Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

[JoelKatz]

No. You keep trying to smuggle back in as agreed-upon fact the totally incorrect assumption that there is such a thing as what is "really moral" if only we could perceive it, and that the problem is our imperfect perceptive faculties. This is still just wrong, and it will continue to be just wrong however many times you try to smuggle it back in.

If the assumption is incorrect, then there is no such thing as "really being wrong", in which case there is no such thing as prescriptive morality. (Prescriptive morality is about what is really wrong, regardless of how people judge it.) Otherwise, all moral questions are descriptive, which science can answer.

There is only an is/ought problem if it really means something for something to "really be wrong", independent of our judging it so. If there is no such thing, then what is the question science can't answer? (And my own answer would be that we have no idea, and only science can tell us.)

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

If the assumption is incorrect, then there is no such thing as "really being wrong", in which case there is no such thing as prescriptive morality. (Prescriptive morality is about what is really wrong, regardless of how people judge it.)

There is such a thing as prescriptive morality, it's just ideas in people's heads. Every time some priest says "it's immoral to blaspheme!" they are making a prescriptive moral statement.

There are no true, objective, universal prescriptive moral rules.

Otherwise, all moral questions are descriptive, which science can answer.

See above.

There is only an is/ought problem if it really means something for something to "really be wrong", independent of our judging it so.

No.

There is an is/ought problem because I can independently think your moral judgments are wrong. not because you can be wrong by comparison to some phlogiston-like imaginary cosmic morality.

 

[JoelKatz]

There is such a thing as prescriptive morality, it's just ideas in people's heads. Every time some priest says "it's immoral to blaspheme!" they are making a prescriptive moral statement.

Yes, and one that you have shown is false scientifically. As you have shown, the immorality of blasphemy is only in his head. Yet he has claimed that blasphemy really is immoral, independent of the contents of his head. Thus science has answered this moral question -- his claim is false.

Your argument is that because science has shown that blasphemy cannot really be immoral, science cannot answer the question of whether blasphemy really is immoral. This is self-contradictory. If there are no real prescriptive moral truths, then anything that claims to be a real prescriptive moral truth is false.

There are no true, objective, universal prescriptive moral rules.

If there are no true prescriptive moral rules, then all prescriptive claims are false. Whether they are objective or universal is irrelevant, if they aren't true, they are false or incoherent. So there is nothing for science to explain.

There is an is/ought problem because I can independently think your moral judgments are wrong. not because you can be wrong by comparison to some phlogiston-like imaginary cosmic morality.

Prescriptive morality claims that some things are really wrong, independent of people thinking they are wrong. If that is not true, and you can show that scientifically, then science has resolved all prescriptive moral claims -- they are false. On the other hand, if all that can really be true is that you think I'm wrong, then there is only descriptive morality, which you have conceded science can address.

That is, either proscriptive morality is amenable to the scientific process because it makes claims that are really true, or it makes false claims.

(Of course, I believe, as I've argued, that prescriptive moral claims can actually be true. I'm just showing that the consequence of the rejection of moral realism is that all prescriptive moral claims are either false or are simply claims that a person has a particular thought. But of course, if someone says "blasphemy is wrong", no rational person would investigate the claim by trying to figure out if the person really believes blasphemy is wrong -- who cares? What we want to know is what really is right. No sane, rational person can believe that prescriptive moral claims are really about the contents of people's heads.)

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Your argument is that because science has shown that blasphemy cannot really be immoral, science cannot answer the question of whether blasphemy really is immoral. This is self-contradictory. If there are no real prescriptive moral truths, then anything that claims to be a real prescriptive moral truth is false.

No. As I keep telling you, they are not claims that can have truth values. They are not true. Nor are they false.

Maybe this analogy will help you.

Some things make people angry. The anger is a real physical phenomenon which can be scientifically studied. When we perceive ourselves being angry we are perceiving that internal, physical phenomenon.

This does not mean that there is any external quality of "angry-making" which we are magically perceiving through some totally unknown phlogiston-like medium.

It also does not mean that if we study enough people we will arrive at some transcendental rule about what is cause for justified anger. You can do as much descriptive work as you like about what actually makes people angry, but what should justifiably make people angry is not a question science can solve alone without adopting one or more philosophical axioms.

Moral instincts are just the same. You can study people as long as you like so see what they think is moral. It will never give you an answer to the question of what they should think is moral. To answer that question you need to help yourself to a philosophical "ought" statement, because there is simply no way of getting to an "ought" unless you start with an "ought".

 

[JoelKatz]

Some things make people angry. The anger is a real physical phenomenon which can be scientifically studied. When we perceive ourselves being angry we are perceiving that internal, physical phenomenon.

This does not mean that there is any external quality of "angry-making" which we are magically perceiving through some totally unknown phlogiston-like medium.

