The Future of Moral Science

[Tassman]

Which hypotheses are you talking about?

As for "moral axioms", I did not introduce the term to the debate (as far as I can remember), but I think it is a sensible term.

In Sam Harris's case the moral axiom he is working from is that what is morally good is "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures". This is, as we have stated before not a bad place to start from, and will require philosophical justification in the sense that it could be challenged by counter-examples such as "Ah! But what if we had a hospital in which the doctors secretly used every 10,000th patient for spare parts but the hospital itself ended up maximizing the welfare of all the other patients! Is that moral?"

However, the moral axiom is not itself testable empirically: it is asserted. That is to say it is presupposed as being morally good. It ain't science, mate!




And you see mine!



Where do I make this claim? Surely axioms are by their nature unprovable starting points. That is to say assumptions. The question is how safe are the assumptions? In Sam Harris's view his axiom is so clearly safe, he believes, that anyone who disputes it is not worth talking to. I think he has not proved his case, and furthermore he certainly has not done so with science.



Let me humour you a little and break it down. The question is somewhat ambiguous and I think you are struggling with the very ambiguity of it judging by your answers to me and to others.

There are a few distinct ways we can answer the question here:

There's the physiological answer:

How does any human make any decision using their brains? Well, it is a matter of physiology and therefore one amenable to scientific scrutiny. If we ever find out it will be interesting, and I don't doubt that trying to figure out why Person X thinks Thought Y is a scientific question. I think you of the opinion that answering this question somehow will tell us something about normative ethics, but that is not the case. This is a descriptive question and is not to be confused with:

The propositional answer:

In this case, we are looking at propositions distinct from the physiological processes required to think them. In this case, we can ask, "Is it right to eat meat?" and then drill down into it to ask about whether the meat came from a conscious animal, and if it suffered pain, and in what circumstances it would be justified. This is a process of conceptual analysis, and while we may use empirical data to let us know whether the animal felt pain, we still have to make judgments that science can hardly help us with such as "Is it right to cause pain?" Ultimately, we may reach the point that someone like Bentham did in which he sees no other considerations for morality other than pleasure and pain, to the extent that something is considered good if it produces pleasure and bad if it produces pain. If we start with that axiom, then we can find all kinds of ways in which science can help promote one and reduce the other. For example, we can build a pleasure machine in which you can strap in and spend the rest of your life having the serotonin receptors stimulated constantly. Of course, a few philosophers saw something inadequate in that conception of morality and improved on it after that. That's a small sample, and I would be interested to know if you see what is meant by moral axioms now. This is the normative answer.

Then there may be a social answer as well.

I call it that, but essentially what I mean is trying to get others to go along with what you see as self-evidently moral. This is trickier ground, but here we come up against problems of relativism, absolutism and nihilism, to name but a few. Sam Harris is a moral realist, that is he thinks there genuinely are objectively true moral propositions. In his opinion, if people disagree about morality, that's because basically almost everyone is wrong just as much as many people used to believe the world is flat. (As far as I remember this was also something Wowbagger believes). This is the meta-ethical answer, I think.

I'm not entirely sure if this is completely correct, however, so I would welcome constructive feedback from you, Tassman. Also, I would be very happy for feedback from Dani, Cavemonster, Kevin Lowe and anyone else.

Oh, and Wowbagger, if you are still out there.

ETA:Let me also repeat in response to your question, "what are these “moral axioms” of yours and how have you arrived at them?":

"I have not made any axiomatic claims."



Now, now. I go to a lot of pains to explain elementary philosophy to you, can you not realize that I may struggle to understand rarefied gobbledygook?



Because it would be like setting up an empirical enquiry into whether all triangles have three sides. Or whether circles are more sparkly than squares. Or whether purple was more interesting than curry. Or which of the Chuckle Brothers was funniest. It's not a scientific question. That's why!



See above.

It seems from your lengthy exposition, with a little help from Google, that in your view morality will be little more than a matter of opinion depending upon the way you approach it. As for your assertion: “I have not made any axiomatic claims" you nevertheless claim that moral axioms are important even though the only way to arrive at them appears at best to come down to personal opinion. Personally, I think Sam Harris’ approach is a more productive approach to morality event though, as frequently admitted, it has a long way to go.

