invented to detect and destroy enemy submarines (Barad 1998)
5. One of the events to expect when you are expecting. A moment to anticipate, celebrate, and share.
6. A ritual that encourages prospective parent(s) to: 1. bond as couples and begin bonding with their child, with whom they will form a nuclear family, 2. bring the fetus to term because is already moving and kicking, 3. avoid behaviors, such as alcohol consumption, that might harm the fetus, 4. encourage them to begin to begin thinking and talking about it as a “boy” or a “girl,” who will have an appropriate name, pronouns, etc., 5. allow them to announce the pregnancy to a larger audience, thus enhancing their social capital, 6. reinforce the authority of credentialed medical professionals in white coats, and 7. produce revenue for the clinic.

Karen Barad wrote a brilliant 1998 article* that explored much of this terrain. I would respectfully dissent from part of her analysis, only because I am trying to work out a view that better fits my sense of the problematic power of science.

Inter alia, Barad raises epistemological doubts about the image that we see on the screen. We are not “peer[ing] innocently at the fetus,” but using an elaborate apparatus that produces an image as a result of complex interactions that can be changed by altering the apparatus. It is a mistake to think that the referent, when we talk about this image, is “the fetus.” The referent is a “phenomenon that is constituted by the inter-action of the apparatus and the object.” Barad cites Niels Bohr’s epistemology in opposition to the older, “Newtonian framework” in which observation was the “benign facilitator of discovery, a transparent and undistorting lens passively gazing at the world.”

I completely agree that looking inside the torso of a pregnant woman is not innocent or automatically benign. Whether to do it, how to design the procedure and the larger event, and what conclusions to draw are moral and political choices that should be critically assessed. Fetal ultrasound could be banned, discouraged, publicly funded, or required. The image could be seen only by a professional who would give written results to the pregnant woman alone. Or it could be done only by the pregnant woman, who would decide whether to share any information with anyone, including a physician. It could be re-designed so that the woman was depicted in the image along with the fetus, or in many other ways.

A fetal ultrasound event is a social phenomenon that reflects and reproduces power. There is a risk that it will block critical deliberation about issues like abortion and gender by claiming to present natural facts just as they are. To quote Bruno Latour, science can “render ordinary political life impotent through the threat of an incontestable nature” (Latour, 2004, p. 10).

Yet I do believe that we are looking at the fetus. In fact, it is precisely because the technology allows us to actually peer into the woman’s body that it is invasive.

When you see a car coming down the road, you may not actually look at the object that matters. Your brain interprets a reflection on the back of your retina, which may reflect the image on a convex mirror, which distorts reality by showing objects smaller than they would appear if seen directly. But you’d better not pull out into the road if there’s a car coming. The mirror is an excellent device for looking around corners, which is why we use it.

We are in a world of tools that we use effectively for a variety of reasons. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein encourages us to see representations as tools that we can use for many purposes. A blueprint can provide instructions to a builder or ideas for a heist, or it can decorate a wall. There is nothing tricky about its metaphysical status. A picture does nothing mysterious inside us that needs analysis (Philosophical Investigations, 188). Whether the visual experience of an image is authentic is not an interesting question (190). The question is what uses we make of an object, including using it to represent a different object. For instance, to see a painting as a portrait of someone is to use it in a certain way. “Now when I say, ‘We consider a portrait to be human’ – when and for how long do we do this? Whenever we see it at all (and don’t see it as something else)” (199).

Likewise, when we are presented with a moving image from inside a pregnant woman, we can see it as a person, or as a boy, or as a fetus, or as a medical problem. Science has no legitimate right to tell us which way to see it. However, the ritual of a fetal sonogram event–conducted by people in white coats with scientific degrees–probably does determine how we will see it. The ultrasound technology really works; the question is whether and how we should use it.

Sources: Karen Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (1998): 87-91; Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2004); Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, German text (1953), my translations.