So any claim that there was an external quality of angry-making would be a false claim. Claims like "blasphemy is immoral" claim that blasphemy has the property, independent of anyone thinking anything, of being immoral. If it does not, the claim is false.

It also does not mean that if we study enough people we will arrive at some transcendental rule about what is cause for justified anger. You can do as much descriptive work as you like about what actually makes people angry, but what should justifiably make people angry is not a question science can solve alone without adopting one or more philosophical axioms.

Right, because the idea of "justifiably making people angry" is incoherent. This is the same "inherent angry-making" that you reject.

If something can make people justifiably angry, that is an inherent property. It doesn't rely on anyone actually being made angry.

Moral instincts are just the same. You can study people as long as you like so see what they think is moral. It will never give you an answer to the question of what they should think is moral.

Because you don't believe there is any such thing. That something is the kind of thing a human being should think is moral would be the exact inherent moral property you claim does not exist. "Should be thought to be moral" is like inherent angry-making.

To answer that question you need to help yourself to a philosophical "ought" statement, because there is simply no way of getting to an "ought" unless you start with an "ought".

Then all such "ought" statements are false. You need a root "ought" statement since you cannot get an "ought" without starting from an "ought". But therefore you cannot have a root "ought" since you have no "ought" to start from. Whatever root "ought" statement you start out with is thus false, lacking the prior "ought" you claim is necessary for it to be true. Since no "ought" has any prior true "ought" on which to rest, and that is required for them to be true, they are all false.

You just, again, rejected proscriptive morality. You cannot get away from the fact that proscriptive moral claims assert inherent moral properties. "X is wrong and one shouldn't do it" means that X is really, in reality, wrong regardless of what anyone thinks of it, or whether anyone thinks at all. If there are no inherent moral properties independent of our thoughts about actions, there is no proscriptive morality. All such claims are actually meaningless or false.

 

[JJM 777]

when scientists define a unit of measurement they try to make sure it is based on something that stays the same for a long time, not something like the emotional state of a living thing that is constantly changing

Obviously you don´t do science much, if you try to argue that measuring quickly changing things is not science. Just turning the car motor on starts a chain reaction of unperceivably fast, but still measurable by science, changes in temperatures etc.

... decide which creatures' emotional states to measure. One would get a different standard of morality if one decides to measure the well-being of a lion than if one decides to measure that of an antilope.

Science does measure the tallness and weight of lions, antelopes and humans, separately. Then one of these eats the other, and we must measure again. The fact that there are billions of unmeasured trees in the world does not make it less science to measure the dimensions of one tree.

it's an additional philosophical assumption to move from "I can measure suffering" to "morally we ought to reduce suffering".

Exactly, but you telling this to me somehow indicates that you haven´t read or understood my two previous posts and the width of television analogy. Science tell how wide the television is, people decide how wide it should be.

you could have used "higher pleasures" like art and learning (J.S. Mill), fulfilled and unfulfilled preferences, or fulfilled and unfulfilled second-order preferences (preferences about our preferences), or the preferences that entities would have if they were fully-informed and rational, or Quality Adjusted Life Years, or something else entirely.

Possibly. That would make a different unit for a different purpose.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

So any claim that there was an external quality of angry-making would be a false claim. Claims like "blasphemy is immoral" claim that blasphemy has the property, independent of anyone thinking anything, of being immoral. If it does not, the claim is false.

It can't be true or false, it's not that sort of thing.

Right, because the idea of "justifiably making people angry" is incoherent. This is the same "inherent angry-making" that you reject.

Okay then, all moral claims are incoherent in your view. You're a moral nihilist. That's a perfectly coherent position.

If something can make people justifiably angry, that is an inherent property. It doesn't rely on anyone actually being made angry.

No it's not. Someone has to make the value judgment that anger in given situations is justifiable. It's not an inherent property of the situation. It's a value judgment made in the mind of an observer.

Because you don't believe there is any such thing. That something is the kind of thing a human being should think is moral would be the exact inherent moral property you claim does not exist. "Should be thought to be moral" is like inherent angry-making.

Not quite. "I think anger in that situation is justified" is like "I think people should think murder is immoral". It's a value judgment.

"It is a true fact that murder is immoral" is like "it is a true fact that anger in that situation is justified", both being unjustifiable claims to know some kind of universal morality.

Then all such "ought" statements are false. You need a root "ought" statement since you cannot get an "ought" without starting from an "ought". But therefore you cannot have a root "ought" since you have no "ought" to start from. Whatever root "ought" statement you start out with is thus false, lacking the necessary prior "ought" on which to rest.

It's not true or false. How many times do I have to say this to you?

It's an axiom. An arbitrary and convenient starting point which can be judged by criteria like usefulness or coherence, but not on the criteria of factual correctness or incorrectness.

