Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions [Archive] - Page 3

Kevin_Lowe

17th October 2010, 09:28 AM

Well, your response was directed at a quote from Harris. Regardless of what you think of my opinion, the point was that Harris also said this.

Did he really? I am confused now, because this subtopic arose from this remark of yours (and I quote):

As another example (not said by Harris, but an example of what I'm referring to), the "problem of induction" is treated as though it represents a serious threat to any claim we may make about knowledge which is the product of science.

So did Harris say this or not? Before you explicitly said that he didn't, and that this was your personal beef with the problem of induction. Now you're saying he did say it.

It seems to me that it's unreasonable to explicitly flag this contention as your own and not Harris', and then insist that my response to it must also be my response to Harris.

Anyway, back to your more recent post:

Right. That would be the opposite of what I said.

Fair enough, I did misread that bit.

To so go back to what you did say:

I'm not talking about covert value claims serving as premises. I'm talking about explicitly, overtly chosen premises. There is a distinction between, "what can be derived from the observation that humans have an interest in the experience of conscious beings?" and "in what way do these actions alter the well-being of humans?" (i.e. well-being as a premise and well-being as a consequence). Utilitarianism refers more to the latter, whereas I meant to be referring to the former.

In response to your rhetorical question, "what can be derived from the observation that humans have an interest in the experience of conscious beings?", the answer is "assuming that this observation is correct and universal, just that humans have an interest in the experience of conscious beings".

Exactly. And why would we want to do so? The idea that we have any interest in these imaginary 'oughts' is merely a remnant of prescientific thinking.

On the contrary, Harris' attempt to appropriate the cachet of science for his confused position is as illegitimate as the appropriation of quantum mechanics by the "energy medicine" frauds.

There's nothing scientific about Harris' position, except that he tries to wrap himself up in rhetoric about science and some people have bought it.

Whether or that is the case is irrelevant to my statement. It was directed at a claim you made about value judgements, not moral claims.

Skeptic Ginger already tried that one.

"Value judgment" in this context means moral value judgment. It does not mean "partially subjective judgment".

Your statement was not about moral claims, it was about value judgments. You stated specifically, "value judgments need never enter into the process" and then provided two examples of a very limited way in which value judgements touch upon science - ethics with respect to human research and in the choice of topics to pursue. My contention is that value judgements heavily permeate the practice of science, but they are difficult to recognize because they are so ubiquitous. I provided one example.

I hope I have cleared up this point of confusion now, although since I already did so for Skeptic Ginger once I rather feel that it shouldn't have been necessary to do it again.

Anyway, back to the core point.

Your angle now seems to be "I agree we cannot get from any number of is statements to an ought statement. But why can't we just do without ought statements altogether?".

That's just an attempt to make the "ought" statements covert rather than overt. Harris is clearly making some kind of "ought" claims about what sort of future world we ought to prefer - one with less in the way of starvation and burkhas. He is not attempting to do away with "ought" claims.

What you and Piggy are doing is jumping back and forth between two contrary positions, and trying to pass it off as a paradigm shift rather than simple self-contradiction.

The first of the two contrary positions is moral nihilism. This is the claim that all "ought" claims are meaningless ("prescientific thinking", "magical thinking", "Platonic forms" etc). The problem with this position is that it doesn't actually give you any basis whatsoever for arguing that the picture of famine on the left of Harris' slide is anything we should care about.

The second, totally contradictory position is a covert and mostly ill-defined variation of utilitarianism where you assume that we ought to prefer nice outcomes like the well-fed woman playing with her child on the beach to bad ones like the starving woman holding a child who is sick or dead. I've got no problem with that as a moral position as long as you realise that you're making a non-scientific "ought" claim there not a scientific "is" claim.

The arguments to back this second position up seem to me to be these:

"It is a matter of fact that some people prefer A to B. Therefore we ought to prefer A to B".

"It is a consequence of human biology that some people prefer A to B. Therefore we ought to prefer A to B".

Neither of these is any good as an argument, as a moment's thought will show. People have in the past preferred all sorts of awful things, as a matter of fact, so the first argument is clearly not a way of generating moral claims we should agree with. Just because a given view is the product of our evolution is no reason to fix the belief that it is moral either: I'm sure that there are sound evolutionary reasons for rape, genocide, murder and so forth. Tribes that successfully murdered all of their rival tribe's men and raped all of their women would certainly have done better at spreading their genes in the short term than their rivals.