See also: what does a Balinese cockfight have to do with public policy analysis?; issues in the philosophy of social science; science, democracy, and civic life; is science republican (with a little r)?; nature includes our inner lives; some thoughts on natural law; is all truth scientific truth?; decoding institutions; media literacy and the social discovery of reality

I think that Tamsin Shaw’s article “The Psychologists Take Power” (New York Review of Books, February 25, 2016) is very important. I enjoyed an informal seminar discussion of it on Friday, but that conversation made me realize that the article is rather compressed and allusive, and its argument may not convey to readers who are unfamiliar with the research under review or with important currents in moral philosophy.

This is how I would reconstruct Shaw’s argument:

First, the psychological study of morality presents itself as a science; it claims to be value-neutral and strictly empirical. The phenomena under study are called “moral,” but the researchers purport or at least strive to be value-free.

Given that self-understanding, psychologists are attracted to three research programs: evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and game theory. Each presents itself as value-neutral. The three programs can be made highly consistent if one focuses on rapid human reactions to very basic stimuli, such as sexual desire or perceived threat. These reactions presumably arose well before cultural differentiation, they have Darwinian explanations, they would serve individuals or groups in competitive situations (e.g., while struggling for food or mates), and they light up specific parts of the brain. Findings that seem consistent with all three streams of research have special prestige because they seem particularly hard-headed and empirical. (A perfect example is the Times’ article yesterday: “What’s the Point of Moral Outrage? It may seem noble and selfless, but it’s also about improving your reputation.”)

People who think this way about morality are basically amoral. They have no independent moral compass. Yet they learn techniques that are useful for manipulating subjects, particularly in extreme situations where instinctive human impulses are most pertinent. Therefore, it is no surprise (Shaw writes) that some of them became professional advisers on torture during the first years of the Iraq occupation. Any argument against torture will seem to them arbitrary and subjective.

The last point may be a bit of an ad hominem, although it is certainly worth taking seriously as a warning. But even if all psychologists use good professional ethics, the agenda of making moral psychology strictly empirical needs to be challenged.

For one thing, you can’t study phenomena categorized as “moral” without independently deciding what constitutes morality. We have many deep, instinctive impulses. For instance, we are capable of altruism and even self-sacrificing love, but also of violence and greed. It’s plausible that many of these impulses have evolutionary roots and can be explained in game-theoretic terms. But only some of them are moral. Imagine, for instance, that I said, “Greed is a moral virtue that we developed early in our evolution as a species to motivate individuals to maximize resources.” This would not be a scientifically false statement. It would be morally false. The mistake is to call greed a “virtue.”

Jonathan Haidt likes to provoke liberals by describing “authority” and “sanctity” as moral values. They may be, but that requires a moral argument against the position that only care, fairness, liberty, and loyalty count as moral. The fact that some people see authority and sanctity as virtues does not make that opinion right. Hitler thought that racial purity was moral, and he was wrong. So moral reasoning is indispensable.

Further, when we reason morally, we are usually thinking about very complex, socially constructed phenomena that we don’t directly perceive. We certainly don’t experience them as immediate sense-data. I wrestle with my feelings about democracy, the United States, academia, capitalism modernity, etc. These things don’t appear in my visual field like violent threats or piles of yummy food. I experience such institutions through speech and text, through vicarious reports, and by accumulating experience and arguments over decades. Possibly the impulses that homo sapiens developed early in our evolution influence my judgments. For instance, I may have a deep, unconscious tendency to separate people into in-groups and out-groups, and that may affect my tendency to see the USA as my group. But I could treat another unit as my main group, I could be uninterested in (or even unaware of) the USA as an entity, or the country might not even exist. A nation is a social construction, built by people for complex reasons, that we understand in a mediated way. It would be a contentious assumption, not a hard-nosed scientific premise, that our most primitive impulses have much to say about institutions or our attitudes toward them.

See also: Jonathan Haidt’s six foundations of morality; neuroscience and morality; morality in psychotherapy; on philosophy as a way of life; is all truth scientific truth?; and right and true are deeply connected.