Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

[Kevin_Lowe]

My moral theories are entirely consistent. If they don't happen to fit nicely into your ism boxes, well, that's not my problem.

"I say two plus two is five, and my maths are entirely consistent. It's not my problem if you want to pigeonhole me with your fascist definitions of two, five, plus and equals".

 

[Piggy]

Why should I care about what other people like? The mere fact that they dislike it is meaningless, unless you also make some kind of value judgment to the effect that it is morally better not to make other people suffer.

It is impossible to have rational discussions with people who insist on making Black Knight arguments. All you can do is ride on.

 

[Piggy]

"I say two plus two is five, and my maths are entirely consistent. It's not my problem if you want to pigeonhole me with your fascist definitions of two, five, plus and equals".

Funny that, from the Platonist.

The sensible man picks up two rocks, then another two rocks, and sees that he now holds four.

Then he moves on to other matters.

 

[Dani]

This one's for Piggy:

How can science answer questions when two or more options lead to different situations that can provide the same amount of happiness to the individual?

 

[Piggy]

This one's for Piggy:

How can science answer questions when two or more options lead to different situations that can provide the same amount of happiness to the individual?

Well, as I said in the "objective morality" thread, and as Harris has also said in his talk, science cannot answer all the questions.

Just because we can use science (especially biology) as an objective basis for morality doesn't mean that reality is obliged to hand us answerable questions every time.

There's absolutely no reason why we can't be confronted by cases in which conflicting claims are evenly balanced.

 

[Dani]

Well, as I said in the "objective morality" thread, and as Harris has also said in his talk, science cannot answer all the questions.

Just because we can use science (especially biology) as an objective basis for morality doesn't mean that reality is obliged to hand us answerable questions every time.

There's absolutely no reason why we can't be confronted by cases in which conflicting claims are evenly balanced.

I agree. And there's where we make a moral decision. Morals assume values, and values aren't facts. Values can be based in facts (biological) but are experienced as conscious decisions about our behavior, not as conscious decisions about what's true.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

It is impossible to have rational discussions with people who insist on making Black Knight arguments. All you can do is ride on.

Ride on, sir.

Just out of curiousity, are there any other fields besides ethics and logic which you feel you are an expert in on the basis of "I went for a walk! Duh, it's obvious!"? Or did your walk only make you the world's foremost authority on those two topics?

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

Kant was very explicit that you should absolutely ignore outcomes, and focus only on acts. If "moral" acts lead to a completely undesirable outcome, as far as he was concerned that was just tough cookies.

Acts still leave their residue on the universe, not just in the outcome of a particular moral concern but also by memories, recordings, etc. A moral fitness function can easily take this into account.

Jesus was pretty clear that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you (which probably made him a fun guy at singles bars), which excludes all sorts of things like killing people in a just cause which can in theory lead to good outcomes.

Again, acts leave a trace. One might argue that the principle of a matter is more important in the long run than a particular individual's death, say. It is not difficult to create a fitness function that incorporates this concept.

Nihilism by definition rejects the very idea of a moral fitness function.

Equivalently, it says that the fitness function is very simple--it returns the same value for any action.

In other words, most of what you are saying is totally wrong.

Try again.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[Piggy]

I agree. And there's where we make a moral decision. Morals assume values, and values aren't facts. Values can be based in facts (biological) but are experienced as conscious decisions about our behavior, not as conscious decisions about what's true.

But then the question becomes: Where do we get the values?

And if we posit external sources for those values, there's another question lurking there: Why do we choose those sources?

Values are facts, after all, you see.

And there are facts underlying all our values, whether we go with our guts, or choose to cite scripture, or anything else.

 

[Piggy]

Ride on, sir.

Just out of curiousity, are there any other fields besides ethics and logic which you feel you are an expert in on the basis of "I went for a walk! Duh, it's obvious!"? Or did your walk only make you the world's foremost authority on those two topics?

I was merely recommending that you get some air. And that you make some sort of attempt to base your assertions at least in part on actual observation of the real world and real people, rather than abstract systems of logic which have little bearing on actual people and how they behave and how their brains operate.

You know Charles Darwin made a few interesting contributions to our understanding of the world and ourselves based on his rambles in the countryside.