Those are to my mind knock-down counterarguments, but I'm getting the feeling that the response to them is "Look, you can't take those arguments and apply them to any old A and B you like. That's taking them out of their proper context. They only count if you use them to get to the conclusions that we ought to prefer certain specific Bs".

Now it seems to me that this response commits the sins of special pleading (because you argue for a general rule and then demand special exceptions to it) and circular argument (because you clearly have a list of Bs in mind before you start, but you want to pass them off as the conclusion of your argument instead of the covert premise).

The other problem is that you can't simultaneously hang on to the idea that all ought statements are meaningless and argue that we ought to care whether people starve in Africa. If ought statements are meaningless we have no reason at all to care about that woman and her child unless their suffering somehow gets in the way of us enjoying our safer and more affluent lifestyle.

Now you can make all the dismissive comments you like about philosophy's "airy-fairy" concern with avoiding blatant self-contradictions like those, but I think it's still pretty clear that you are making two different philosophical claims here that simply cannot both be right.

AlBell

17th October 2010, 09:48 AM

What are these imaginary relics of prescientific thinking? Moral values? No, they're real, they happen in our brains.
Which is full-stop.

Secular humanists have taken the previous thinking of our forebearers, thrown away religion, revised a bit, and claim them as, what? Certainly not 'scientific'.

They've revised NOMA from science/religion to science/our ideals, and now all that's needed is sell them to the world at large (or at least to their social group) and enforce compliance.

And no, I'm not implying Harris is right with this obvious statement.

fls

17th October 2010, 11:14 AM

Well, then you'll have to read this very interesting post (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=6439899&postcount=326).

I'm not sure what your point is, although it does demonstrate that people get irritated thinking about utilitarianism. :)

I'm not blurring the distinction between facts and moral values (sorry if I didn't make that clear, but I think it's obvious that I'm talking about moral values). Defining what constitutes a better state of well-being is not a moral judgment. I'm describing things as they are, not as they ought to be. If I'm wrong with my description, it's irrelevant. It's still a claim about facts.

I admit that it is confusing to me when people say "values" and then it turns out that sometimes they mean a statement about a subjective fact, sometimes a value judgement, sometimes a moral value, or sometimes a moral claim (usually they seem to mean whatever I didn't pick as the likely candidate :)).

I'm confused with your last comment. What are you referring to?

Piscivore gave me a hard time earlier about using "we". Apparently it was taken to mean that I was talking about all humans.

Linda

fls

17th October 2010, 11:17 AM

What are these imaginary relics of prescientific thinking? Moral values?

No, not at all.

I'm talking about the goals used in teleology which Earthborn described in post 459.

Linda

Kevin_Lowe

17th October 2010, 11:30 AM

Perhaps this will help the people who are thinking of themselves as scientifically minded and don't quite grasp the distinctions in play here (although a big part of the problem is your misunderstanding of science - yes, I'm saying I understand science better than you do too).

People have thoughts about i, defined as the square root of negative one. They do sums involving i. Yet never in the universe has anyone ever had 2i rocks in one hand and 2i rocks in the other hand and concluded by inspection that they had 4i rocks total, because never in the universe has anyone ever seen i of anything. It's a concept with no external referent.

Now despite the fact that i is used in engineering as a convenient way of tracking certain values, i is not a scientific idea. Science has nothing to say about i. No experiments ever have or ever will be done to produce empirical data about how i behaves. Yet it's nonetheless a useful cognitive tool.

In a perfectly meaningful sense i is just an arrangement of atoms into neurons and whatnot doing their thing in people's heads. It has no existence external to those systems of atoms. It arises and can only exist because we have the sorts of brains that can think thoughts about i. However that doesn't make thoughts about i true. They are neither true not false, just consistent or inconsistent and useful or useless.

Moral value in moral philosophy is in one sense a bit like i. It's not a concept arrived at empirically, and it has no external referent.

Yet it would be manifestly stupid to accuse mathematicians and engineers who use i of "pre-scientific thinking" or "magical thinking" or "Platonic forms" or whatever other insults you want to throw at moral philosophy. That would merely demonstrate that you don't grasp what they are doing, and are insulting things you don't understand based on a half-baked understanding of what science and rationality are about.

Especially if the minute you were done throwing rocks at mathematicians for talking about i, you then turned around and started claiming that science could determine the correct value of i and how to bring more i into the world.