 

[Tassman]

Ah! Now this is interesting.

You may remember that Sam Harris had a competition for the person who could write the best essay that respectfully rubbished his book The Moral Landscape.

The subject of moral axioms is the heart of the criticism of his book, in an essay by the winner Ryan Born, he criticizes Sam Harris's response to what Sam Harris calls "The Value Problem".

In Sam Harris's afterword to The Moral Landscape, he writes:



He then cites a review from Russell Blackford in which he this point is made.

Sam Harris's answer:



!

I wonder where this leaves Tassman's claim:



Oh no he does not. He says:



I think that's all that needs to be said as it is essentially an admission that it rests on an assumption, although Ryan Born goes further in his winning essay:



Note his use of "moral axioms".

You have not included Harris’ response to Ryan Born: “Clarifying the Moral Landscape - A Response to Ryan Born” in the course of which Harris states:

“Ryan wrote that my “proposed science of morality cannot offer scientific answers to questions of morality and value, because it cannot derive moral judgments solely from scientific descriptions of the world.” But no branch of science can derive its judgments solely from scientific descriptions of the world. We have intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything”.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/clarifying-the-landscape

This, I think deals with many of the issues that have been raised by you and others and has been the approach I’ve taken in this discussion.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

You have not included Harris’ response to Ryan Born: “Clarifying the Moral Landscape - A Response to Ryan Born” in the course of which Harris states:

“Ryan wrote that my “proposed science of morality cannot offer scientific answers to questions of morality and value, because it cannot derive moral judgments solely from scientific descriptions of the world.” But no branch of science can derive its judgments solely from scientific descriptions of the world. We have intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything”.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/clarifying-the-landscape

This, I think deals with many of the issues that have been raised by you and others and has been the approach I’ve taken in this discussion.

Well, no, it hasn't been. To begin with as angrysoba showed you didn't even properly understand what Harris was saying. That is perhaps forgivable since Harris is a skilled obfuscater and equivocator who lards his core of nonsense with heaping helpings of palatable trivialities. He's fooled smarter people than you, to be sure. However it's a bit rich to claim as your thesis a thesis which you manifestly didn't understand.

Also if you actually read and understand Harris you understand that he is pulling what you call a "moral axiom" out of thin air, that moral axiom being welfare utilitarianism, the axiom that what is morally good is to maximise the fulfilment of the preferences persons would have if they were well-informed and rational. That is something Harris is explicitly doing, and which you explicitly claim not to be doing.

This is a perfectly good moral axiom to pull out of one's nether regions in my humble opinion, perhaps even one of the best. However it's still an axiom with absolutely no underlying scientific justification. My beef with Harris is simply that he tries to pretend that his position is scientific and original, instead of just being plagiarised welfare utilitarianism based on a scientifically unsupported moral axiom.

My beef with your position is that you refuse (I use that word deliberately) to understand that you just can't do moral reasoning without one or more such axioms, and you misappropriate any text which isn't nailed down to support this daft position you have staked out and are now too invested in to abandon.

 

[Pup]

It seems from your lengthy exposition, with a little help from Google, that in your view morality will be little more than a matter of opinion depending upon the way you approach it. As for your assertion: “I have not made any axiomatic claims" you nevertheless claim that moral axioms are important even though the only way to arrive at them appears at best to come down to personal opinion.

How do you propose we scientifically arrive at an underlying premise for morality, without just arbitrarily choosing a goal?

I don't see any contradiction in not stating one's own axiomatic claims, while still thinking they're important. If one wants the soution to an equation, it's important to state the equation, but one particular equation (the one a person might choose as their favorite) is irrelevant to the scientific study of equation-solving as a whole.

...the same can be said about medicine, or science as a whole. As I point out in the book, science is based on values that must be presupposed - like the desire to understand the universe, a respect for evidence and logical coherence, etc...

