The need for philosophy, social sciences and humanities in Stem
The need for science rigor and ethics in economy
Western society value technology and science (hard science – sciences dures in French, the ones that use math as their main tool) above everything else. Humanities, social sciences (sciences molles in French) and philosophy are generally despised.
Why? Because they don’t seem to be productive in the current economy.
Humanities department in universities are constantly under-funded, even though students numbers in many cases are higher than ever.
However, I believe that we need more of these disciplines and scholars for several reasons.
Maybe this is a just a rehash of “science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme”, but at least, I’ll try to make it an up-to-date argument and define what “conscience” might mean nowadays.
“Conscience” is the faculty we use to make judgments, it is a sort of moral guidance, what enables us to distinguish between good and bad. It used to be the exclusive domain of religions, with their director of conscience.
The need for “conscience” seems to have been forgotten. The demise of religions in most western cultures is not the only reason, not enough to explain the disappearance of what was once a central aspect in human life.
Moral guidance given by religions is differently interpreted, and can be turned into extremism.
The need for judgment has not disappeared, but now most judgements are not based on good vs bad, mean vs nice, but on profitable or not.
The classic and neo-classic economists have produced the perfect pretext for the dominating class to keep and even reinforce their position: pursuing your selfish goals will (somehow, magically) benefit the entire society in the long term. This clause has never been proven, there are even countless counter-examples, which, if economy was a proper (hard) science, would be enough to discard such a hypothesis. A small elite of mostly old white males still keep their faith in this credo. It is indeed a matter of faith or ideology, and not science, either hard or soft. This particular credo is kept alive because it enables, justifies and reinforces the deep inequalities between members of human society seen as a whole. The top elite can have a clear conscience, thanks to this pretext. They are free to behave in the most selfish ways, with the universal justification that they do it, not for themselves, but for the good of all.
The absence of good conscience or morality in economists is not a fantasy. Studies have shown that people who went through business schools and economy classes at university are significantly more likely to make immoral decisions than students in any other discipline.
Economy and business studies undermine the moral sense of humans.
Economy is such a fundamental discipline: how come it can’t be reformed the way physics or biology were?
Economy needs to convert to true hard sciences, and don’t cling to unrealistic models that have been proven wrong again and again by what happened in reality. They now have at their disposal the computing power and the big data necessary to make real assumptions, test them and refine them, before claiming any ideological truth.
To make these models realistic, they need to integrate human and environmental data, not only money flows. The economy doesn’t run in a neutral space. It has impacts, massive impacts on people and the environment. These impacts are not reflected sufficiently in values measured by money or wealth.
Economists need to use systemic thinking, enlarge their vision beyond production, redistribution and money. They need to merge the micro and macro and use social sciences to inform their models and theories.
Social scientists themselves have to use the new tools at their disposal, such as the big data generated by social media to test and validate long-standing hypothesis. Machine learning can help uncovering patterns. While it can’t / shouldn’t be used as prediction or decision tool because of inherent bias built into the data gathered from a society where discrimination is the rule, machine learning can on the other hand be used to uncover, prove these bias, and, potentially, help humans remedy to them.
To navigate these challenges ethically, we need people who have been trained to think critically, who have reflected for a long time on ethical questions: these people exist: they are philosophers and ethicists!
Scientists, economists, engineers (designers) sometimes behave as if they are the first to face ethical dilemmas. When you are seriously sick, you go to the doctor, you don’t try to fix your body yourself. When your car is broken, you go to the mechanical repair shop. Why not doing the same for ethical problems? Some people don’t even seem to realize that specialists in this domain exist.
Oh, yes, of course, philosophy is so underrated. So much contempt. But philosophy is as much the foundation of knowledge that math is the foundation of science. Philosophy discusses the possibility, status and conditions of knowledge (versus doxa – mere opinion). In France, all students who have the baccalaureate had one year of philosophy teaching. It is certainly the most feared and decried class. Even so, I believe it does open the door for most students to deeper thinking, critical thinking especially.
A report has shown that much more fake news were shared in the US, compared to France and Germany. It’s not possible of course to name one specific cause, but I would think that the differences in education systems are in part responsible for this (yuge) discrepancy, and the following election results. Mandatory philosophy teaching is only one aspect of the French education system but it’s significant.
New technologies produce more challenges in every aspect. To name just a few: the disruption from new economic models enabled by internet such as e-commerce and uberisation, automation of blue-collar jobs in assembly plants, AI-enabled automation of more and more white collar jobs as well, ethical dilemma regarding tampering with stem cells and DNA, global surveillance enabled by networks and related privacy issues,…
In each and every case, the potential ethical, social and individual consequences are not only overlooked, they are simply discarded as irrelevant. The only justification a new product or service needs to be legitimate is if it makes money.
Capitalism and making profit is today what is used as conscience.