Skeptic Ginger

17th October 2010, 11:46 AM

Intelligible arguments work better than wild accusations you can't back up.
I made the argument, but rather than address it, you simple ignore it.

fls

17th October 2010, 12:16 PM

Did he really? I am confused now, because this subtopic arose from this remark of yours (and I quote):

So did Harris say this or not? Before you explicitly said that he didn't, and that this was your personal beef with the problem of induction. Now you're saying he did say it.

It seems to me that it's unreasonable to explicitly flag this contention as your own and not Harris', and then insist that my response to it must also be my response to Harris.

Ah I see. Your response was meant to ignore the example from Harris.

On the contrary, Harris' attempt to appropriate the cachet of science for his confused position is as illegitimate as the appropriation of quantum mechanics by the "energy medicine" frauds.

There's nothing scientific about Harris' position, except that he tries to wrap himself up in rhetoric about science and some people have bought it.

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I said.

Skeptic Ginger already tried that one.

"Value judgment" in this context means moral value judgment.

Yeah, I think I've figured out now that it will turn out not to mean whatever it looked like it meant to me. :)

It does not mean "partially subjective judgment".

Right, but since I didn't suggest that it did, I'm not sure why you bothered saying this.

Anyway, back to the core point.

Your angle now seems to be "I agree we cannot get from any number of is statements to an ought statement. But why can't we just do without ought statements altogether?".

This has been my point all along. I hoped that by trying different ways of conveying it, it might eventually be the point you address.

That's just an attempt to make the "ought" statements covert rather than overt. Harris is clearly making some kind of "ought" claims about what sort of future world we ought to prefer - one with less in the way of starvation and burkhas. He is not attempting to do away with "ought" claims.

What you and Piggy are doing is jumping back and forth between two contrary positions, and trying to pass it off as a paradigm shift rather than simple self-contradiction.

The first of the two contrary positions is moral nihilism. This is the claim that all "ought" claims are meaningless ("prescientific thinking", "magical thinking", "Platonic forms" etc). The problem with this position is that it doesn't actually give you any basis whatsoever for arguing that the picture of famine on the left of Harris' slide is anything we should care about.

I agree that that it doesn't give you a basis for choosing between two different outcomes. However, why is this to be considered a problem, rather than simply a factual statement? After all, it would be much easier to measure time if there were a lumineferous ether, but we don't call the lack of that ether a "problem" and simply pretend that it is still there instead.

The second, totally contradictory position is a covert and mostly ill-defined variation of utilitarianism where you assume that we ought to prefer nice outcomes like the well-fed woman playing with her child on the beach to bad ones like the starving woman holding a child who is sick or dead.

Well, I don't hold that position, but how is this a contradiction? If you recognize that there are no 'oughts' one can make absolute reference to, then it seems a reasonable step to suggest a replacement (no matter how ill-conceived they may be). It would be a contradiction if you wanted to act as though there were 'oughts' and also concern yourself with the consequences.

I've got no problem with that as a moral position as long as you realise that you're making a non-scientific "ought" claim there not a scientific "is" claim.

The arguments to back this second position up seem to me to be these:

"It is a matter of fact that some people prefer A to B. Therefore we ought to prefer A to B".

"It is a consequence of human biology that some people prefer A to B. Therefore we ought to prefer A to B".

Neither of these is any good as an argument, as a moment's thought will show. People have in the past preferred all sorts of awful things, as a matter of fact, so the first argument is clearly not a way of generating moral claims we should agree with. Just because a given view is the product of our evolution is no reason to fix the belief that it is moral either: I'm sure that there are sound evolutionary reasons for rape, genocide, murder and so forth. Tribes that successfully murdered all of their rival tribe's men and raped all of their women would certainly have done better at spreading their genes in the short term than their rivals.

Those are to my mind knock-down counterarguments, but I'm getting the feeling that the response to them is "Look, you can't take those arguments and apply them to any old A and B you like. That's taking them out of their proper context. They only count if you use them to get to the conclusions that we ought to prefer certain specific Bs".

Now it seems to me that this response commits the sins of special pleading (because you argue for a general rule and then demand special exceptions to it) and circular argument (because you clearly have a list of Bs in mind before you start, but you want to pass them off as the conclusion of your argument instead of the covert premise).

I agree that this would be fallacious. It also doesn't seem to be a scientific approach, so I wouldn't argue for this. And as I said earlier, I haven't read Harris' book, so I don't know the details, but he also indicated that he was looking for a scientific approach. I think that far too much is being read into the two pictures he used as an example and the creation of various back stories. You don't even have to say that one is 'good' and the other 'bad'. It is sufficient to recognize that there are factual ways to distinguish between the two.

