Scientific Fundamentalism

Eugene Volokh comments on a Slate Magazine piece on the possibility of a device that can measure consciousness in a person. (For example, a fetus. Or Terri Sciavo.)

The consciometer may not put the abortion issue to rest — given the deeply held religious and moral views on all sides, it's hard to imagine that anything could. But by adding a definitive neurophysiological marker to the historical and secular precedents allowing abortion in the first two-thirds of pregnancy, it may greatly buttress the status quo or even slightly push back the 23-week boundary. There is another possibility. The implications of the consciometer could create a backlash that displaces science as the legal arbiter of when life ends and begins. Such a shift — a rejection of science not because it is vague but because it is exact — would be a strange development, running counter to the American legal tradition.

This is a deep error; and it can be called "scientific fundamentalism" because of its tendency (similar to that in the most unpersuasive versions of religious fundamentalism) to assume that If It Isn't In [Science / The Bible / The Koran], It Doesn't Matter. What rule we should use for deciding when someone should have the legal right not to be killed is not a scientific question. Applying the rule may be a scientific question; if we decide that only entities that have consciousness have the right not to be killed, then science can tell us whether John Smith has consciousness. But deciding on the rule is simply not a scientific issue: It's a matter of moral judgment, which science isn't equipped to provide.