All those things hold true when investigating morality as well, but those presupposed values are not part of the thing being investigated. In other words, one could say that medicine is based on a desire to understand disease, but it's not based on the premise that there are four humors (anymore). One could say that chemistry is based on replicatable experiments, but not that it's based on the four elements of earth, wind, fire and water.

Similarly, one could say that a scientific study of morality is based on wanting to know what's moral, but not that morality must equal the minimizing of suffering for some particular group.

 

[angrysoba]

It seems from your lengthy exposition, with a little help from Google,

My lengthy exposition, as you call it, is a good faith answer to your demands in which you repeatedly ask me how we come to moral axioms. I gave you an answer.

But please tell me what you mean by "a little help from Google"? This sounds like some kind of insinuation that you should be able to flesh out properly, so let's have it.

that in your view morality will be little more than a matter of opinion depending upon the way you approach it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "little more than a matter of opinion". I think a great deal of thought has gone into the nature of what is moral and how we behave morally. In fact, it goes by the name of "moral philosophy". Sam Harris appears to have apprised himself of the fruits of this intellectual endeavour and not bothered to acknowledge this.

As for your assertion: “I have not made any axiomatic claims" you nevertheless claim that moral axioms are important even though the only way to arrive at them appears at best to come down to personal opinion. Personally, I think Sam Harris’ approach is a more productive approach to morality event though, as frequently admitted, it has a long way to go.

This is bizarre! I have already shown you that Sam Harris himself acknowledges that "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures" is a presupposed value; a moral axiom. It was not arrived at scientifically.

Besides, you dodged an earlier question of mine when you lauded the approach of "Scientist Sam Harris" when you said:

Scientists, such as Sam Harris, argue from hypotheses which, unlike the axioms of philosophical argument, have the potential for empirical verification.

So which hypotheses are these?

And is it a hypothesis, that can be tested by empirical verification, that moral behaviour consists of "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures"?

 

[angrysoba]

You have not included Harris’ response to Ryan Born: “Clarifying the Moral Landscape - A Response to Ryan Born” in the course of which Harris states:

“Ryan wrote that my “proposed science of morality cannot offer scientific answers to questions of morality and value, because it cannot derive moral judgments solely from scientific descriptions of the world.” But no branch of science can derive its judgments solely from scientific descriptions of the world. We have intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything”.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/clarifying-the-landscape

This, I think deals with many of the issues that have been raised by you and others and has been the approach I’ve taken in this discussion.

To me it looks like you have simply quoted part of a response to Harris and hoping that nobody will notice that it does not answer the objection at all that Sam Harris has presupposed what is moral rather than discovered it through scientific enquiry. Of course, if Sam Harris's approach fails then it is a logical corollary that yours does too as it is the approach you have taken in this discussion.

 

[Tassman]

Well, no, it hasn't been. To begin with as angrysoba showed you didn't even properly understand what Harris was saying. That is perhaps forgivable since Harris is a skilled obfuscater and equivocator who lards his core of nonsense with heaping helpings of palatable trivialities. He's fooled smarter people than you, to be sure. However it's a bit rich to claim as your thesis a thesis which you manifestly didn't understand.

Also if you actually read and understand Harris you understand that he is pulling what you call a "moral axiom" out of thin air, that moral axiom being welfare utilitarianism, the axiom that what is morally good is to maximise the fulfilment of the preferences persons would have if they were well-informed and rational. That is something Harris is explicitly doing, and which you explicitly claim not to be doing.

This is a perfectly good moral axiom to pull out of one's nether regions in my humble opinion, perhaps even one of the best. However it's still an axiom with absolutely no underlying scientific justification. My beef with Harris is simply that he tries to pretend that his position is scientific and original, instead of just being plagiarised welfare utilitarianism based on a scientifically unsupported moral axiom.

My beef with your position is that you refuse (I use that word deliberately) to understand that you just can't do moral reasoning without one or more such axioms, and you misappropriate any text which isn't nailed down to support this daft position you have staked out and are now too invested in to abandon.

My beef with your position is that no-one, Harris included, is saying that one can do moral reasoning based on pure science. He has not said this and nor have I. As Harris says, no branch of science can derive its judgements solely from scientific descriptions of the world. We have instinctive intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything and everything.

