Free Planet of the Apes and Philosophy by John Huss

argument—Taylor’s responses would not be appropriate, nor could the apes answer him in kind. In short, despite the fact that their dialogue with Taylor belies the content of their own argument, the apes hold fast to their claims, a classic ideological strategy.
    Indeed, this is precisely the strategy employed by scientific ideology to dismiss both empirical and conceptual evidence of animal thought and animal communication. Some propositions are so deeply embedded in the background beliefs of scientists that they become almost irrefutable. They are held, dogmatically, in the face of all evidence and argument to the contrary. When science hardens into ideology in this way the result is a near-religion known as “scientism.” When you’re in the grip of a scientistic worldview, “facts” that are evident to both sense experience and common sense are ruled out as irrelevant.
    Perhaps surprisingly, in the character of Zaius, science and religion are conflated. Zaius is both Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, and his reaction to Taylor’s behavior is consonant with that dual role. As Taylor rightly remarks, “Are they afraid of me? I can’t hurt them . . . but I threaten them somehow. Threaten their faith in simian superiority. They have to kill me.” Faith and science converge in contemporary science’s unwillingness to consider the morality of harming and killing animals for the sake of advancing scientific knowledge. The failure of science to acknowledge the obvious fact that non-human animals can be hurt and harmed and the correlative failure to apply ethical categories to patently hurtful animal use is very much a matter of scientific faith , not reason, and thus looks very much like religiously based dogma , rather than rational ethics.
Scientific Ideology
    Ideologies operate in many different areas—religious, political, sociological, economic, ethnic. So it’s not surprising that a scientific ideology has emerged. After all, science has been the dominant way of knowing about the world in Western societies since the Renaissance. In order to fully explain how Planet of the Apes is relevant to contemporary ideologically-based moralabuses, I have to summarize what I have studied and taught for nearly forty years. I call it scientific ideology or the common sense of science . It is to scientific life what common sense is to daily life.
    Ask a typical working scientist what separates science from religion, speculative metaphysics, or shamanistic worldviews. Most would immediately say that science tests all claims through observation and experiment. This aspect of scientific ideology dates to Sir Isaac Newton, who proclaimed that he did not “feign hypotheses” (“ hypotheses non fingo ”) but operated directly from experience. The fact that Newton in fact did use such non-observable (and therefore hypothetical ) notions as gravity, action at a distance, and absolute space and time did not stop him from explicitly ruling out hypotheses. Members of the Royal Society, arguably the first association of scientists, apparently took him literally, gathered data for their ‘commonplace books’, and fully expected major scientific breakthroughs to emerge. For the most part, those breakthroughs never came.
Defending Science against Nonsense
    The insistence on experience as the bedrock for science continues from Newton to the twentieth century, where it led to logical positivism , a movement that was designed to eliminate from science anything that could not be verified by the senses. At its most extreme, it aimed to reduce all of science to a set of general truths logically derivable from observations. Anything not based on sensory experience or logic was to be cast aside as meaningless. A classic example can be found in Einstein’s rejection of Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time, on the grounds that such talk was