If you don't want to be a moral nihilist, you need to adopt some moral axiom.

Harris' axion is "human flourishing is morally good, human suffering is morally bad", for example.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Exactly, but you telling this to me somehow indicates that you haven´t read or understood my two previous posts and the width of television analogy. Science tell how wide the television is, people decide how wide it should be.

Reading back I think we're actually probably on the same page. Science can help us achieve our "moral" goals once we make the necessary value judgment as to what those goals are, it just can't help us decide what those goals should be.

Possibly. That would make a different unit for a different purpose.

Indeed.

 

[JoelKatz]

Not quite. "I think anger in that situation is justified" is like "I think people should think murder is immoral". It's a value judgment.

This cannot be right. "I think anger in that situation is justified" is something that can clearly be true or false. It *cannot* be a value judgment. A value judgment, you argue, must be the kind of thing that *cannot* be true or false.

Only claims like "anger *is* in fact justified in that situation", a claim that asserts the existence of the very inherent properties you claim do not exist, is a value judgment. Essentially, you are arguing that all value judgments stated in "X is Y" form (rather than "I think X is Y" form or "if J, then X is Y" form) are false. Since X is not the kind of thing that can actually be Y if "X is Y" is a value judgment.

It's an axiom. An arbitrary and convenient starting point which can be judged by criteria like usefulness or coherence, but not on the criteria of factual correctness or incorrectness.

The problem is, anything that you deduce from an axiom is dependent on that axiom. If X is an axiom that leads to Y, you get "if X, then Y". Since, you admit, X is not *true*, all you have deduced is that if something that was not capable of being true were somehow true, then Y would be true too. This is like "if two plus two was seven, Christmas would be in January". It's true, but useless.

If you don't want to be a moral nihilist, you need to adopt some moral axiom. Harris' axiom is "human flourishing is morally good, human suffering is morally bad", for example.

Then all of his conclusions are of the form "*IF* human flourishing is morally good *AND* human suffering is morally bad, *THEN* doing X is best". That is what it means to make something an axiom.

Realize two things he has done:

1) His morality is not proscriptivist, it is descriptivist. We have again rejected proscriptive morality. "*IF* human flourishing is good, *THEN* we should do X" doesn't proscribe anything. (It's only proscriptive if flourishing really *is* good, which you reject.)

2) His morality makes claims that are provably true or false and subject to scientific analysis. We can determine whether or not particular things really do maximize flourishing or minimize suffering.

You can make it proscriptive by interpreting its conclusions as "if you value human flourishing and disvalue human suffering, you really should do X". This is proscriptive for those people who do in fact have those values. But all it does is redefine "should" to mean "maximizes flourishing and minimizes suffering". Once understood to be precisely equivalent to "X maximizes flourishing and minimizes suffering" (which is all it can conclude) it becomes clear that such claims are scientifically analyzable.

 

[Earthborn]

Obviously you don´t do science much, if you try to argue that measuring quickly changing things is not science.

I haven't argued that.

Just turning the car motor on starts a chain reaction of unperceivably fast, but still measurable by science, changes in temperatures etc.

Yes, if you have previously established a unit of measurement that does not change.

Science does measure the tallness and weight of lions, antelopes and humans, separately.

You weren't talking about measuring animals. You were talking about measuring how much happiness and/or suffering is caused by a certain act by using animals as the measuring device.

Then one of these eats the other, and we must measure again.

What is the well-being of an eaten antelope?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

This cannot be right. "I think anger in that situation is justified" is something that can clearly be true or false. It *cannot* be a value judgment. A value judgment, you argue, must be the kind of thing that *cannot* be true or false.

It's a true fact that the person is thinking "I think anger in that situation is justified". That is what their brain is doing.

It's not a true fact that "anger in that situation is justified". That's a value judgment that cannot be true or false.

The problem is, anything that you deduce from an axiom is dependent on that axiom. If X is an axiom that leads to Y, you get "if X, then Y". Since, you admit, X is not *true*, all you have deduced is that if something that was not capable of being true were somehow true, then Y would be true too. This is like "if two plus two was seven, Christmas would be in January". It's true, but useless.

On the contrary, it's enormously useful and even necessary.

The basis for allocating public health spending in Australia, the UK and every other civilized nation I am aware of (the USA doesn't count as civilized in this respect) is "if extending human life and improving human quality of life is good, and every person's life and quality of life count equally, then the most effective way to spend the health budget is thus".

Is it true that the most moral way to spend the Australian health budget is, broadly speaking, to pay for treatments that provide at least one Quality-Adjusted Life Year per AU$40,000? Well, no. It's a consequence of the axiomatic assumption previously stated. If you discard that axiom then the policy has no basis.

