Well, Pinker's list of questions from my recent post certainly got Professor Schaff thinking, something that, as any reader of this blog knows, can be a disturbing event.
First, there are some questions on that list that cannot be answered by science. Has religion killed more people than Nazism? Well, how do we know what people's motivations are? A small example. Did Elizabeth I kill her sister Mary because Mary was a Catholic, or because Mary represented a threat to her power? Or are those the same thing? And how many people's deaths are the Nazis responsible for? How do we quantify the moral notion of "responsibility"? In this case, do we just count those who died in the Holocaust? How about every one who died in the European theater of war? Does that mean both soldiers and civilians, German and non-German?
Just because a question is hard to answer, or requires a lot of work to define, doesn't mean it can't be answered by science or at least by a scientifically rigorous historical examination. Would Mary have represented a threat to Elizabeth or vice versa if not for the religious difference? I see no reason by argument and evidence cannot be employed against the question.
I think this is one of the weaker questions in the list because it not very interesting. Comparing such a broad and historically ubiquitous thing as religion with a tightly transient evil like the Third Reich doesn't reveal much about either. Almost all of the other questions are essentially empirical in nature.
I agree with Dr. Schaff that a utilitarian moral analysis alone can lead to very bad results and, sometimes, to evil; but that only means that utilitarian analysis is not enough, not that asking empirical questions with utilitarian implications is morally suspect. I don't know if I would be in favor of a baby market or not, but knowing whether or not it would save the lives of more children is something I would like to know before I am forced to decide. Knowing that abortion has reduced the crime rate will not change my view on abortion. In fact, I would find that a very inconvenient truth. I still want to know the truth.
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