The other problem is that you can't simultaneously hang on to the idea that all ought statements are meaningless and argue that we ought to care whether people starve in Africa. If ought statements are meaningless we have no reason at all to care about that woman and her child unless their suffering somehow gets in the way of us enjoying our safer and more affluent lifestyle.

Now you can make all the dismissive comments you like about philosophy's "airy-fairy" concern with avoiding blatant self-contradictions like those, but I think it's still pretty clear that you are making two different philosophical claims here that simply cannot both be right.

You seem to be equivocating between what is meant by 'ought' under two different circumstances.

However, it is true that I do not think that the lack of absolutes renders us incapable of pursuing what can be found in reference frames.

Linda

Dani

17th October 2010, 12:18 PM

I took my time transcribing almost literally a part of Harris' last speech. Here's the video again:

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http://img13.imagevenue.com/loc575/th_38639_samharris_122_575lo.JPG (http://img13.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=38639_samharris_122_575lo.JPG)

In this bit he makes an analogy between scientific values and the moral value he brings up to justify why he brings it up. Min. 22:30 if you want to actually hear it:

The notion that facts and values are distinct breaks down again when you look at how we describe the most basic understanding of the physical universe.

You take water. We now know something about its structure: water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. We've known this for about 150 years. What do you do when someone comes into the room and doubts this proposition. What do you do with a skeptic about water chemistry? How do you change their mind? Well, you have to appeal to certain values. You have to... first of all, the person has to want to understand the world, that is a core scientific value. There's some virtue in figuring out what is actually going on. So what would you say to someone who says "listen, actually my chemistry doesn't have much to do with understanding the world, I just want make everything fit the book of Genesis. That's my version." That person can use the word chemistry all here she wants, but it's not chemistry in the way that any real chemist would acknowledge, and no chemist would be burdened with the task of saying "well, if I just can't convince that guy, maybe there's no truth to chemistry, maybe I'm wasting my life".

Anyone in this room doesn't think this is a tight analogy? This is the kind of criticism I get equating morality and human values to questions of the well-being of conscious creatures. We have to value evidence. What do you say to someone who doesn't value evidence? What evidence could you provide that would suggest they should value evidence [crowd laughs, circularity is funny]. What logic could you use to show the necessity of valuing logical consistency.

Intellectual honesty, Parsimony, mathematical elegance... these are all values.

So the notion that many of you I'm sure have heard, loosely derived from David Hume, that you can never get an ought from an is, that you can never get to a statement about what you ought to do based merely on a description of the way the world is... we only get to "is", to scientific statements, through "oughts", through values.

The only way you say what water is is: first you ought to respect evidence, you ought to want to understand the world, you ought to be logically consistent...

There's an obvious inconsistency in this argument:

Yes, there are some axiomatic principles in science. But they are foundational principles in science, not principles that are derived from science.

So what is he arguing for?

Does he want to introduce a new foundational principle in science?

From this argument I would say that's what he's doing. If so, it's a quite meaningless exercise, because whether you choose to introduce this moral value within or outside the realm of science, it doesn't change the axiomatic, non-evidence based nature of such value.
http://img13.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=38639_samharris_122_575lo.JPG

Tapio

17th October 2010, 12:46 PM

I didn't question whether most people would prefer the latter- I certainly would. But history shows that some poeple have valued other things more. Consider the people of Ireland in 1651 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwellian_conquest_of_Ireland#Guerrilla_warfare. 2C_famine_and_plague) why they chose to starve rather than surrender to Cromwell right away. Or the Soviets in the Forties and Chinese in the early Sixties that decided that ideology preempted "well-being". Consider the people that leave behind lives that meet their simple, basic needs, but are willing to risk misery, starvation, and even death on the chance of something more. Millions of people have chosen to "suffer" willingly and even enthusiastically because something else was more important to them.

Do you think the starving woman in the picture has chosen to suffer?

Those are good examples you give above. But I think there is a world of difference between choosing to live a life of suffering and having to live one. Actually, it could be argued that a person choosing to suffer isn't actually suffering, but simply experiencing self-chosen pain. Thus "to suffer" would mean something else to that person than what (s)he has chosen for whatever reason.

That means the "scientifically determined" morality that says "reducing suffering is a universal good" isn't correct.

I don't see Harris talking about "universal" anything. That's what some of his critics don't seem to get over of.

For example, at the end of the TED talk he clearly acknowledges the possibility of individual differing of experiences based on differing values (using the example of some muslim women feeling good about veiling themselves). I see him more arguing that we can use science to find "the closest peaks" in the collective moral landscape and with the help of science lead a majority of the whole towards them.