This isn't a problem. Well, maybe it's a serious problem for you. I don't see it as one. I recognise that there is simply no way of doing morality at all, that works, except adopting some axiom or axioms as a starting point. So I adopt some axioms and get on with it.

 

[JoelKatz]

It's not a true fact that "anger in that situation is justified". That's a value judgment that cannot be true or false.

You are saying "anger in that situation is justified" is neither true nor false, but that "it is true that anger in that situation is justified" is false. That is, you are drawing a distinction between claiming something and claiming that that same thing is true. That is bizarre and, in my opinion, borderline incoherent.

To anticipate your response, a person who says "going to the movies is fun" is not lying. But saying, "it is true that going to the movies is fun" is not a lie either. To argue so is to misunderstand what "going to the movies is fun" means. As all the things you call value judgments are, it is a relationship claim. This claim is that going to the movies and the speaker are both so constructed as to have a particular relationship, namely that the speaker (or other unspecified people -- the claim is a bit vague) does in fact experience enjoyment when they go to the movies.

It is a claim that going to the movies has an inherent property that is demonstrated by a relationship. Just like "hydrogen is flammable" claims hydrogen has an inherent property that can only be demonstrated by exposing it to oxygen.

The basis for allocating public health spending in Australia, the UK and every other civilized nation I am aware of (the USA doesn't count as civilized in this respect) is "if extending human life and improving human quality of life is good, and every person's life and quality of life count equally, then the most effective way to spend the health budget is thus".

This is purely descriptive. It says, "if X, then Y". It is not a moral claim any more than "to make sodium explode, you add water" is a moral claim. "If you want X, then do Y" is another way of saying "Y causes more of X than the other possible things we could do". It's purely objective.

Is it true that the most moral way to spend the Australian health budget is, broadly speaking, to pay for treatments that provide at least one Quality-Adjusted Life Year per AU$40,000? Well, no. It's a consequence of the axiomatic assumption previously stated. If you discard that axiom then the policy has no basis.

Right, so anyone who claimed it was true would be wrong. It is, as you say, *not* true.

This isn't a problem. Well, maybe it's a serious problem for you. I don't see it as one. I recognise that there is simply no way of doing morality at all, that works, except adopting some axiom or axioms as a starting point. So I adopt some axioms and get on with it.

That's fine. But then all of your conclusions are dependent on the truth of your axioms. You are practicing descriptive morality, not proscriptive.

As you claim, an ought can only be based on another ought. So your root ought must forever be an axiom and any conclusions you draw from it are forever contingent on the truth of that axiom.

If that axiom is not true, as you conceded it is not, then the conclusions are not shown. Anyone who claimed they were shown to be true would be wrong, and if you make such claims, you are intentionally misrepresenting them.

There's one other point I need to make. If you were right about this, then moral claims would be as amenable to scientific claims as anything else. All it would mean is that you need one more axiom. But science has, and needs, many axioms. For example, you cannot prove that a person should reject experimental results that cannot be repeated. This is an axiom that you must accept if you want to do science.

If you say it's not an axiom and you can prove it, it's only because you have accepted some other axiom. For example, if you show that rejecting unrepeatable results leads to more accurate predictions, you still cannot say that one should do that unless you accept that accurate predictions are good. So even if it does require one root axiom that cannot be proven within science, that does not make it unscientific or else no conclusions are scientific.

So this is also a case of special pleading. Somehow, this one axiom makes it not science while all the other axioms of science are fine.

I actually believe that science, in the broadest sense, can in fact internally validate its own axioms, including a 'moral axiom'. (Though we can't do that for a moral axiom *yet*, but we have done it for many other axioms such as about repeatability, objectivity, and all the other shoulds in science.) It's only 'formal science' -- science that you can state as a set of rules or procedures -- that has to have unvalidated axioms. But that's a whole other issue that's probably not worth getting into here and I'm sure you and I have too many disagreements at lower levels, like this one about what values and judgments actually are, to make any headway on it. As a consequence, I believe that value judgments are relationship facts, like most facts are, and not in a different category at all.

We just speak in a form of shorthand. For example, if I say "Your wife is cheating on you", what I really mean is something like, "I have reasons to believe that your wife is cheating on you that justify you sharing my belief". This difference matters because the former claim appears to be false if I have good reasons that just happen to be wrong through no fault of mine. The latter statement can still be true even if your wife is not in fact cheating on you. So it matters to the claim whether when you say the first you are "really saying" the second.

Value judgments are also similar shorthands. They appears to be unverifiable, subjective assessments. But they are actually claims about objective relationship properties, just using a convenient verbal shorthand. For example, we all understand that a person who says "that dress looks great on you" can in fact be lying. (And, of course, we all understand 'that dress looks great on you' to really be saying something like 'I think that dress looks great on you' or 'From what I know about how people judge beauty, that dress improves the way most would assess you' or the like.)

