Free Planet of the Apes and Philosophy by John Huss Page A

untestable.
    But the logical positivist program was only partly eliminative, of course. Logical positivism’s “positive” program was to encourage the formulation of views in such a way that their predictions could be tested by experience. In a sense, this requirement may very well have bequeathed us the Planet of the Apes franchise. On January 14th, 1972, when astronauts Taylor, Landon, Dodge, and Stewart took flight aboard the Icarus, their mission was to test the Hasslein Curve theory of Dr. Otto Hasslein, which predicted that over the course of eighteen months (ship time) that the crew would spend in flight,most of it in suspended animation, they would be propelled over two thousand years forward in Earth time, a prediction that was confirmed as the ship’s clock reads November 25th, 3978 at the time it crashes.
    Although logical positivism took many forms, the message to scientists and their students (like me), was that proper science shouldn’t allow unverifiable statements. This left scientists free to dismiss religious claims, metaphysical claims, or other speculative assertions not merely as false, and irrelevant to science, but also as meaningless. Only what could be verified (or falsified) empirically was meaningful. A looser requirement was that a claim should be verifiable in principle. “In principle” meant “someday,” given technological progress.
    So although the statement “In the distant future, Earth will be ruled by an advanced simian society” could not in fact be verified or falsified in 1972, it was still meaningful, since we could see how it could be verified, for example by building rocket ships and sending astronauts deep into outer space and back at near light speed. Such a statement is totally unlike the statement “There are intelligent beings in Heaven,” because, however our technology is perfected, we don’t even know what it would be like to visit Heaven, since it is not a physical place. Thus, according to the logical positivist, it’s a meaningless statement.
Is Science Value-Free?
    What does all this have to do with ethics? Quite a bit, it turns out. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who greatly influenced the logical positivists, remarked in a public lecture around 1930, that if you take an inventory of all the facts in the universe, you will not find it a fact that killing is wrong. In other words, ethics is not part of the furniture of the scientific universe. You can’t, in principle, test the proposition that “Killing is wrong.” It can neither be verified nor falsified. So, according to Wittgenstein, ethical judgments are empirically and scientifically meaningless. It’s a short leap of logic to the conclusion that ethics lies outside the scope of science, along with all judgments regarding values. The slogan that I learned in my science courses in the 1960s, and which is still being taught in too many places, is that “Science is value-free.”
    The denial of the relevance of ethics to science was taught both explicitly and implicitly. One could find it stated in science textbooks. For example, in the late 1980s when I was researching a book on animal pain, I looked at basic biology texts, two of which a colleague and I had used, ironically enough, in an honors biology course we team-taught for twenty-five years attempting to combine biology and its philosophical and ethical aspects. The widely used Keeton and Gould textbook, in what one of my colleagues calls the “throat-clearing introduction,” loudly declares that “Science cannot make value judgments . . . cannot make moral judgments.” In the same vein, Mader, in her popular biology text, asserted that “Science does not make ethical or moral decisions.” The standard line affirms that science at most provides society with facts relevant to making moral decisions, but never makes such decisions itself.
    So according