"Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts"
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Pagels draws a bright line that’s easy to miss in a culture addicted to “trust the science” as a moral mic drop. A physicist by trade, he’s not demoting science so much as rescuing it from a job it can’t do. Moral conflicts aren’t puzzles with hidden variables; they’re clashes of values, priorities, and power. The intent is clarifying: don’t ask a thermometer to write your ethics.
The subtext carries a warning to both sides of a familiar modern argument. To technocrats, it says: data won’t absolve you of responsibility. You can model outcomes, quantify risks, estimate tradeoffs; you can’t compute what a society owes its most vulnerable, or how much inequality is “acceptable.” To anti-expert populism, it offers the opposite rebuke: rejecting science doesn’t make your moral stance purer, it just makes your debate sloppier. Accurate framing matters because vague arguments are where ideology hides. Define the stakes, specify the causal links, separate what’s uncertain from what’s merely unpopular, and you reduce the room for bad faith.
Context matters: Pagels wrote and spoke in an era when nuclear weapons, environmental limits, and biotechnology were turning scientific capability into political destiny. His point anticipates today’s fights over climate, pandemics, and AI. Science won’t tell us what we should value, but it can tell us what our values will cost, who will pay, and what consequences we can no longer pretend are hypothetical. That’s not moral authority. It’s moral accountability.
The subtext carries a warning to both sides of a familiar modern argument. To technocrats, it says: data won’t absolve you of responsibility. You can model outcomes, quantify risks, estimate tradeoffs; you can’t compute what a society owes its most vulnerable, or how much inequality is “acceptable.” To anti-expert populism, it offers the opposite rebuke: rejecting science doesn’t make your moral stance purer, it just makes your debate sloppier. Accurate framing matters because vague arguments are where ideology hides. Define the stakes, specify the causal links, separate what’s uncertain from what’s merely unpopular, and you reduce the room for bad faith.
Context matters: Pagels wrote and spoke in an era when nuclear weapons, environmental limits, and biotechnology were turning scientific capability into political destiny. His point anticipates today’s fights over climate, pandemics, and AI. Science won’t tell us what we should value, but it can tell us what our values will cost, who will pay, and what consequences we can no longer pretend are hypothetical. That’s not moral authority. It’s moral accountability.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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