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

You are saying "anger in that situation is justified" is neither true nor false, but that "it is true that anger in that situation is justified" is false. That is, you are drawing a distinction between claiming something and claiming that that same thing is true. That is bizarre and, in my opinion, borderline incoherent.

It seems perfectly logical to me. If there are classes of things that are neither true nor false, then it is false to say that any member of that class is true, and also false to say that any member of that class is false. I see no problem with this.

X is neither true nor false.
"X is true" is false.
"X is false" is false.

Where's the incoherence?

This is purely descriptive. It says, "if X, then Y". It is not a moral claim any more than "to make sodium explode, you add water" is a moral claim. "If you want X, then do Y" is another way of saying "Y causes more of X than the other possible things we could do". It's purely objective.

.

No. You misunderstand the terms you are using.

Descriptive moral claims are factual claims about what people think. They by definition have absolutely no content, for or against, that speaks to the question of whether those moral ideas people have are good moral ideas or bad moral ideas.

Prescriptive claims are non-factual claims about what people should do.

In this particular case, QALY-based utilitarianism is prescribing which behaviour the health system should engage in, and the health system engages in the prescribed behaviour.

What might be confusing you is that you can of course describe prescriptive morality in action - how could it be otherwise? However just because you can practice descriptive moral observation on people who are engaged in acting on prescriptivist moral theories does not magically make those theories non-prescriptive.

That's fine. But then all of your conclusions are dependent on the truth of your axioms. You are practicing descriptive morality, not proscriptive.

Nope. It's not merely describing what people happen to think is moral, it's making a claim about what people should do, and as a matter of fact they are doing it right now.

As you claim, an ought can only be based on another ought. So your root ought must forever be an axiom and any conclusions you draw from it are forever contingent on the truth of that axiom.

If that axiom is not true, as you conceded it is not, then the conclusions are not shown. Anyone who claimed they were shown to be true would be wrong, and if you make such claims, you are intentionally misrepresenting them.

You nearly get it.

All moral claims have to be based on one or more axioms which are neither true nor false. The moral claims which develop from those axioms are also neither true nor false. That is how it has to be.

There's one other point I need to make. If you were right about this, then moral claims would be as amenable to scientific claims as anything else. All it would mean is that you need one more axiom. But science has, and needs, many axioms. For example, you cannot prove that a person should reject experimental results that cannot be repeated. This is an axiom that you must accept if you want to do science.

If you say it's not an axiom and you can prove it, it's only because you have accepted some other axiom. For example, if you show that rejecting unrepeatable results leads to more accurate predictions, you still cannot say that one should do that unless you accept that accurate predictions are good. So even if it does require one root axiom that cannot be proven within science, that does not make it unscientific or else no conclusions are scientific.

So this is also a case of special pleading. Somehow, this one axiom makes it not science while all the other axioms of science are fine.

I'd say rather that philosophers of science have pared down the axioms required to do science to the bare minimum needed to make it work. Science assumes that we want to have a map that corresponds to the territory, and that such a map can be found.

However any excess axioms that don't get the scientific job done that you want to tack on aren't science.

Just because science needs specific axioms to get going doesn't give you a blank cheque to take any other wacky axiom you can think of as a given, and call your new creation "science" (as Harris tried to do).

 

[JoelKatz]

It seems perfectly logical to me. If there are classes of things that are neither true nor false, then it is false to say that any member of that class is true, and also false to say that any member of that class is false. I see no problem with this.

X is neither true nor false.
"X is true" is false.
"X is false" is false.

Where's the incoherence?

The incoherence is that you are equating logical propositions with claims. "X" (as a claim) is precisely equivalent to "X is true". That's what it means to claim something. If "X is true" is false, then X is false.

Someone who says "it is raining" is not just stating a logical proposition. That's why no sane person responds to "it is raining" with "that's interesting, you've just stated a logical proposition that might be true and might be false". Claiming a proposition, which is what "it is raining" does, is equivalent to asserting that the proposition is true or that belief in its truth is justified.

Someone who says "ice cream is delicious" is asserting that it is in fact true that there exists a particular relationship between ice cream and a group of people (that consuming it produces pleasure in most of the people). This relationship can in fact exist and it can in fact not exist. He is using the same inherent property shorthand as scientists do when they say "hydrogen is flammable". This also, of course, is asserting that in fact a relationship exists between hydrogen and oxygen.

Your fundamental arguments that value judgments are in a different category from scientific-established relationship facts and that one can claim something and that's somehow different from claiming that that something is true (or that belief in it is justified) are both incorrect. Value judgments are relationship facts. Claiming a proposition is claiming that it is true (or that belief in it is justified or something similar to that, depending on the context).