More value judgements. A value judgement about the value judgements of others. And an appeal to emotion. This is a "science-based morality"?

First of all, I've never claimed to be an example of Harris' proposed way of thinking. Second, I'm not appealing to anything, simply expressing my feelings towards a position which I found conflicting my own in a deeply emotional way.

This isn't about me. And don't even pretend to guess what I know of suffering... unless you want me to post a picture of my dead child lying on a hospital table? Or how about her cremated ashes and the little labeled box they're nestled in?

I'm very sorry for your loss. I can't even begin to imagine what you've had to go through (I'm a father of three). I think you've clarified your position in the beginning of your post so I now understand it better. Thanks for that.

Dani

17th October 2010, 12:48 PM

I'm not sure what your point is, although it does demonstrate that people get irritated thinking about utilitarianism. :)

I don't think people get irritated thinking about utilitarianism. Maybe they get irritated when someone disguises utilitarianism as science though, but I couldn't tell for sure.

I admit that it is confusing to me when people say "values" and then it turns out that sometimes they mean a statement about a subjective fact, sometimes a value judgement, sometimes a moral value, or sometimes a moral claim (usually they seem to mean whatever I didn't pick as the likely candidate :)).

My mistake. I'll try to explicitly say it when I'm referring to moral claims, values or judgments. Feel free to ask what I was referring to in previous posts. I've got nothing to hide and it's not my intention to use obscure terms.

No, not at all.

I'm talking about the goals used in teleology which Earthborn described in post 459.

Linda

I should read his post again, but I was guessing those goals are nothing more than moral values.

Beth

17th October 2010, 12:58 PM

No. My two yeses demonstrate we cannot only if we are referring to imaginary relics of prescientific thinking. The solution is to discard this reference, not to stop saying yes.
Linda

I think the problem is that because different people place different values on different aspects of well being as a result of their core values, it's important to understand what intrinsic values are important to people in order to construct the best possible society that can accommodate the different values together.

I took my time transcribing almost literally a part of Harris' last speech. Here's the video again:

From this argument I would say that's what he's doing. If so, it's a quite meaningless exercise, because whether you choose to introduce this moral value within or outside the realm of science, it doesn't change the axiomatic, non-evidence based nature of such value.

Perhaps he is arguing for the inclusion of some sort of moral axiom in science? I haven't read the book yet, but I plan to.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 01:05 PM

If "human nature" is to have scientific meaning, it has to be reducible to purely physical matters, especially if it has to have a meaning distinct from human culture and represent some innate "hard-wired" behaviour patterns. If it isn't physical matters, then it is culture. And we already have a word for that.

Ultimately, it is somehow, but we don't yet know how.

We don't know how, for example, reciprocity is wired into our heads -- or into a gorilla's head -- but there is enough observation and testing at this point to be certain that it is indeed wired into our brains.

Ditto for a preference of blood kin over others, and a whole host of innate tendencies and drives.

We do not need to crack the precise mechanism in order to understand that these drives exist.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 01:07 PM

"Recognising faces" is, which is one of the few physical matters on the list. Having 2 legs and seeing are things that are more widespread among humans than many of the claimed "human universals", and surely they must have a huge influence on people's behaviours. If they want to include only behaviour patterns, why not include "walking on 2 legs" ?

Ask them. Perhaps it shouldn't be on the list.

At any rate, that's a quibble. The fact is, scientist are in the process of developing a rather robust picture of innate human nature.

And at the end of the day, even our cultural variations are going to have be understood in the context of our biology, which lies at the root of it all.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 01:09 PM

So prisons are immoral? How about monasteries?

I didn't say it was immoral. I said it poses a moral dilemma.

Or it can.

Monasteries don't, because people go there voluntarily. But if you were to kidnap someone and lock him in a closet inside a monastery and keep him there for years, most folks would consider that immoral.

And of course there's debate over the tension between justice/punishment and human rights when it comes to how prisons should be run.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 01:10 PM

So anyone that deviates from "the norm" is immoral?

Where would you get such an idea?

And anyway, you should note that I have said nothing about "immorality" in my post. You're dragging that issue into it yourself.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 01:13 PM

How does science determine how much harm is "necessary"? How did evolution?

I hate to have to say this, Piscivore, but I'm having an extremely hard time following your arguments because they appear to be riddled with non sequiturs.

Science does not determine how much harm is necessary. Science helps us resolve conflicts between our own hard-wired drives, which is precisely what it means to solve a moral dilemma.