 

[Dani]

But then the question becomes: Where do we get the values?

And if we posit external sources for those values, there's another question lurking there: Why do we choose those sources?

Values are facts, after all, you see.

And there are facts underlying all our values, whether we go with our guts, or choose to cite scripture, or anything else.

I don't follow you. What do you mean by "posit external sources for those values"?

Values are facts as thoughts, as processes that occur in our brains, not as concepts that have a correspondence with the reality. "More social equality is desirable" is not a fact from the world, but a moral thought. Yes, it's a fact because it's happening in my brain, but Superman also happens in my brain and doesn't have a correspondence with reality.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Acts still leave their residue on the universe, not just in the outcome of a particular moral concern but also by memories, recordings, etc. A moral fitness function can easily take this into account.

You're still getting Kant completely wrong. He just does not care about outcomes, full stop. He does not care what residue acts leave on the universe.

He doesn't even care if his good acts themselves cause more or fewer good acts by others in the future. "Do good, though the heavens fall" is Kant's theory.

Again, acts leave a trace. One might argue that the principle of a matter is more important in the long run than a particular individual's death, say. It is not difficult to create a fitness function that incorporates this concept.

Again you are trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole, and handwaving away the important bits that you have sheared off. Jesus definitely never said "Kill a few dudes if you have to, if it's a good cause". He wasn't a utilitarian in any meaningful sense, he was a kind of radical communist deontologist.

Equivalently, it says that the fitness function is very simple--it returns the same value for any action.

That is not at all the same thing. Zero is not the same thing as "that was a stupid question". A nihilist would say that there is no such thing as a moral fitness function, not that all outcomes are morally equal, because to a nihilist there is no such thing as "morally equal". To them you might as well be asserting that all colourless green dreams sleep equally furiously.

Try again.

- Dr. Trintignant

I don't think I need to - the violence you are doing to both utilitarianism and every other theory you try to shoehorn into it is still fairly extreme.

Kant, Jesus and nihilists simply aren't maximalist, universalist utility-maximisers however you define utility as far as I can see. Their moral theories are different enough that trying to redefine them all as subtypes of a particular kind of consequentialism is actively counterproductive to understanding or applying them.

 

[Piggy]

I don't follow you. What do you mean by "posit external sources for those values"?

Well, for example, fundamentalists posit their scriptures as external sources for their values. They see their values as coming not from themselves, but from divine revelation.

Values are facts as thoughts, as processes that occur in our brains, not as concepts that have a correspondence with the reality. "More social equality is desirable" is not a fact from the world, but a moral thought. Yes, it's a fact because it's happening in my brain, but Superman also happens in my brain and doesn't have a correspondence with reality.

Well, like Superman, values don't need to have a correspondence with reality.

But the scientific/biological approach begins with values-as-facts in themselves.

Here are our values, in all their strange variety.

Now, how do we make a moral choice between, say, the Taliban's custom of essentially treating women as men's property, on the one hand, and the modern Western approach of recognizing women as having equal (if not identical) rights with men?

Well, the Taliban point to their book to argue that their judgments are correct.

A bio-sci approach looks to science to determine that the brains of women and men are not different in any way that should make women suffer less from confinement, restriction, and being treated like property, much less being subject to punishments such as having their noses, eyes, and lips cut off for failing to conform to such treatment.

Are these two ways of viewing the question equally valid? Are they "arbitrary"?

No, and no.

They are not equally valid because scripture can say anything at all, and has a track record of being demonstrably wrong on all sorts of verifiable points, whereas science has demonstrably led to concrete advancements of knowledge and understanding of our world.

They are not arbitrary for the same reason.

So science cuts through both Gordian knots.

Moreover, science can help us understand why people do cling to scripture in the face of contrary evidence.

But it doesn't stop there.

Science helps us decide how to handle the situation in which these values clash. Just because science offers us an objective basis for our moral decisions, it does not follow from there that we can simply ignore the opinions of religious fundamentalists.

No, we must take them into account because they are a reality, and so we can use science to help us understand how to properly address a situation like religious persecution without inadvertently making the situation worse by being heavy-handed about it and simply ignoring human nature.