Descriptive moral claims are factual claims about what people think. They by definition have absolutely no content, for or against, that speaks to the question of whether those moral ideas people have are good moral ideas or bad moral ideas.

Prescriptive claims are non-factual claims about what people should do.

Okay, then your so-called moral claims are not moral at all. "If you value thriving and disvalue suffering, you should do X" is therefore not a moral claim at all but a simple factual one.

If you accept, as you do, that at least one axiom is needed to make a moral claim, the you are a moral nihilist. All moral claims are of the form "if my ought axiom is true, then X" so they are neither prescriptive nor descriptive.

In this particular case, QALY-based utilitarianism is prescribing which behaviour the health system should engage in, and the health system engages in the prescribed behaviour.

It is prescribing conditional on its axiom. A conditional prescription "if you want X, do Y" is not moral by your definitions.

What might be confusing you is that you can of course describe prescriptive morality in action - how could it be otherwise? However just because you can practice descriptive moral observation on people who are engaged in acting on prescriptivist moral theories does not magically make those theories non-prescriptive.

No, what makes those theories non-prescriptive is that all their results are conditional on the truth of their root ought axiom. Since they cannot claim the axiom is true, and you conceded it is not, they don't actually make unconditional prescriptions. And a conditional prescription is no prescription at all.

Nope. It's not merely describing what people happen to think is moral, it's making a claim about what people should do, and as a matter of fact they are doing it right now.

It is making a claim about what people should do conditional on an axiom.

All moral claims have to be based on one or more axioms which are neither true nor false. The moral claims which develop from those axioms are also neither true nor false. That is how it has to be.

The claims are true provided they are made conditional on the axioms. Since the axiom is not true, anyone who claimed it was true would be making a false claim.

As I explained, claiming 'X' is precisely equivalent to claiming 'X is true'. Since X is not true, and you concede it cannot be true, the claims that it is so are false. (Unless you interpret them as descriptive relationship claims.)

However any excess axioms that don't get the scientific job done that you want to tack on aren't science.

But then your argument is entirely circular. "Moral truths are outside of science because I won't add the axioms needed to find them because they aren't needed for science because moral truths are outside of science, but I'll add the axioms needed to find all kinds of other truths."

Just because science needs specific axioms to get going doesn't give you a blank cheque to take any other wacky axiom you can think of as a given, and call your new creation "science" (as Harris tried to do).

I 100% agree. The conclusions are conditional on the truth of the axiom, as *all* scientific truths are. In a sense, all scientific results are conditional on the validity of the scientific method, something that cannot be formally proven. If science shows X, the result is "science shows X", not just "X".

 

[JJM 777]

You weren't talking about measuring animals.

Somewhere earlier in this thread I defined morals/ethics (which seem to be actually synonyms) as "the study of the emotions of living creatures which are capable of emotions, most notably humans".

What is the well-being of an eaten antelope?

A dead creature has no emotions. In the case of bacteria and gnats, it has no mourning living relatives either. In case of humans, the trauma of surviving relatives and friends is significant and long-lasting. In case of antelopes... idunno, haven´t researched their psychology in the aftermath of losing a friend.

 

[Democracy Simulator]

I’m going to move on from is/ought, because we are going round in circles. To address some of Harris’ other arguments:

Harris writes, on page 37 of TML:

It is essential to see that the demand for radical justification levelled by the moral skeptic could not be met by any branch of science. Science is defined with reference to understanding the processes at work in the universe. Can we justify this goal scientifically? Of course not. Does this make science itself unscientific?

Sam Harris is right: Science itself is not unscientific, because it is a matter of definition that it would be contradictory if it were so. Scientific knowledge is limited to knowledge gained through the application of scientific methodologies based on the assumption of the axioms of science. However, Sam Harris' moral knowledge assumes axioms pertaining to moral truth that are additional to the axioms of science and the definition of what science is, therefore any moral knowledge he speaks of is not scientific knowledge. If Harris had called his book: ‘How science can determine factors of well-being’, I would have less beef with him as this would be a more honest representation of his arguments and vastly less contentious. Instead, Harris assumes moral truth and claims that moral truth (the basis for moral knowledge) is scientific knowledge, but if it assumes axioms extra to science (moral truth should be based on the well-being of conscious creatures), it cannot be. Limiting the discussion of moral truth to science, does not make moral truth real or scientific.

To use an analogy, If I assumed a priori that God existed and that the minds of conscious creatures were a reflection of the mind of God, I could then study the minds of conscious creatures, with the claim that I could find scientific knowledge about them which would give me the knowledge of the mind of God. Yet how ‘scientific’ would my system of God-knowledge be?

Harris makes a similar axiomatic assumption (i.e. one that cannot be proved by logic and evidence), yet claims that this begins a science of morality. We should be a bit dubious of this type of ‘science’.

