Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

[Beth]

That's ironic, because I'm not the one claiming that science establishes goals. If science can answer moral questions in the first place, science can establish goals, since a moral statement is the establishment of a desired goal. I'm not sure if you understand my position, because you're actually supporting my point here.



So science can give an answer that doesn't describe the universe, but instead is a subjective characterization? Science creates its own subjective characterization then? Science doesn't work this way. Precisely my point.

Given a subjectively established goal, like the well-being of conscious creatures, science can establish sub-goals, such as providing adequate food, shelter and medical care to all such creatures and measure whether actions taken resulted in improvement or not. Science can observe and characterize subjective aspects of the universe.

My understanding is the Linda is arguing that given that initial goal, science can be used to observe and understand how our actions contribute to those goals. I think, hopefully she will correct me if I'm mistaken, she is arguing that the establishing of such goals is either unimportant or uninteresting. What is important and/or interesting is that we can use science determine what approaches to achieving the goals are most effective. She does not seem to understand why others feel that the establishment of such goals is of great importance.

Harris, in chapter 3 of his book, claims that belief about moral statements and statements of fact, like 2 + 2 = 4, are similar neurologically in important ways and provides evidence of that.

 

[AlBell]

We are all philosophers one way or another, and until one decides (unscientifically) one ought to examine some question, nothing changes.

Well, despite my appellation, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot be a philosopher because I don't seem interested in declarations of what cannot be done or what cannot be known. I am also grateful that scientists haven't listened to these declarations and have simply gone about the business of making quite wondrous discoveries by violating them.

You and piggy need to compare notes on your respective my-philosophy-is-not-philosophy philosophies.

You appear to pretend this fact doesn't exist.

More like, recognizing that this 'fact' doesn't exist gets me to knowledge that would otherwise be inaccessible to me.

Linda

It must be fun to pretend facts you don't like aren't facts. And your statement is a load of pap, but believe it if it helps you sleep better.

 

[fls]

Woah. You mean Harris' "science can answer moral questions" is entirely about subjective experience and subjective/axiomatic questions? So in this case science doesn't describe the Universe?

If good/bad aren't described by science, how can science answer good/bad questions?

Science addresses questions about good and bad by referring to the source of that characterization. That is, since actions can only be characterized by humans as good and bad based on processes in the human brain, reference is made to those processes. Whether or not good/bad characterizations happen to correspond to some other way of characterizing actions, such as on the basis of mortality, perceptions of well-being, or utility, can also be investigated. There is clearly some correspondence between these other ways of characterizing actions and good/bad characterizations, but there are also conflicts. A choice to characterize an action as good or bad on the basis of an objective characteristic, such as a perception of well-being, should not be confused with the subjective perception of good and bad.

To state that moral actions are about the well-being of conscious creatures does not mean that an objective characteristic, well-being, has been chosen as the characteristic of interest, instead of the subjective perceptions of good and bad. It means that the domain of brain processes which are involved in the perceptions of good and bad are those which relate to our perceptions about the well-being of conscious creatures, as opposed to something like the domain of processes relating to reading a book or playing a sport.

Linda

 

[fls]

"when knowledge can't be gained by science, fake that it does so you can feel more secure/righteous in your morality"

In that case, I was thinking instead of stuff like gauge symmetry or the indeterminacy of elemental particles. However, if we want to look at morality, we wouldn't know that altering the degree of impersonal decision-making alters the extent to which the pre-frontal cortex vs. the amygdala is activated and alters the extent to which a decision is considered morally acceptable, if scientists had blindly followed proscriptions as to non-overlapping magisteria.

Linda

 

[Beth]

In that case, I was thinking instead of stuff like gauge symmetry or the indeterminacy of elemental particles. However, if we want to look at morality, we wouldn't know that altering the degree of impersonal decision-making alters the extent to which the pre-frontal cortex vs. the amygdala is activated and alters the extent to which a decision is considered morally acceptable, if scientists had blindly followed proscriptions as to non-overlapping magisteria.

Linda

This is quite interesting. Could you give a cite for further reading? Thanks.