This has been my position throughout which you refuse (I use that word deliberately) to recognize. I would go further and argue that no-one can arrive at true conclusions in moral reasoning without the input of science. But you too invested in your philosophical stance to abandon your position that pure philosophy is all that's necessary.

 

[Tassman]

How do you propose we scientifically arrive at an underlying premise for morality, without just arbitrarily choosing a goal?

The goals are not arbitrary; they are based upon our evolved instincts, as I've been saying all along, e.g. medicine is based upon the instinctive belief that good health is important for our well-being. This instinctive belief cannot be empirically verified by science to be true and certainly not by philosophy. But evolutionary biologists have established that it's commonplace among conscious entities and therefore its a reasonable assumption that it's the case. Similarly morality is based upon the instinctive needs of social species such as us for social cohesion; there is considerable evidence to support this as the basis of our moral codes.

I don't see any contradiction in not stating one's own axiomatic claims, while still thinking they're important. If one wants the soution to an equation, it's important to state the equation, but one particular equation (the one a person might choose as their favorite) is irrelevant to the scientific study of equation-solving as a whole.

All those things hold true when investigating morality as well, but those presupposed values are not part of the thing being investigated. In other words, one could say that medicine is based on a desire to understand disease, but it's not based on the premise that there are four humors (anymore). One could say that chemistry is based on replicatable experiments, but not that it's based on the four elements of earth, wind, fire and water.

And this is the point, precisely. Conclusions in philosophical deductive arguments are only as true as the premises upon which they are based. And true premises can only be established by science. It was science which established that there are no “four humours” and that the "four elements of earth, wind, fire and water" are mere poetic fancy, not fact. Philosophy does not have the capacity to establish empirically verifiable fact such as these; science does.

Similarly, one could say that a scientific study of morality is based on wanting to know what's moral, but not that morality must equal the minimizing of suffering for some particular group.

The question is WHY does one want “to know what’s moral” and I contend because we instinctively believe that it enhances the social cohesion essential for the survival of us as a social species.

 

[Tassman]

My lengthy exposition, as you call it, is a good faith answer to your demands in which you repeatedly ask me how we come to moral axioms. I gave you an answer.

But please tell me what you mean by "a little help from Google"? This sounds like some kind of insinuation that you should be able to flesh out properly, so let's have it.

You provided a number of philosophical approaches, no more, and all they do is reveal the great diversity of opinion among differing schools of philosophy.

I'm not sure what you mean by "little more than a matter of opinion". I think a great deal of thought has gone into the nature of what is moral and how we behave morally. In fact, it goes by the name of "moral philosophy". Sam Harris appears to have apprised himself of the fruits of this intellectual endeavour and not bothered to acknowledge this.

Exercising a “great deal of thought” is no guarantee that the conclusions are true as demonstrated by Aristotle’s famously incorrect Four Elements theory - among very many other examples of philosophical conclusions being later contradicted by empirical scientific verification. So which are the particular "fruits of intellectual endeavours" do you claim Sam Harris has "apprised himself of" without acknowledgement?

This is bizarre! I have already shown you that Sam Harris himself acknowledges that "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures" is a presupposed value; a moral axiom. It was not arrived at scientifically.

And “I have already shown you that Sam Harris himself acknowledges” that no branch of science can derive its judgements solely from scientific descriptions of the world. No scientific theory exists in isolation.

Besides, you dodged an earlier question of mine when you lauded the approach of "Scientist Sam Harris" when you said:



So which hypotheses are these?

And is it a hypothesis, that can be tested by empirical verification, that moral behaviour consists of "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures"?

Poor soba, forever trying to catch me out in lieu of substantive argument!

Evolutionary biologists have established by observation and experiment that it's instinctive behaviour among social creatures like us to maintain social cohesion and personal well-being. There is considerable evidence to support this as the origin of our behavioural codes (i.e. our morality) and thus it is a reasonable basis for a working hypothesis. One can only wonder at your vehement objection to this approach. What are your objections and what is your alternative? Philosophy???

