Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

[Kevin_Lowe]

I substantiated it extensively. If it's not an actual property of the universe, why do people agree on it at all? Is it just coincidence that the vast majority of people agree that torturing children for pleasure is immoral?

If you are arguing that we somehow have organs in our minds that perceive Objective Universal Moral Truth, the way our eyes perceive light, then I don't really know where to begin in rebutting the idea. How such a thing could have evolved in the absence of an interventionist deity is beyond me, how such a mechanism could possibly work is beyond me and I'm sure there are multiple other equally serious problems.

If you're just saying that humans for sound evolutionary reasons mostly share instincts about what is morally desirable and undesirable, you're not telling us anything we don't know. That fact doesn't get us to any sound conclusions about what we should see as morally desirable: throughout history humans have mostly shared the instinct that slavery was okay, raping and/or murdering outgoup members was okay and so on, hence these instincts are unreliable moral guides.

 

[JJM 777]

Science is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Hence science can describe what ethical realities are, quite much as a meter tape measures how long something is. (Yes, length measure units are _subjective_ to begin with, but once they have been standardized, they serve as a tool for _objective_ measurements.) Then humans make subjective decisions which exact measure is what they exactly want to get.

http://www.johnjoemittler.com/ethics/English/ch_04.html
http://www.johnjoemittler.com/ethics/English/ch_03.html

The best science can do is take a sample and see how many people share a belief in particular moral axioms.

With that method you cannot send a rocket to Mars, can you? So science can do a lot more than just ask opinions of people on the street, who might not even care or understand what you are asking about.

 

[Paulhoff]

If you are arguing that we somehow have organs in our minds that perceive Objective Universal Moral Truth...........

It is called the brain, which you are.

Paul

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Hence science can describe what ethical realities are, quite much as a meter tape measures how long something is. (Yes, length measure units are _subjective_ to begin with, but once they have been standardized, they serve as a tool for _objective_ measurements.) Then humans make subjective decisions which exact measure is what they exactly want to get.

<snip>

Nature is consistent. Human moral axioms aren't.

 

[Sophronius]

I substantiated it extensively. If it's not an actual property of the universe, why do people agree on it at all? Is it just coincidence that the vast majority of people agree that torturing children for pleasure is immoral?

I honestly don't get why you keep asking this, as I answered it so many times already. No, it's not a coincidence. Humans are wired to make moral judgements, according to specific criteria which are partly hardcoded, partly dependent on upbringing. (near as I can tell, anyway)

I'm really not sure what point you want to make with this.

So is it your position that 'human nature' is somehow not objective or not analyzable scientifically? Is it your position that science stops at human skin and nothing on the inside is amenable to scientific study or can be anything we want it to be?

No. I am merely arguing against your claim that morality is objective. Though it seems to me that you don't mean with that what other people do who use the same phrase.

Exactly. So it is an *objective* property of the action that causes us to *label* it evil.

Exactly. Thus there *is* an underlying reality.

Right. If that's all that you're saying, then we agree. Though when you say that morality is an objective property of acts themselves, it certainly sounds like you are claiming that morality exists independent of human thought.

If that's true then why do so many people feel the same way about the same act? Is it coincidence? Is it magic? If it's not an objective property of the act that they're all detecting (and giving the same name to for the same reason we all call the sky's normal color 'blue'), then what is the other possibility?

The act of torture is, objectively speaking, different from the act of mowing lawns. I agreed to this plenty of times. The act is not, however, objectively good or bad in and of itself. That requires human judgement, which is subjective, regardless of any general consensus there may be.

It cannot be something just about people that causes them to treat X one way and Y another way. It must also be something about X and Y.

Ok, lost you here. Why can't it be?

Of course moral judgments would disappear. Without humans, nothing would "look blue" either.

And that's exactly the difference! Colour would not disappear, and neither would the action in question be any different without humanity. But it would no longer "look blue" and it would no longer be "good" or "bad". Without humanity there would be colour, but there would be no morality.

Humans are physical objects. Their nature is a physical property.

Mere semantics. If you are going to claim that morality is a physical property of the universe as opposed to mere belief, then people will call you out on it. Insisting that humans are part of the universe is just dancing around the issue.

If you want to say that human nature is something that can be measured, just say so. Don't say that it's "an objective property of physical objects." It serves no purpose but to confuse people.

Of course humans make the judgments. Something doesn't "look blue" unless there's someone looking at it. But it has the property of reflecting particular colors of light that causes a human being to say it "looks blue" when they do judge it.

