Reductive Naturalism and Evolutionary Psychology's Empty Ethics of Enhancement

Theory as truth and as ethics.

“…C. Richardson et al, 1999). Theories that ignore the immediacy of the experience of the ethical lead to a type of nihilism in which truth is as absurd as ethics because it encourages psychology in which questions of truth and ethics are ruled out of bounds a priori as merely the product of the very constructs and abstractions the discipline invokes rather than as the source of the very human concern the establishes the raison d’etre of the discipline in the first place (see, e.g., Evans, 1993; Gantt et al, 2022; Gantt & Yanchar, 2007; Hinman, 1979; Sommers & Rosenberg, 2003).…”

Making sense of charges of scientism in psychology and beyond: Logical and epistemological implications

“…To be sure, the reasons for not liking a kind of science (or what is alleged to be a science) help determine whether we accept its denunciation as scientistic. And theoretical psychologists are quick to give their many reasons for not liking mainstream psychological science, including and beyond its use of natural-science methods—for instance, its lamented dehumanizing objectivism (Christopher et al, 2014; Clegg, 2017; Slaney & Wu, 2022), epistemic violence and inattention to subjectivity (Kirschner, 2022; Teo, 2017, 2018), and reductive ontological and epistemological naturalism (Gantt et al, 2022; Wertz, 2018). Their critiques often document ways in which mental life/lived experience has received short shrift in psychology’s physics-envy shuffle.…”