To me it looks like you have simply quoted part of a response to Harris and hoping that nobody will notice that it does not answer the objection at all that Sam Harris has presupposed what is moral rather than discovered it through scientific enquiry. Of course, if Sam Harris's approach fails then it is a logical corollary that yours does too as it is the approach you have taken in this discussion.

To me it looks like you have focused upon just one aspect of Sam Harris’ approach without taking into account that he specifically says that, as with EVERY scientific theory “we have intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything”.

 

[Tommy Jeppesen]

My beef with your position is that no-one, Harris included, is saying that one can do moral reasoning based on pure science. He has not said this and nor have I. As Harris says, no branch of science can derive its judgements solely from scientific descriptions of the world. We have instinctive intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything and everything.

This has been my position throughout which you refuse (I use that word deliberately) to recognize. I would go further and argue that no-one can arrive at true conclusions in moral reasoning without the input of science. But you too invested in your philosophical stance to abandon your position that pure philosophy is all that's necessary.

Would you please explain the hilited part?

 

[Tassman]

Would you please explain the hilited part?

As I said to Pup in #248. In philosophy conclusions in philosophical deductive arguments (i.e. the “moral reasoning” to which I was referring) are only as true as the premises upon which they are based. And true premises can only be established by science. Philosophy does not have the capacity to establish empirically verifiable premises. It functions via assumed, axiomatic premises, whereas scientific methodology does have this capacity.

 

[Dani]

Potentially yes.

Thanks. I'll take that as an unequivocal "yes", because I was asking your opinion on what science can do, not on what already does.

Never? How can you be so confident?

I wouldn't say "never". I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but the problem is that no amount of empirical data will do it, because the disagreement lies a step back. From what I've observed, it stems from a conceptual and logical mistake.

I'll tell you why I'm so confident:

Because it's logically untennable. It's a non sequitur, as Hume pointed out. It's conceptually impossible, unless science or morality are redefined, which only would have the trivial impact in reality of naming things differently. That's what Sam Harris does, in fact.

Your question does not allow for a simple “yes or no” answer.

Of course it does. That you want to expand on the reasons why you give your specific answer is of course appreciated for our debate, but not necessary to answer the question with an unequivocal "yes" or "no". But that's not why I said it's irrelevant. I said it's irrelevant because no amount of empirical facts entails an objective normative moral claim. You seem to imply that investigation of the human brain and human morality supports your "yes", but that doesn't follow and that's why you need the axiom others (Harris included) have been talking about.

And you keep in mind that the human brain, as a purely biological organism, is subject to investigation by scientific methodology as to why and how we behave the way we do and why we consider certain behaviours to be right or wrong.

This, again, is irrelevant to whether science can answer normative moral questions. We all seem to agree on the trivial fact that science can describe the universe. It doesn't follow that, because of that, science can answer normative moral questions.

 

[Pup]

The goals are not arbitrary; they are based upon our evolved instincts, as I've been saying all along, e.g. medicine is based upon the instinctive belief that good health is important for our well-being. This instinctive belief cannot be empirically verified by science to be true and certainly not by philosophy. But evolutionary biologists have established that it's commonplace among conscious entities and therefore its a reasonable assumption that it's the case. Similarly morality is based upon the instinctive needs of social species such as us for social cohesion; there is considerable evidence to support this as the basis of our moral codes.

How do you explain so many different moral codes that have all worked to keep social cohesion?

There have been civilizations where unquestionable religious leaders have ruled with an iron fist, others where democracy is the order of the day, sometimes with slaves, sometimes without. There have been civilizations where prowess in warfare to gain wealth was the most important goal, and others where negotiating and trading with surrounding groups was considered best.

Each has been successful in its own way, and while no group has lasted since the dawn of humankind, many have lasted for centuries. Yet what was morally right in one would be considered morally wrong in another. If the goal was merely social cohesion, one could point to several different conflicting sets of morals that, in practice, worked equally well, as far as any objective measure: how long they existed, how few protests or how little unrest there was, that kind of thing.

In fact, the longest running social groups so far have generally kept slaves and have had limited input by members into the government, usually certain males only, if that.