At every turn, science can inform our decisions and actions: the is, the ought, and the should.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

A bio-sci approach looks to science to determine that the brains of women and men are not different in any way that should make women suffer less from confinement, restriction, and being treated like property, much less being subject to punishments such as having their noses, eyes, and lips cut off for failing to conform to such treatment.

Again I ask you, so what? So what if they do not suffer less?

It only matters that they suffer if you have made a prior value judgment that other people's suffering matters, or that justice is good. Those are not scientific facts.

Even if you found some wiring in the brain that made us think these things are good, that would still be utterly irrelevant to the question of whether we should think them to be good. Just as finding wiring that made people think slavery was good would not morally validate slavery, finding wiring that makes people think utilitarianism is good would not morally validate utilitarianism.

Really, the very idea is laughable. Unless you believe in some flavour of Intelligent Design, you have to acknowledge that our brains evolved to maximise our reproductive success, not to uphold universal moral truths, and that maximising our reproductive success is not all there is to morality.

Are these two ways of viewing the question equally valid? Are they "arbitrary"?

No, and no.

They are not equally valid because scripture can say anything at all, and has a track record of being demonstrably wrong on all sorts of verifiable points, whereas science has demonstrably led to concrete advancements of knowledge and understanding of our world.

They are not both equally valid as arbiters of fact. Science does not claim to be an arbiter when it comes to value judgments, however, and people like you and Harris who try to elevate it to the status of a moral oracle both misunderstand it and do it a disservice.

 

[Piggy]

Again I ask you, so what? So what if they do not suffer less?

It only matters that they suffer if you have made a prior value judgment that other people's suffering matters, or that justice is good. Those are not scientific facts.

Kevin, if you simply decide to ignore reality and live in your little abstract Platonic bubble, I suppose you can pretend that it doesn't matter at all.

The trouble is, nobody really lives there. It's just a fantasy.

I deal with the actual reality I live in.

 

[Piggy]

They are not both equally valid as arbiters of fact. Science does not claim to be an arbiter when it comes to value judgments, however, and people like you and Harris who try to elevate it to the status of a moral oracle both misunderstand it and do it a disservice.

That's begging the question, my friend.

In any case, the question is not whether "science claims to be an arbiter of value judgments" -- as if science could claim anything, but that's for another thread -- but rather, whether or not science can or cannot inform our moral decisions.

Harris (and Pinker) proposes that science has just as much value to us in deciding moral questions as it does in deciding questions such as where to route a railroad. And he's right.

It would make no sense to argue that science is irrelevant to the question of where to put a railroad on the grounds that "science does not claim to be an arbiter when it comes to transportation".

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Science can answer the 'ought...if' question.

Oops, oh well. Three out of four ain't bad.

This is the standard answer. I see Harris as thinking outside the box and I have agreed with Harris' premise for many years.

Try looking at the problem a different way.

Most agree science can describe the process of morality. The issue arises when people throw out the usual, science cannot tell you who to love or what is moral, yadda yadda. But everything we use the scientific process for is not simply asking and answering questions. Defining and describing the Universe is a huge part of the function of science.

If I explore the evolution of morality using the scientific process. And I find how the morality function of the brain works, how it evolved, how it is expressed in non-human primates and other non-human animals, how children decide moral questions based on their nature and I tease out what was nurture, and how brains vary in moral reasoning (like we vary in intelligence) vs what defects and and how do they result in an abnormal brain expressing abnormal moral behavior, ... at some point I can develop a very good idea of what the range of human morality is, what the range of abnormal or dysfunctional morality is, and so on. Like it or not this is the 'ought' you seem to think is beyond science.

It takes a paradigm shift. I've gone with the shift and though I've not read Harris' book, and only heard him briefly describe it, I believe Harris has also made the same paradigm shift. One has to stop seeing science as limited in which questions it can and cannot answer. But more importantly one needs to quit viewing certain aspects of the brain as being in some magical realm, outside the observable/detectable Universe.

Can science tell you what is and is not normal intelligence? You have to choose some criteria you are going to define intelligence by. Can science then tell you what is and is not normal morality? Of course it can. Is the fact there is a range of morality that still falls within the range of normal mean one canot view morality using the scientific process? No. These are biological processes within biological brains. There's no magic pixie dust that is sprinkled in the eyes of newborns instilling in them their moral guidance. Nature and nurture, no big mystery here.