There is no other explanation for human moral agreement about acts other than that humans are keying into some property of the act that causes them to judge it a particular way. That we do this is a property of us.

That's it? Is that all you're claiming? If all you're trying to say is that people judge different actions differently because they're different... you could have just said so.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

If science can't answer moral questions, can morality answer science questions?

 

[AlBell]

If science can't answer moral questions, can morality answer science questions?

Gee, you mean like "Ought science be working with fetal stem cells?"?

 

[JoelKatz]

Right. If that's all that you're saying, then we agree. Though when you say that morality is an objective property of acts themselves, it certainly sounds like you are claiming that morality exists independent of human thought.

It certainly does. Say I write an action with moral implications on a sheet of paper and then I die. Nobody knows what's on that sheet of paper. There can be no human thought about it. Yet we all know that if someone reads the paper, they will make particular moral judgments about its content. Thus the paper, independent of any human thought, has the property that *if* someone thinks about it, they will reach a particular result.

It is the same way the sky does not "look blue" if nobody is looking at it. Yet the sky has a property whose consequence is that if someone looks at it, it appears blue to them.

The act of torture is, objectively speaking, different from the act of mowing lawns. I agreed to this plenty of times. The act is not, however, objectively good or bad in and of itself. That requires human judgment, which is subjective, regardless of any general consensus there may be.

So would you say that the sky is different from the grass, but the sky is not objectively blue or objectively green -- a human must look at it to see that one is blue and the other green? Surely there must be some property that the human is measuring.

Ok, lost you here. Why can't it be?

Because if we look at the sky under certain conditions it appears blue. That is a property of the sky. If we look at the grass under certain conditions it appears green. That is a property of grass.

One can view the appearance of blueness when looking at the sky in a given situation as an interaction of properties of the sky, the person looking, the time of day, and so on. But it is an inherent property of the sky that given those conditions, it appears blue.

And that's exactly the difference! Colour would not disappear, and neither would the action in question be any different without humanity. But it would no longer "look blue" and it would no longer be "good" or "bad". Without humanity there would be colour, but there would be no morality.

Without humanity, there would be no human hair. Is the color of human hair not objective given that there are in fact people?

Color, as we once understood it, would disappear. At one time, our understanding of color was just how things looked to people. We didn't know there was an objective property of objects that explained why they appeared a particular color to us. I'm saying we could have easily inferred that there must have been, even without a full scientific understanding of color.

Mere semantics. If you are going to claim that morality is a physical property of the universe as opposed to mere belief, then people will call you out on it. Insisting that humans are part of the universe is just dancing around the issue.

I don't see the distinction between these two things. Do people's beliefs not exist? Are they not subject to scientific analysis? Are you back to claiming that inside the human skin, science is bizarrely impotent?

If you want to say that human nature is something that can be measured, just say so. Don't say that it's "an objective property of physical objects." It serves no purpose but to confuse people.

I don't just want to say that it can be measured, I want to also say that human nature is what it is, just as a rock is what it is. Science is entirely competent to study them both.

That's it? Is that all you're claiming? If all you're trying to say is that people judge different actions differently because they're different... you could have just said so.

Just as people see the sky and the grass as different colors because they're different. Color is an objective property of objects, just as morality is.

It is a property of torturing children for pleasure that a normal human in our society will judge it as morally wrong. The question for science is -- what is the nature of that property? How accurate are humans at judging it? Can we develop machines that can measure it better? What purpose does it serve? And so on.

 

[JJM 777]

Nature is consistent. Human moral axioms aren't.

Also "one meter" is a consistent measure, but human estimations about it aren´t (in the absence of, or unwilingness to use, a measuring tool, which you seemingly refuse to do in the case of morals). Consistency is available, but you hand-pick some issues which you agree to measure consistently, and some others that you refuse to even try measuring consistently.

 

[JJM 777]

The question for science is -- what is the nature of that property? How accurate are humans at judging it? Can we develop machines that can measure it better? What purpose does it serve? And so on.

I think the two linked pages in my previous posts yesterday give some initial answers how to develop more accurate measuring techniques for ethics. The obvious starting point is, as in any science: carefully observe, precisely measure, and logically classify the reality.

Just a quick example. You say: "Stealing is _wrong_ (or _sin_), not tealing is _right_ (or _not sin_)."