 

[fls]

That's ironic, because I'm not the one claiming that science establishes goals. If science can answer moral questions in the first place, science can establish goals, since a moral statement is the establishment of a desired goal. I'm not sure if you understand my position, because you're actually supporting my point here.

I think you're right, that I haven't yet understood your point, because as it is, it appears contradictory. It seems to be that science can investigate morals once a goal has been established. That is, a goal (i.e. a characteristic of interest such as a life-saved or a sense of well-being, whose choice depends upon a human's values) is chosen a priori, and scientific investigation shows you how to achieve that goal. The choosing of the a priori goal cannot be got at through science, however, since it represents human values whose descriptions vary. Science can describe those values, but it doesn't provide a way to single out one description from another, so it doesn't provide a way to resolve conflict between two different descriptions a priori. On the other hand, were those descriptions to all be the same, then the goal would be obvious. The goal would be the description of human values.

Here is where it is inconsistent or contradictory. The last sentence in the above paragraph demonstrates that it isn't about is's and ought's, but simply about consistency, so all this reference to Hume et. al. is a red herring. Scientific investigation reveals that there is far more consistency in human values than there are difference. That is, it is scientific investigation which is taking us to that purported goal. But more importantly, it hasn't been explained where the idea comes from that science is being asked to establish goals. That is, science can be said to answer moral questions only if it is science which prescribes what it is that humans value. Yet it doesn't seem to bother us that science does not prescribe the shape of the universe or the number of species. We still manage to propose that science can answer cosmological or biological questions.

So science can give an answer that doesn't describe the universe, but instead is a subjective characterization?

Science would be describing the universe, unless you are suggesting that human brains are not part of the universe?

Science creates its own subjective characterization then?

No, the description and investigation of subjective characterizations is one of the many things which are amenable to scientific inquiry.

Well, that's your red herring. I'm not interested in arguing about subjective characterizations in general, which would be a much broader and distracting discussion. Color can be measured. Please provide evidence of objective distastefulness.

Colour can't be measured objectively in the sense that one can measure a wavelength and claim that this is the colour "red", since it won't be perceived as red without contex, and within context, it may be perceived as any one of a number of different colours depending upon that context.

However, if you are not interested in actions which are perceived as good or bad, why are you arguing with me?

Linda

 

[fls]

You and piggy need to compare notes on your respective my-philosophy-is-not-philosophy philosophies.

I didn't say I don't have a philosophy, I said I don't seem to be a philosopher.

It must be fun to pretend facts you don't like aren't facts. And your statement is a load of pap, but believe it if it helps you sleep better.

What are you going on about? How can a claim be factual if it can be violated at will?

Linda

 

[fls]

This is quite interesting. Could you give a cite for further reading? Thanks.

http://www.pni.princeton.edu/ncc/PDFs/Moral Reasoning/Greene et al (Science 01).pdf

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-etal-Neuron04.pdf

Linda

 

[AlBell]

I didn't say I don't have a philosophy, I said I don't seem to be a philosopher.

What.ever

What are you going on about?

That's been the question to you since the thread started.

Move along; nothing to see here.

 

[openingmind]

I picked up The Moral Lanscape the other day and I've a bit. I watched the TED talk with Sam Harris and admired it quite a bit.

I agree with him that science has valuable input for the common moral knowledge.

The big question looming in my mind, though, is...Okay, so suppose every changes their mind and says "Yes, science can answer moral question." Will the morals that science puts forth any different than the moderate, average moral knowledge of thousands of years of civilization?

Will science come up with anything better than the Golden Rule?

 

[Kuko 4000]

Harris' latest response to what he thinks are the more serious and common criticisms to his book (such as this one by Russell Blackford) is now online. In a nutshell:

It seems to me that there are three, distinct challenges put forward thus far:

1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value well-being, our own or anyone else's. (The Value Problem)

2. Hence, if someone does not care about well-being, or cares only about his own and not about the well-being of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)

3. Even if we did agree to grant "well-being" primacy in any discussion of morality, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure well-being scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of morality. (The Measurement Problem)

I believe all of these challenges are the product of philosophical confusion. The simplest way to see this is by analogy to medicine and the mysterious quantity we call "health." Let's swap "morality" for "medicine" and "well-being" for "health" and see how things look:

1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value health, our own or anyone else's. (The Value Problem)

2. Hence, if someone does not care about health, or cares only about his own and not about the health of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)

3. Even if we did agree to grant "health" primacy in any discussion of medicine, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure health scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of medicine. (The Measurement Problem)

Read the whole piece from here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-response-to-critics_b_815742.html

 

[bokonon]

The big question looming in my mind, though, is...Okay, so suppose every changes their mind and says "Yes, science can answer moral question." Will the morals that science puts forth any different than the moderate, average moral knowledge of thousands of years of civilization?