Are we to conclude that they are the most successful at social cohesion and therefore it's more moral to allow slavery and strictly limit the people's input into their laws and rulers? I suspect it's only because we're born into a certain time and place that we would even be doubtful of that. Each social group (broadly speaking) thinks its standards are the most moral.

 

[angrysoba]

You provided a number of philosophical approaches, no more, and all they do is reveal the great diversity of opinion among differing schools of philosophy.

So what? You asked me to explain how moral axioms come about and I told you. Now, why did you state I had "a little help from Google"?

Exercising a “great deal of thought” is no guarantee that the conclusions are true as demonstrated by Aristotle’s famously incorrect Four Elements theory - among very many other examples of philosophical conclusions being later contradicted by empirical scientific verification. So which are the particular "fruits of intellectual endeavours" do you claim Sam Harris has "apprised himself of" without acknowledgement?

This is very simple: he has used "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures" as his moral axiom which is one that is derived from utilitarianism. Even he admits it is a moral axiom, though he doesn't admit where it came from, and therefore it is not a result of empirical enquiry. That really is game over for Sam Harris's theory and I suspect he knows it too which is why he abandoned his initially proposed back-and-forth with the winner of his essay competition and instead offered his "clarification" and then moved swiftly on. Some of his fans have not caught on, though.

And “I have already shown you that Sam Harris himself acknowledges” that no branch of science can derive its judgements solely from scientific descriptions of the world. No scientific theory exists in isolation.

In other words his evaluative premise is not scientific. Yeah, I know, and I have been telling you that for what seems like and may actually be years.

Poor soba, forever trying to catch me out in lieu of substantive argument!

Actually, although I can understand your sympathy, I am forever trying to get you to make a substantive argument.

Evolutionary biologists have established by observation and experiment that it's instinctive behaviour among social creatures like us to maintain social cohesion and personal well-being.

Not in dispute and not relevant.

But just for the laughs, because it always cheers me up, do you believe Sam Harris is arguing for an evolutionary account of morality and for conforming to the dictates of evolution?

There is considerable evidence to support this as the origin of our behavioural codes (i.e. our morality) and thus it is a reasonable basis for a working hypothesis.

Not in dispute and not relevant.

One can only wonder at your vehement objection to this approach. What are your objections and what is your alternative?

My objections are that you make a lot of trivial claims about evolution that are open to empirical observation and which would have relevance for descriptive morality but that this does not translate into normative morality.

To me it looks like you have focused upon just one aspect of Sam Harris’ approach without taking into account that he specifically says that, as with EVERY scientific theory “we have intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything”.

Okay, let's assume I have "focused upon just one aspect of Sam Harris's approach." So what?

 

[Dani]

My beef with your position is that no-one, Harris included, is saying that one can do moral reasoning based on pure science. He has not said this and nor have I.

Let's recap: Sam Harris dissmissed Hume's observation that you can't derive an "ought" from an "is". If Hume is right, that's why you would need an axiom, the "ought", to reach moral conclusions, because no chain of "ises" will give you the "ought" in the first place. Sam Harris disputes that.

Then Harris argued that his "ought" is self evident. That is, an axiom. Which is precisely consistent with the observation made by Hume that you can't derive and "ought" from an "is".

So, clearly, that is a position Sam Harris has taken when he dissmissed Hume. Or maybe he didn't really mean it because he didn't really understand what Hume said, and in reality is saying something very trivial.

On the other hand, I recently asked you whether you thought science can answer normative moral questions and you said "potentially yes". When I asked the question, I didn't mean in the trivial sense in which we already do science. For example, there's a discipline called medicine with many different branches that has existed for a long time because we care about the well-being of humans. That moral decisions can impregnate applied sciences is trivially true.

As Harris says, no branch of science can derive its judgements solely from scientific descriptions of the world. We have instinctive intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything and everything.

"No branch of science can derive its judgements solely from scientific descriptions of the world". By "judgements" you mean something like "conclusions"? Because if that's what you mean, that's what science already does. Those foundational principles you briefly describe are embedded in the scientific method. They define what science is and we don't need to postulate an ad hoc extra principle to, for example, conclude whether particles are entangled.