By observing the economical behaviour of humans, I can classify it much more precisely than that:

- 2 = victim of theft
- 1 = voluntary poverty
0 = Socialist pursuit of equality
+0.25 = 75-25 compromise between Socialism and free competition, 25% taxation
+0.5 = 50-50 compromise between Socialism and free competition, 50% taxation
+0.75 = 25-75 compromise between Socialism and free competition, 75% taxation
+1 = commonly and legally agreed free competition, 0% taxation
+2 = theft

Add 1000 people and 10,000 situations and actions, with this mathematical model you can still keep track of the statistical trends of moral behaviour, total moral balance, statistical highs and lows, etc.

Without a mathematical tool of this kind, there are heavy limitations how much and how precisely a person can logically handle about ethics, especially of a large population.

In the mathematical model described above, the total balance of all actions should theoretically be 0. So we can set a _requirement_:

every action must be classified as morally neutral (0.00), _unless_ you are able to _prove_ that it is not neutral (causes or includes a statistically significant risk for destruction ((someone destroys, someone else is destroyed)), or competition ((someone goes to +1 and someone else is thrown to -1)).)

The _proof_ for an act being morally "destructive" (2) is the fact that someone else´s interests are observably being _destroyed_ (-2) or set at a statisticaly significant risk of becoming destroyed.

The _proof_ for an act being morally "competitive / egocentric" (1) is the fact that someone else´s financial needs etc. are observably being _not met_ (-1) or set at a statisticaly significant risk of not being met.

How this differs from religious morality, is when a holybook-thumper claims that specific acts are evil / destructive, without any observable evidence proving that this is the case. In that case scientific ethics would _refute_ the claim that the said act was as evil / destructive as was subjectively claimed without evidence.

So, scientific ethics says: "Every act shall be presumed innocent (morally neutral) unless proven otherwise." Subjective ethics says: "Acts can be _declared_ as innocent or not innocent, without any evidence or even contrary to evidence." This is what we would like to get rid of, methinks.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Also "one meter" is a consistent measure, but human estimations about it aren´t (in the absence of, or unwilingness to use, a measuring tool, which you seemingly refuse to do in the case of morals). Consistency is available, but you hand-pick some issues which you agree to measure consistently, and some others that you refuse to even try measuring consistently.

And why is a meter the correct unit of length to use? Because Napoleon said so?

 

[Sophronius]

Ok Joel, replying to each of your paragraphs is not getting us anywhere, so let me try something else.

You claim that morality is objective. You say it can be measured, objectively. You say it exists independently of human thought. So, if I understand you well, you would take this statement to be correct:

A specific action has one single correct interpretation. If there is a difference in opinion regarding the morality of an action, someone is wrong.

This seems to flow logically from what you are saying. If multiple people can have different correct opinions, say half thinks it is good and half thinks it is bad, then morality would not be subjective but objective by definition.

Do you disagree with this?

 

[Sophronius]

How this differs from religious morality, is when a holybook-thumper claims that specific acts are evil / destructive, without any observable evidence proving that this is the case. In that case scientific ethics would _refute_ the claim that the said act was as evil / destructive as was subjectively claimed without evidence.

So, scientific ethics says: "Every act shall be presumed innocent (morally neutral) unless proven otherwise." Subjective ethics says: "Acts can be _declared_ as innocent or not innocent, without any evidence or even contrary to evidence." This is what we would like to get rid of, methinks.

*claps*. You've got my vote.

I don't agree with only measuring wealth like that, but I assume that that's a gross simplification. I also don't agree that the total balance of all actions should be 0. I think more value is created than destroyed every day.

 

[Dani]

Only because we now understand color and color wasn't that important. But in fact, we could have had precisely the same debates about color.

People could have argued over where red ends and orange begins. They could argue that blue is just what we call blue and not a real physical property because the sky isn't always blue, isn't blue in the dark, and so on. Colorblind people could have insisted there was no such thing as color, and people just called things different colors for purely subjective reasons. And so on.

When people argue over where red ends and orange begins, they argue about the categorization of color, not about color perception. We perceive millions of different colors. We just don't have millions of color names.

Color depends on light and the physical properties of objects. The sky is not a measurable, well defined, object. It can contain different objects at different times, and the light source also varies.

Color blindness is a vision deficiency.

So my point stands. It's not a good analogy.

I don't see why these same arguments couldn't have been made precisely the same way about color. Perhaps our minds 'paint' the world as a tool for us to more easily separate objects, for example. (And I subjectively find these arguments about morality to be just as absurd as similar arguments about color being subjective.)

Again, I have to remind you that there's a significant difference between perception and conception. We don't perceive morality, we conceive it.

