Others in the social sciences have taken a more aggressive stance. They have argued that no science, not even Physics, is truly objective. Complex, culturally acquired biases shape all human thinking—even, they say, the thinking of the physicists and chemists.

Thus, they argue that the overarching position called moral relativism is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the whole body of social science research, or all research in all fields, for that matter. We can try to observe and study human societies and the belief systems they instill in their members, but we can’t pretend to do such work objectively. We come to it with eyes already programmed to see the details considered “significant” under the models and values that we absorbed as children. Each researcher’s model of what human society is—or should be—lies deeper than her ability to articulate thoughts in words or even simply to observe. Our biases can’t be suspended; they prefigure our ability to think at all.


   
                            
                           same girl in differing lights - which is real?  (credit: Wikipedia) 

This is the stance called social constructivism. In its view, thought filters are learned from our culture (parents, teachers, etc.) as we grow, and with these tools, we string together sense data—the ones that we have been told matter—until, moment by moment, we form a picture of “reality.” But the whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of sights and sounds we are paying attention to. And other people, especially those from other cultures, construct their own pictures of reality, some of them very different from ours, but still quite workable. People from other cultures have morés and ways of seeing reality that differ from our ways, but their ways do work for them.

In support of this claim, social scientists point out that while descriptions of events in a given society are possible, and even generalizations about apparent connections between events in that society are possible, general, law-like statements about how moral codes and morés for all humans in all societies work continue to elude us.

Some social scientists even go so far as to claim there aren’t any “facts” in any of our descriptions of the events of the past, or even the events happening around us now. There are only sets of details selected by us, but guided by the values we learned as children, and we string these details that we do notice together to form various narratives, any one of them as valid as any other one. At the highest level of generality on what morals are, many social scientists not only have nothing to say, they insist that nothing “factual”—that is, nothing objectively true—can be said. Each of us is trapped inside of her or his version of reality, and there is nothing we can do about that. Even Science is just a set of opinions that seem to be working …for now. 

This argument called the Science Wars continues to rage. There’s not enough space here to go into even five percent of it. But the point for us is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack conviction. They can read about honor killings and remark calmly, “Well, that’s their culture.” In fact, to many thinkers in the humanities and social sciences today, all convictions are temporary and local. (One more recent, sensible, and useful compromise position is taken by Marvin Harris in Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times.)⁵

                

                                                                                   ^{Marvin Harris (credit: Wikipedia)} 

This has been the scariest consequence of the rise of Science: moral confusion and indecision among our elites. It began to become serious in the West in the nineteenth century after Darwin and then Nietzsche's ideas started to spread, but here we are in the twenty-first and, if anything, the crisis of moral confidence appears to be getting worse.