On the other hand, maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures strikes me as a reasonable principle, but it's question begging to postulate it as a scientific principle when it's never been until this day, mainly because it doesn't help describe the world, which is what science is invested in.

This only reinforces my view that it's about redefining concepts, after all.

This has been my position throughout which you refuse (I use that word deliberately) to recognize. I would go further and argue that no-one can arrive at true conclusions in moral reasoning without the input of science. But you too invested in your philosophical stance to abandon your position that pure philosophy is all that's necessary.

Who claimed that we can arrive at true conclusions in moral reasoning, with or without the input of science?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

My beef with your position is that no-one, Harris included, is saying that one can do moral reasoning based on pure science. He has not said this and nor have I.

Harris definitely has said this, although he is wrong. He claimed to have solved the is/ought problem, which is the problem that you cannot do moral reasoning based purely on factual statements.

You said just earlier to Dani that you thought science could answer moral questions, potentially, which is either utterly banal and trivial if you were not claiming science can solve the is/ought problem, or wrong if you think it can.

It seems to me that you are not arguing honestly and presenting a consistent position, but rather putting up a cloud of ink and then trying to change your position while claiming it has been the same all along.

As Harris says, no branch of science can derive its judgements solely from scientific descriptions of the world. We have instinctive intuitions of truth and falsity, logical consistency, and causality that are foundational to our thinking about anything and everything.

These are all "is" intuitions, not "ought" intuitions, and hence empirically testable. It seems to me that you have grabbed this argument from Harris just now and tried to tack it on to your ramshackle edifice, without understanding that Harris is pulling a fast one on the audience.

This has been my position throughout which you refuse (I use that word deliberately) to recognize. I would go further and argue that no-one can arrive at true conclusions in moral reasoning without the input of science. But you too invested in your philosophical stance to abandon your position that pure philosophy is all that's necessary.

Oh dear. Once again you are reduced to repeating the banal, trivial and uncontested idea that science can help you achieve moral goals, after you have chosen some unscientific moral axioms. But Tassman, absolutely nobody here has ever said otherwise! That idea is either a figment of your imagination, or a false front you are projecting in a final, desperate attempt to make it look like you might possibly have been right about something.

 

[Tassman]

Thanks. I'll take that as an unequivocal "yes", because I was asking your opinion on what science can do, not on what already does.

No it’s a potential “yes”, as I said - i.e. probable but not yet.

I wouldn't say "never". I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but the problem is that no amount of empirical data will do it, because the disagreement lies a step back. From what I've observed, it stems from a conceptual and logical mistake.

I'll tell you why I'm so confident:

Because it's logically untennable. It's a non sequitur, as Hume pointed out. It's conceptually impossible, unless science or morality are redefined, which only would have the trivial impact in reality of naming things differently. That's what Sam Harris does, in fact

So you have in fact said “never” in reality. This is merely an argument from incredulity. As for Hume “it’s conceptually impossible” as a deductive argument but not as an inductive argument and much of science bases its hypotheses on the latter form of argument.

Of course it does. That you want to expand on the reasons why you give your specific answer is of course appreciated for our debate, but not necessary to answer the question with an unequivocal "yes" or "no". But that's not why I said it's irrelevant. I said it's irrelevant because no amount of empirical facts entails an objective normative moral claim. You seem to imply that investigation of the human brain and human morality supports your "yes", but that doesn't follow and that's why you need the axiom others (Harris included) have been talking about.

It does not allow for a simple “yes or no” answer because qualifications are required. Science does not function in a vacuum as has already been alluded to.

This, again, is irrelevant to whether science can answer normative moral questions. We all seem to agree on the trivial fact that science can describe the universe. It doesn't follow that, because of that, science can answer normative moral questions.

But in practise it does, doesn't it. Our behaviour is based upon what we understand about our own human nature. And short of ascribing our self-knowledge to divine revelation, this is based on our natural instincts and what biology and the cognitive sciences have told us. What’s the alternative? Philosophy hasn't got us very far and religion has been a disaster.

 

[Tassman]

How do you explain so many different moral codes that have all worked to keep social cohesion?