Will science come up with anything better than the Golden Rule?

I think it will be better than the Golden Rule, and similar on most issues to the moderate, average moral knowledge of thousands of years of civilization.

I think the goal for Harris is to move beyond the "no better or worse, just different" moral relativism that makes many people reluctant to criticize societies which attempt to achieve social stability through repression, for instance.

 

[Dragoonster]

Thanks for the link Kuko. Harris as in the past seems no more than a grad student (or actually underclassman) on philosophy.

For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds -- and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomenon, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science.

No, morality in conscious minds is not specifically about "well-being" and "suffering", idiot. Have you ever visited Burma, or The Congo? Or an inner city in the US? Some consci0ous creatures belive morality is promoting their own "well-being", even it takes raping and macheteing to death others.

Many critics claim that my reliance on the concept of "well-being" is arbitrary and philosophically indefensible. Who's to say that well-being is important at all or that other things aren't far more important? How, for instance, could you convince someone who does not value well-being that he should, in fact, value it? And even if one could justify well-being as the true foundation for morality, many have argued that one would need a "metric" by which it could be measured -- else there could be no such thing as moral truth in the scientific sense. There seems to be a unnecessarily restrictive notion of science underlying this last claim -- as though scientific truths only exist if we can have immediate and uncontroversial access to them in the lab. The physicist Sean Carroll has written a fair amount against me on this point (again, without having read my book), and he is in the habit of saying things like, "I don't know what a unit of well-being is," as though he were regretfully delivering the killing blow to my thesis. I would venture that Carroll doesn't know what a unit of depression is either -- and units of joy, disgust, boredom, irony, envy, or any other mental state worth studying won't be forthcoming. If half of what Carroll says about the limits of science is true, the sciences of mind are not merely doomed, there would be no facts for them to understand in the first place.

So many evasive words, so little definition of "well-being".

Everyone bless the new cleric, Sam Harris. Surely his words mean something if we only just believe and trust in Him.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

The man's got a book to sell.

His analogy to health is interesting. I wonder if he got it from reading Linda's posts?

I also wonder why he thinks medicine is the scientific study of health, or that it provides any unconditional answers as to what is healthy?

 

[Earthborn]

Will the morals that science puts forth any different than the moderate, average moral knowledge of thousands of years of civilization?

Perhaps. If we look at other scientific knowledge, we can be sure it would be so freakishly complicated that specialists can understand only tiny parts of it and it would be incomprehensible to the moderate average people, who will largely ignore it. It would also be constantly in doubt, continuously criticised and always in danger of being overthrown by completely new paradigm. Or more than paradigm will appear to be correct, but also appear mutually unreconcilable.

Sam Harris wants to use science as the firm ground on which to build morality. Unfortunately science happens to be stormy sea.

I think the goal for Harris is to move beyond the "no better or worse, just different" moral relativism that makes many people reluctant to criticize societies which attempt to achieve social stability through repression, for instance.

I consider myself a moral relativist as I believe that "there is no objective measure one can use to determine which is better and which is worse, just that it is different", but I am not reluctant to criticise societies which attempt to achieve social stability through repression (are there societies that do not?).

Some consci0ous creatures belive morality is promoting their own "well-being", even it takes raping and macheteing to death others.

Harris will probably say that since their morality doesn't promote "well-being", their morality is "wrong".

So many evasive words, so little definition of "well-being".

I think that is covered by his idea of a "moral landscape", in which people can have differing definitions of well-being, and therefore there can be different high points in the moral landscape. That way he doesn't have to present his own definition. Which is just as well, as we know that his viciously anti-religious views would make his definition utterly unacceptable to the vast majority of people.