 

[Democracy Simulator]

Now, how do we make a moral choice between, say, the Taliban's custom of essentially treating women as men's property, on the one hand, and the modern Western approach of recognizing women as having equal (if not identical) rights with men?

Well, the Taliban point to their book to argue that their judgments are correct.

A bio-sci approach looks to science to determine that the brains of women and men are not different in any way that should make women suffer less from confinement, restriction, and being treated like property, much less being subject to punishments such as having their noses, eyes, and lips cut off for failing to conform to such treatment.

The actual 'hidden' value here is Egalitarianism, which is behind the 'Western Approach' you referred to. Egalitarianism is the value that everyone should be treated equally under law, regardless of physical/social/cultural/religious differences. Therefore, bio-sci has nothing to say about whether Egalitarianism is valid or arbitrary, or right or wrong.

You put forward the argument that women should have the same rights as men because they have the same capacity to suffer as men, which we know because of the facts of bio-science. Behind this argument lies the implicit value that if women did not have the same capacity to suffer as men, they should not have the same rights as men.

So the question I would put to you is how does bio-sci (or any science for that matter) help us decide between Egalitarianism and the approach that you put forward that people should be granted rights according to their capacity to suffer?

 

[Piggy]

@Skeptic Ginger: I don't know that this is Kevin's fundamental problem. Rather, Kevin seems to be wedded to this notion that the process of deciding moral questions must necessarily involve, as a first step, the defining of certain abstract Platonic ideals such as "intrinsic good".

He doesn't appear to be able to even consider a method of approaching morality that is entirely grounded in observable reality and which, therefore, simply dispenses with such purely idealistic notions.

I doubt he will even be able to consider your argument until and unless he kicks off those training wheels, which he appears to have no intention of dispensing with anytime soon.

 

[Piggy]

The actual 'hidden' value here is Egalitarianism, which is behind the 'Western Approach' you referred to. Egalitarianism is the value that everyone should be treated equally under law, regardless of physical/social/cultural/religious differences. Therefore, bio-sci has nothing to say about whether Egalitarianism is valid or arbitrary, or right or wrong.

You put forward the argument that women should have the same rights as men because they have the same capacity to suffer as men, which we know because of the facts of bio-science. Behind this argument lies the implicit value that if women did not have the same capacity to suffer as men, they should not have the same rights as men.

So the question I would put to you is how does bio-sci (or any science for that matter) help us decide between Egalitarianism and the approach that you put forward that people should be granted rights according to their capacity to suffer?

The first step will be to forget the schools and the isms altogether. Then you don't have any choice to make between "Egalitarianism" and any other ism and you can just move on.

Once you do that, then your moral choice will either be informed by science -- which is our best method for determining objective reality -- or it won't.

But in fact, the bio-sci approach does not require that we assess each individual person's capacity for suffering in order to "assign rights".

Which is not to say that it's totally irrelevant.

For instance, a bio-sci approach sides with Terry Schiavo's husband and not her parents because science clearly shows that she has no conscious experience, and that the concept of a "soul" inhabiting her body is nonsense; therefore, she's not being harmed by being taking off of life support.

But that's a rare case. For the most part, we have to come up with general rules that apply to all of us, just because it's manageable.

Anyway, if it were true that women did, in fact, enjoy being subjugated to men and being physically punished for resisting this subjugation, then sure, making them second-class citizens would be fine.

And in fact, there are actual sex differences that may have a real impact on our moral decisions.

For instance, there's good reason to believe that some types of sexual molestation are much more traumatic to girls than to boys. Which means that there's a legitimate argument for unequal punishment.

But that has to be weighed against the reality of social norms which may make such discriminations impractical.

More to the point, there's the case of animal cruelty.

If we eventually crack the problem of how the brain creates consciousness, and we discover, for instance, that dogs have the same sort of capacity for suffering that humans do, but that crickets are no more self-aware than rocks are, then we're justified in prohibiting cruelty to dogs but allowing people to use crickets as fish bait.