There have been civilizations where unquestionable religious leaders have ruled with an iron fist, others where democracy is the order of the day, sometimes with slaves, sometimes without. There have been civilizations where prowess in warfare to gain wealth was the most important goal, and others where negotiating and trading with surrounding groups was considered best.

Each has been successful in its own way, and while no group has lasted since the dawn of humankind, many have lasted for centuries. Yet what was morally right in one would be considered morally wrong in another. If the goal was merely social cohesion, one could point to several different conflicting sets of morals that, in practice, worked equally well, as far as any objective measure: how long they existed, how few protests or how little unrest there was, that kind of thing.

In fact, the longest running social groups so far have generally kept slaves and have had limited input by members into the government, usually certain males only, if that.

Are we to conclude that they are the most successful at social cohesion and therefore it's more moral to allow slavery and strictly limit the people's input into their laws and rulers? I suspect it's only because we're born into a certain time and place that we would even be doubtful of that. Each social group (broadly speaking) thinks its standards are the most moral.

All of which demonstrate our natural instinct, as a social species, to live in community. This is not in doubt as you yourself indicate. All that’s in doubt is how rules of behaviour to best maintain this cohesion are best formulated. To date we have not been very successful at this as you have argued.

So in your view what should we, as a planet-wide community, do to best achieve this goal? Philosophy does not have the capacity to establish empirically verifiable facts upon which to base or rules of behaviour or do think otherwise?

 

[Tassman]

So what? You asked me to explain how moral axioms come about and I told you. Now, why did you state I had "a little help from Google"?

No, I asked how YOU arrive at moral axioms. I did not ask for a smorgasbord of how moral axioms can be arrived at. Interesting that there are so many from which to choose. So, on what basis do you make your selection?

Did you not rely on Google for you extensive list of definitions – all off the top of your head was it?

This is very simple: he has used "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures" as his moral axiom which is one that is derived from utilitarianism. Even he admits it is a moral axiom, though he doesn't admit where it came from, and therefore it is not a result of empirical enquiry. That really is game over for Sam Harris's theory and I suspect he knows it too which is why he abandoned his initially proposed back-and-forth with the winner of his essay competition and instead offered his "clarification" and then moved swiftly on. Some of his fans have not caught on, though.

He does in fact. Have you actually read him? He argues that conscious states are not randomly determined but depend upon the “states and capacities” of brains and the physical dynamics of such within bodies, societies, the world, and the universe; i.e., “human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and of states in the human brain”. And that these things are susceptible, at least in principle to scientific investigation.

In other words his evaluative premise is not scientific. Yeah, I know, and I have been telling you that for what seems like and may actually be years.

See above. I repeat: No branch of science can derive its judgements solely from scientific descriptions of the world. No scientific theory can exist in isolation and none do. Do you therefore dismiss scientific methodology because it doesn’t conform to what YOU think science should be?

Not in dispute and not relevant.

But just for the laughs, because it always cheers me up, do you believe Sam Harris is arguing for an evolutionary account of morality and for conforming to the dictates of evolution?

Are you really arguing that our instinctive behaviour to maintain social cohesion, which you accept, is not relevant in how we formulate our rules of behaviour? Come now. What is relevant to this end in your view – divine revelation? Academic metaphysical argument – what?

Not in dispute and not relevant.

See above.

My objections are that you make a lot of trivial claims about evolution that are open to empirical observation and which would have relevance for descriptive morality but that this does not translate into normative morality.

Of course it does. Are you seriously arguing that our empirically verified knowledge of how and why we behave the way we do, has no bearing on the rules of behaviour we formulate? So what DOES have a bearing on how we arrive at normative morality? This is what you consistently refuse to answer.

Okay, let's assume I have "focused upon just one aspect of Sam Harris's approach." So what?

I would have thought it obvious.

 

[Tassman]

Harris definitely has said this, although he is wrong. He claimed to have solved the is/ought problem, which is the problem that you cannot do moral reasoning based purely on factual statements.

“You cannot do moral reasoning based on facts”? Really! So what do you do moral reasoning based on?

I've snipped the rest of your argument as being snide misrepresentations.