In modeling the regularity in human action or the human mind: It’s possible to (1) think in terms of an individual as part of a group. For example, you can say: “Japanese people are honest, and Mr. Takahashi is Japanese. Therefore, Mr. Takahashi is honest.” It’s also possible to (2) think in terms of the individual alone. You can say, simply: “Mr. Takahashi is honest.”

Interestingly, both of those ways of modeling regularity are such that the resulting propositions can feel suffocating. To use an example from my own life: As a white American who spends a lot of time in Japan, I find it frustrating when a Japanese person assumes that I’ll think or act in a certain way just because I’m a “foreigner.” Whether what’s attributed is positive or negative, it feels like being boxed in arbitrarily; my personality isn’t just an outgrowth of my nationality or race. But it can also feel suffocating even when the purported regularity is thought of as an outgrowth of you as a unique individual. Consider: If you want to put your past behind you, move on from it, and invent yourself anew, then most radical, and thus most useful in that regard, would be to move somewhere new and cut all of your old ties to the people from your past. The people around you knowing what kind of person that you’ve been up until now can trap you into staying like that indefinitely. Moving somewhere new can get you out of that trap.

If you model a person as part of a group, then you challenge their free will to deviate from the past pattern of action of the people in that group. You bind their future to the past of others. And even if you model the person as a unique individual, then you do the same thing, just according to their own past rather than the past of others.

Thus, any attempt at scientific description of the regularity in human action or the human mind is easily taken as suffocating to free will, i.e. binding of the future of action to the past.

The scientific or rational approach is one of pure description—insofar as that ideal is even possible—with any prescriptions being included only when laid bare as the descriptions that they must ultimately be. For example, when thinking scientifically or rationally it’s perfectly reasonable to give an argument of the following logical form: “X causes Y. You want Y. Therefore, you should also want X.” Whether X actually causes Y, and whether you actually want Y, are separate questions; they’re questions that can be debated. What’s important to emphasize here is simply that science doesn’t hide value judgments but puts them out in the open for all to see. You can describe a person’s value judgments, and in some cases you may even be able to tell them something about their value judgments that they’re not already consciously aware of. But science always does its best to untangle judgments of value from beliefs in cause and effect. The ideal of science is to offer propositions only in an ultimately purely descriptive way, whether or not any prescriptions are in turn logically implied.

That is, scientific propositions are always perspective-neutral in their formulation, though it’s of course possible for each person to plug in their own value judgments and then in effect get advice on what to do.

To be clear: It’s not that the scientific approach doesn’t let you tell people what they should do. It’s just that the scientific approach lays bare the logical steps of the argument; it untangles value from belief. It doesn’t preach: “Do X, for X is right and good.” Instead, it says (much more nihilistically than any preacher would): “If you want Y, then you should do X.” Science is a tool, and like any other tool it’s itself agnostic about what people use it for. More concretely, science is analogous to a knife in that, e.g., a chef can use a knife to cut an onion, yes, but a mugger can also use that same knife for a much different purpose.