It appears that he is still using "well-being of conscious creatures" and "human well-being" interchangeably. They are not the same thing. I think he came up with the concept of "well-being of conscious creatures" to try to include vegetarian and animal rights moralities into his "moral landscape". Of course it excludes everyone of us who believes there is nothing inherently wrong with preparing conscious creatures for dinner. It also demands a rigorous scientific definition of "consciousness", which isn't very likely.

 

[bokonon]

No, morality in conscious minds is not specifically about "well-being" and "suffering", idiot. Have you ever visited Burma, or The Congo? Or an inner city in the US? Some consci0ous creatures belive morality is promoting their own "well-being", even it takes raping and macheteing to death others.

Presumably you agree with them that rape and murder are morally good.

His analogy to health is interesting. I wonder if he got it from reading Linda's posts?

Since he makes the same analogy in the book, only if Linda's posts were public before it was published.

I consider myself a moral relativist as I believe that "there is no objective measure one can use to determine which is better and which is worse, just that it is different", but I am not reluctant to criticise societies which attempt to achieve social stability through repression (are there societies that do not?).

On what basis, then, do you presume to criticize them? If they are no better and no worse, why is criticizing them even a worthwhile activity?

 

[cyborg]

Expecting objective answers to the correct behaviours of machines devised by chaos seems... optimistic.

 

[Dragoonster]

Presumably you agree with them that rape and murder are morally good.

Me? No

They? Yes

Science? Who knows, I haven't seen Harris' calculation that solves this question now and for eternity and in every hypothetical circumstance. Have you? What use is "science can answer moral questions" if it's more like "science can potentially answer moral questions, in time, if we understand more..."?

Perhaps. If we look at other scientific knowledge, we can be sure it would be so freakishly complicated that specialists can understand only tiny parts of it and it would be incomprehensible to the moderate average people, who will largely ignore it. It would also be constantly in doubt, continuously criticised and always in danger of being overthrown by completely new paradigm. Or more than paradigm will appear to be correct, but also appear mutually unreconcilable.

This and Ivor's post reminds me of a personal annoyance I've had in the last couple decades--scientists (or at least the media) continually contradicting themselves as to what is healthy. When I was in college the big news was that bread was awful and no one should ever eat it; then it was healthy and everyone should eat it. Same IIRC for eggs, alcohol, salt, various types of sugar, etc. etc. If "science" can't even settle health questions "for good", what chance does it have for much more ephemeral moral questions?

It appears that he is still using "well-being of conscious creatures" and "human well-being" interchangeably. They are not the same thing. I think he came up with the concept of "well-being of conscious creatures" to try to include vegetarian and animal rights moralities into his "moral landscape". Of course it excludes everyone of us who believes there is nothing inherently wrong with preparing conscious creatures for dinner. It also demands a rigorous scientific definition of "consciousness", which isn't very likely.

Yeah, this is a great point. I wonder how Peter Singer feels about Harris' views, particularly with this lazy conceit.

And it again highlights that Harris' entire concept is only painted in extremely broad strokes, without rigorous definitions, without logic proofs, without much of anything that would distinguish his theories from any non-scientific claims.

If science can answer moral questions where religion, sociology, etc. can't, then it would sure behoove him and his scientific theory to actually scientifically answer them.

 

[fls]

This and Ivor's post reminds me of a personal annoyance I've had in the last couple decades--scientists (or at least the media) continually contradicting themselves as to what is healthy. When I was in college the big news was that bread was awful and no one should ever eat it; then it was healthy and everyone should eat it. Same IIRC for eggs, alcohol, salt, various types of sugar, etc. etc. If "science" can't even settle health questions "for good", what chance does it have for much more ephemeral moral questions?

I suspect you are confusing "media reporting on the results of scientific investigation" with "the actual results of scientific investigation." The two often have little resemblance to each other.

Linda

 

[AlBell]

I suspect you are confusing "media reporting on the results of scientific investigation" with "the actual results of scientific investigation." The two often have little resemblance to each other.

Linda

That sounds like a small taste of the problem the scientific analysis of moral questions will face.

ps. Is it scientifically ok to eat eggs?