Peter Singer. A professor of Bioethics at the Princeton University (New Jersey, USA), gave voice to an important question that had been wandering about the mental space in our life, all around our thinking faculty. In his recent article, Perils of Ignoring Science, published in the December 25th issue of Daily Times, Professor Singer illustrated the consequences of following an unscientific route to reality – particularly to physical reality that can ultimately hurt and kill. He related a brief account of South African President Thabo Mbeki’s denial of AIDS as a viral condition, doggedly clinging to his unscientific approach for treating AIDS. This way of thinking led to over 360 000 premature deaths in the country due to AIDS related illnesses. Why this ignorance from a country’s president?

A simple answer to this question may be that politicians tend to see all matters from behind their spectacles of political power. Like Nelson Mandela, Mbeki was up against apartheid; yet Mbeki’s rule paid little heed to the use of antiretroviral drugs manufactured by the western pharmaceuticals for AIDS and its related viral diseases. Professor Singer concedes that Mbeki may have had noble intentions but his refusal to accept scientific facts cost the nation a heavy lot on life. Good intentions are not enough, as Mr. Singer infers; being open to realistic views is even more important because accepting a truth is pivotal to progress. Mbeki’s culpability thus lies in closing down his mind’s gate to the possibility of testing a scientific fact (or, to him, a scientific claim). Now, can we really be certain that his intentions were good?

Certainly, we do not see or know about any scientific gadgets that can measure the nature of intentionality to categorize something discretely as ‘good, ‘bad’, or just ‘neutral’. Our judgmental power, in such cases, rests mainly on personal tendencies to rate the policies of an authority as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and project the same rating onto the psychological state that would induced such views. Thus, by its nature, intentionality is more of guesswork than a scientific parameter. Disparity between a ‘good intention’ and a ‘bad policy’, which springs from it, is not hard to perceive – a fact/observation that Peter Singer illustrates by the case of President Mbeki. So given our own lenient tendencies in judgment, we may regard someone’s intentions as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, albeit not scientifically. What is obviously bad, as Peter Singer points, is the refusal to be open to scientific evidence; the denial of science as the authority in determining certain policies in which high stakes are involved (in South Africa’s case, it is the issue of public health versus AIDS). And it is here that we stumble upon the big question: Do we have any means of objectively judging the intentions underlying this rejection of science as the legitimate authority in determining a crucial policy for millions of people?

What passed above seems to negate this possibility of objective verification as intentionality itself is not a scientific parameter. Yet, denying a causal connection between conscious thinking (and judging) and decision-making also violates the morality and logic of any code of conduct. Put simply, whether someone chooses a beneficial or a disastrous prospect for his/her nation, he/she is ‘supposed’ to be conscious of his/her action (or judgment, or decision etc.) and must be held responsible for the outcome, be it good or bad. This is the foundation of the human judicial system- the logic on which our system of reward and punishment rests. Given the case here, it sounds like a logical dilemma that can hardly be bypassed without compromising one or more important components of our systems of knowledge and justice. If intentionality is impossible to prove scientifically as good or bad, the moral decree of any reward or punishment for an act causally tied to some intention is unscientific. At best, it will be a matter of chance if some ‘good intention’ leads to a ‘good act’ and is recognized as such for a reward; same holds for a ‘bad intention’, ‘bad act’ and punishment.

It follows that the refusal to accept science as the authority on any issue may not be a bad intention in itself; it may, however, be a bad act resulting possibly from some good intention – in President Mbeki’s case, for example, developing an economic and/or cultural resistance to the western influence in the region. The most important element in the whole business of intentionality, science, and morality is that of time. Scientific concepts often take decades to get established through repeated experimentation and until that happens, it mostly remains clouded whether or not a scientific claim is reliable enough to allow any policy or course of action that seems a potential alternative, or which has a claim to be able to meet the same end as the scientific approach. President Mbeki seems to have done just that – opted for alternative means (herbal remedies, conventional medicine etc.) instead of antiretroviral drugs; and it does not render him at a loss on the logical front of the case. Of course, he may have won the favor and confidence of his nation in rejecting the western pharmacy as the savior of his nation from the doom of AIDS – something many South Africans would appreciate as an act symbolic of nationalist pride. But those countrymen of his would certainly be the ones who lived at that particular time. Those who live now, along with many others, can confidently regard him as an irresponsible leader who endangered thousands of people’s lives. Would we rate his decision the same had we lived in that particular time (and at that particular place under those very conditions)? Probably not! In the end, we come to the inference that it is time which has the final (?) word on the trio of intentions, science, and morality involved in any issue of import. Judgment is just a matter of time!