Why Facts Without Values Are Dangerous

How following the facts without a preferred destination can lead us into hell.

The character of Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum’s rock-star mathematician in Jurassic Park, is remarkably Nietzschean. He’s accurate in his prescient pessimism; he’s ignored when his warnings should be taken seriously; he is a human vending-machine of aphorisms. He gave us:

“Life finds a way.”

And, “What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.”

And, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

In this last line, however, he is less Nietzsche and more David Hume, the philosopher who described what is known as the “is-ought problem”. This is the claim that we can’t derive an “ought” (prescribed behaviour) from an “is” (the described universe). The scientists could clone dinosaurs, but that did not mean that they should.

I’m no philosopher, but it seems to me that you can get an “ought” from two statements of what is. Take a desired outcome, add to it a fact or facts of the physical universe, and hey presto – a g…