If we assume additional axioms and present our arguments as science, then they are, by definition not science. Something else has muddied the water.

The comparison to health is a red herring as there are not extra ‘competing axioms’ of health and any 'undecidability' of the healthiness of an action can be, in principal, solved by having better knowledge of the physical world. In contrast, there are many competing moral axioms that cannot be decided by reference to evidence. Indeed there is great doubt as to whether moral axioms are meaningful or whether moral statements can be truth bearing. Certainly the opposite cases cannot be proven. Also, there are plenty of 'hard cases' which can be easily quoted which demonstrate the difficulty of deciding between moral axioms. As far as I am aware, there are no 'hard cases' of health that cannot in principle be decided by science alone.
Also, there are particular single actions that are unhealthy for everyone, e.g. being vaporised in a nuclear blast, and therefore there is a clear objective basis for health.

Harris' 'objective basis for morality' argument is flawed. He imagines the 'worst possible misery for everyone' as providing an objective basis for moral knowledge. Yet there is a problem with this which does not pertain to the 'nuclear blast' example I used for health:

1. Even if we could understand what the 'worst possible misery for everyone' universe looked like (which we do not), there would be no action that would be universally 'worst miserable' for everyone (whereas the nuclear blast is universally unhealthy for everyone). The worst possible misery would be slightly different for everyone, depending on what they subjectively found worst miserable.

2. Therefore we can draw no legitimate moral knowledge from this supposed 'objective' basis for moral knowledge, even if we accepted Harris' axiom about well-being. What objective moral laws or truths can we draw from a situation that provides only the subjective knowledge that this or that scenario is worst miserable for this or that person? The example is self-defeating. It shouldn't be surprising that when we check out this supposed objective basis for moral knowledge we only find a mirror of the subjective disagreements concerning morality.

On page 39 of TLM Harris says:

It is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for everyone

This premise is meaningless and useless. For a start we do not know what the worst possible misery for everyone is, so we cannot know how to avoid behaving in such a way as to avoid it. It is a useless place to start, unless we wish to defer doing morality for who-knows how long. Also, even if we did know what the worst possible misery for everyone was and this was practically avoidable, this would be different for every individual, so in moving every individual away from their worst possible misery, we would be able to gain precisely no moral knowledge of the kind that Sam Harris would like, whereby we can scientifically tell the Taliban they are bad. We cannot move from moving everyone away from their own worst misery, to anywhere else. Harris' argument of 'worst possible misery' actually ends up being an argument for moral relativism.

There is also another massive problem for Harris which magnifies all his other problems. Harris says that the well-being of conscious creatures must be the basis for deciding values. Yet he does not seem to provide a working definition of what consciousness entails or a justification of his definition as a dividing line in terms of well being. If we assume that Harris has a broad definition in mind, simply ‘the capacity to feel well-being or otherwise’, we must include the well-being of all conscious creatures in the entire universe into our ‘worst possible misery for everyone’ formula. If it wasn’t bad enough already, perhaps if we start removing Harris' anthropocentric arguments and replace the words ‘human’ and everyone’ with ‘all conscious creatures in the universe’, we can see how distorted, truly subjective and meaningless his supposed objective basis for morality becomes. We have to start wondering what the worst possible misery for individual tadpoles looks like, if they have the capacity to feel pain and how much tadpole worst possible misery equals one human worst possible misery, (if we presume that all human worst possible misery is an equal amount of misery, which is almost certainly either meaningless, undecidable or wrong). As anyone should see, this is only going to lead to truths of the most subjective kind.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

The incoherence is that you are equating logical propositions with claims. "X" (as a claim) is precisely equivalent to "X is true". That's what it means to claim something. If "X is true" is false, then X is false.

The claim "X" is not equivalent to "X is true" if "X" is a moral claim. In that case "X" is neither true nor false. When I say "the US public health care system is morally atrocious" I am expressing a value judgment which is neither true nor false, for example.

Okay, then your so-called moral claims are not moral at all. "If you value thriving and disvalue suffering, you should do X" is therefore not a moral claim at all but a simple factual one.

If I were to say "If you value X, you should think you should do Y" that could be a true factual statement.

If I were to say "X is morally valuable, which means you should do Y" that compound statement is neither true nor false, and is not factual.

(If I were to say "It's a psychological fact that I think X is morally valuable", that too would be a factual claim).

If you accept, as you do, that at least one axiom is needed to make a moral claim, the you are a moral nihilist. All moral claims are of the form "if my ought axiom is true, then X" so they are neither prescriptive nor descriptive.

You were the one who insisted on that formulation, which is indeed subtly wrong, but there were bigger errors to iron out so I didn't press the issue.

Moral claims are indeed strictly speaking of the form "I believe X is moral", not "If I believe X is moral then...".