If you're arguing that our perception can't help us know the absolute truth, you're right. Neither our logic, but we have decided that these are scientific tools that help us explain what's scientifically true. We're arguing about science, not about absolute truth.

Just as color is an objective property of an object, even though how it appears depends on all kinds of other factors, so morality is an objective property of a conscious act (that also depends on circumstances and so on). We just don't know exactly what it's measuring yet.

You haven't defined what an "objective property of a conscious act" is. An example of an existing one might help.

 

[Earthborn]

It certainly does. Say I write an action with moral implications on a sheet of paper and then I die. Nobody knows what's on that sheet of paper. There can be no human thought about it. Yet we all know that if someone reads the paper, they will make particular moral judgments about its content. Thus the paper, independent of any human thought, has the property that *if* someone thinks about it, they will reach a particular result.

I find it strange that you claim something is independent of human thought when you have said yourself that it is a human thought written down on paper. Humans can put their thoughts on paper, or record them in many other ways. These recordings wouldn't exist without human thought, so they are not independent from them. Their existence depends on human thought.

If someone else reads the paper after your death they may make moral judgements about its content. There is no way for you to know what those moral judgements are going to be. The person reading it may not interpret your story in the same way you do, and may not have the same moral values you have and therefore not make the same moral judgement. If you write well and this person reads well, this person may be able to empathise with your point of view but not necessarily agree with it. Thus the paper does not have the property that if someone thinks about it they will reach a particular result.

 

[JJM 777]

And why is a meter the correct unit of length to use? Because Napoleon said so?

Oops I forgot that I am talking with Americans...

So here we go, we don´t even share the same measure units, but we in mainland Europe have standardized units and you in Anglo-American world have your different standardized units, and this is sufficient to make exact measurements on both sides and compare them (using a conversion table).

Also in ethics it might be possible for one researcher to use one kind of a classification system, and another reseacher to use a different classification system, and the research findings would be more or less comparable with each other if the classifications and observations are logical and precise enough.

 

[JJM 777]

I also don't agree that the total balance of all actions should be 0.

Total balance 0 follows from the requirement that every act is presumed as innocent (0), unless it can be proven that a victim (-x) caused by an aggressor (+x) exists. If the balance is not 0, then something is logically missing from the formula, or something has been defined as non-zero without including the victim or aggressor party in the calculation.

A more useful concept, should I call it "actual or causative moral balance" or what, we get when we omit the object side from the calculation, and only include the subject side. We include the transgressors (+x) but not their victims (-x), (whose existence we must prove and calculate, however). Then we get a balance report that gives some actually useful information to us.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Oops I forgot that I am talking with Americans...

So here we go, we don´t even share the same measure units, but we in mainland Europe have standardized units and you in Anglo-American world have your different standardized units, and this is sufficient to make exact measurements on both sides and compare them (using a conversion table).

Also in ethics it might be possible for one researcher to use one kind of a classification system, and another reseacher to use a different classification system, and the research findings would be more or less comparable with each other if the classifications and observations are logical and precise enough.

If a unit of happiness is a happion and a unit of utility is a util, what constitutes a happion or util? How many happions are equivalent to a util?

Show your working.

 

[Sophronius]

Total balance 0 follows from the requirement that every act is presumed as innocent (0), unless it can be proven that a victim (-x) caused by an aggressor (+x) exists. If the balance is not 0, then something is logically missing from the formula, or something has been defined as non-zero without including the victim or aggressor party in the calculation.

Hm, why is it presumed that an aggressor gets +X when a victim gets -X? If a man kills another out of boredom, surely he gets less utility out of it than the other loses? Or is it not supposed to measure utility?

 

[JJM 777]

If a unit of happiness is a happion and a unit of utility is a util, what constitutes a happion or util? How many happions are equivalent to a util?

Utility has only indirect moral/ethical value, by affecting happiness which has moral/ethical value.

I would like to define morals/ethics as study of the emotions of beings which have emotions, most essentially humans. (Others are free to define morality differently, and if everyone is clear enough with their definitions and observations, then the findings will be comparable with each other, using some filter or conversion table.)

A community of robots would have a lot of utility but no emotion, hence no morals/ethics either. Also a dead star in outer space might have a lot of utility in how the rocks flow on its molten surface, but no emotion and hence no morality. A dead human no longer has emotions, hence no moral value either (but desecrating the grave or memory of a dead human has indirect moral value by affecting the emotions of still living humans). An unborn embryo has no emotions yet, also in this case the issue is moral/ethical mainly because it stirs the emotions of living adult humans.