No, what makes those theories non-prescriptive is that all their results are conditional on the truth of their root ought axiom.

How many times am I going to have to repeat that axioms are neither true nor false?

But then your argument is entirely circular. "Moral truths are outside of science because I won't add the axioms needed to find them because they aren't needed for science because moral truths are outside of science, but I'll add the axioms needed to find all kinds of other truths."

Not even close. To begin with, moral claims aren't truths or falsehoods. So that part of your thesis is just plain wrong.

Moreover, I'm gratified that you think I'm the ruler of the planet but it turns out that I'm actually not and that I don't get to personally define what science is. There is already a well-defined understanding of what science is, and it doesn't include any moral axioms.

If you want to start tacking new axioms on to science, then you have to start calling your new creation something else. I would suggest "religion", or "philosophy".

 

[JoelKatz]

The claim "X" is not equivalent to "X is true" if "X" is a moral claim. In that case "X" is neither true nor false. When I say "the US public health care system is morally atrocious" I am expressing a value judgment which is neither true nor false, for example.

This is the same incoherent claim just in new dressing. If "the US public health care system is morally atrocious" is a value judgment, then it is precisely the same as saying "I have made the value judgment that the US public health care system is morally atrocious". (And, in fact, any rational person would interpret these two statements as saying precisely the same thing.) This is either true or false, you either have made that judgment or you haven't.

If I were to say "If you value X, you should think you should do Y" that could be a true factual statement.

If I were to say "X is morally valuable, which means you should do Y" that compound statement is neither true nor false, and is not factual.

But then what *is* it? To the extent it means you consider X to be morally valuable, it's a true claim. What is the sense in which it is not factual? I genuinely do not know, and I strongly suspect that you don't know either. But if you do, please explain.

(If I were to say "It's a psychological fact that I think X is morally valuable", that too would be a factual claim).

Precisely. So what is this sense in which you claim it's not a fact? I don't know.

Moral claims are indeed strictly speaking of the form "I believe X is moral", not "If I believe X is moral then...".

Then they are factual claims. The person actually does believe that. If that is, strictly speaking, what they are, then strictly speaking, they are either true or false. Someone either has or does not have that belief.

How many times am I going to have to repeat that axioms are neither true nor false?

You can say it as many times as you want and it will still be a serious misunderstanding of the role of axioms. Axioms can be true or false -- just not within the same context in which they are an axiom. Any conclusions based on an axiom are valid truths in another context where the axiom is true and not an axiom.

For example, an axiom of Euclidean geometry is "parallel lines, no matter how far extended, do not meet". This is not, in the abstract, true or false. That's what makes it an axiom. But on an uncurved surface, the axiom is true. In that context, it is no longer an axiom. The principles of Euclidean geometry are truths in contexts where their axioms are truths. In other contexts, they are simply consequences of their axioms and not truths (unless you treat them as conditional on their axioms).

Any conclusions based on an axiom are *never* to be considered true in any context in which the axiom cannot justifiably be considered true. Doing so is a misuse of axioms. That is why the conclusions of Euclidean geometry are *not* true except as conditioned on the truth of the axioms. The apparently conflicting conclusions of Euclidean geometry and of non-Euclidean geometry are all truths, and they do not conflict even though they appear to do so, because their truth is conditioned on the contextual truth of conflicting axioms.

If you need an axiom that cannot ever be true for procscriptive morality to function, then all conclusions therefrom are conditional truths. If you hold your position consistently, it will lead inexorably to moral nihilism.

 

[Democracy Simulator]

If you need an axiom that cannot ever be true for procscriptive morality to function, then all conclusions therefrom are conditional truths. If you hold your position consistently, it will lead inexorably to moral nihilism.

Isn't that the genuine 'scienitific version' of morality? if we make no assumptions outside of science then we are left with nihilism (or error theory, or non-cognitivism for example).

So, therefore, isn't Sam Harris' project ultimately unscientific? Or not as scienitific as nihilism?

 

[JoelKatz]

Isn't that the genuine 'scienitific version' of morality? if we make no assumptions outside of science then we are left with nihilism (or error theory, or non-cognitivism for example).

That is the inexorable conclusion of the (IMO incorrect) argument that you need an axiom that is not true in order to reach any proscriptive conclusions. However, as I've argued, value judgments are in fact relational truths.

So, therefore, isn't Sam Harris' project ultimately unscientific? Or not as scienitific as nihilism?

This argument is invalid because it is based on special pleading and circular reasoning. However, the most obvious way to show the problem is probably thus -- If proscriptive moral truths are outside of science, then all truths are outside of science. If science can't tell us that we *shouldn't* accept that something is true without evidence or that we *should* reject some claim if evidence falsifies it, how can it possibly work?