And evolution is on a whole nother plane. Evolution is what gave us the drives, whether we like them or not. It does not -- because it cannot -- resolve conflicts generated by the drives it creates.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 01:15 PM

No one said science didn't influence people's value judgments. That's a far cry from dictating them completely, as you are claiming.

Since no one, including Harris and certainly not myself, has claimed here that science can dictate our so-called "value" judgments, it's a moot point.

I'm getting tired of addressing this red herring, so I think I'll just ignore questions and claims like that from now on.

And yes, everyone here knows science can influence our judgment -- what I've done is to explain how science changes the "ought" and the "should", i.e. how science changes what we think ought to be and changes what we think should be done.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 01:20 PM

So science can form a basis for morality, except no, it can't really? Brilliant.

I'm sorry, but if you want to discuss my posts, I'm going to have to insist that you actually discuss them.

My post went to some effort to explain why science can change the ought/should, and why that does not mean it can resolve every specific dilemma.

In other words, I provided a cogent explanation in support of Harris's claim that the science/morality divide is an illusion, and why it is not a contradiction to say simultaneously that science (a) can tell us what we ought to value, and (b) cannot hand us the answer to every moral question.

When you want to discuss that, I expect you to put at least some effort into it, given the effort I have put into the post you are reacting to. (I won't use the word "responding", because I don't think it fits.)

Name one thing.

I have already discussed more than one example, thank you.

Beth

17th October 2010, 01:29 PM

For example, at the end of the TED talk he clearly acknowledges the possibility of individual differing of experiences based on differing values (using the example of some muslim women feeling good about veiling themselves). I see him more arguing that we can use science to find "the closest peaks" in the collective moral landscape and with the help of science lead a majority of the whole towards them.

That is pretty much how I read him as well. He also acknowledged at some point that it was possible there were multiple peaks.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 01:33 PM

Unfortunately without some arbitrary "ought" claim, you cannot get to non-arbitrary ought claims no matter how high you stack "is" claims.

If you (or Piggy, or anyone else) think otherwise, just show us how you do so.

But I've already shown that the oughts are not arbitrary, since they flow from the is.

For instance, because we are hard-wired to find extreme confinement unpleasant, we feel that we ought not be locked in a closet for days at a time, and because we're hard-wired to be social beings, we feel that our social groups ought not subject their members to such treatment unless some other hard-wired drive conflicts in such a way that, on balance, makes it more desirable than the alternative.

But we're also hard-wired to prefer our in-group over other out-groups. Which means that we often do feel (because all of this is tied up with our emotional systems) that others should not be granted the same rights, because they are evil, or God hates them, or they're inferior, or their ancestors murdered our ancestors, or our safety matters more than theirs, etc.

Again, all of the ought's flow directly from the is's. Moral dilemmas are conflicts -- usually social ones -- among the various ought's which are outcomes of the various is's.

We resolve these conflicts by making should decisions. Science changes the should by illuminating the is and tipping the balance among the oughts in a different direction.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 01:39 PM

Dani

17th October 2010, 02:17 PM

Perhaps he is arguing for the inclusion of some sort of moral axiom in science? I haven't read the book yet, but I plan to.

Honestly, I don't think so. If this were really his point (quite pointless, by the way) he wouldn't have talked about the illusion of distinguishing facts from moral values.

No, I tend to think that his is a mishmash of incoherent ideas.

Earthborn

17th October 2010, 02:23 PM

We do not need to crack the precise mechanism in order to understand that these drives exist.It probably is necessary to crack the precise mechanism to determine whether or not they are "innate".

The fact is, scientist are in the process of developing a rather robust picture of innate human nature.No, they are not. "Innate human nature" is an undefined, and quite possibly undefinable concept.

... why it is not a contradiction to say simultaneously that science (a) can tell us what we ought to value, and (b) cannot hand us the answer to every moral question.Harris claims that "Science can answer moral questions" so there should at least be some moral questions that science can answer. There appear to be none. He has also not shown how science can tell us what we ought to value.

Again, all of the ought's flow directly from the is's. Moral dilemmas are conflicts -- usually social ones -- among the various ought's which are outcomes of the various is's.Oughts do no flow directly from the is's. They can't; as they represent two irreconcilable ways of thinking. They flow in completely different directions. Read post 459 again if you have to.

Btw, I should mention that "values" is another idea that we would be better off to jettison, along with intrinsic and instrumental good.Sam Harris on the other hand wants to claim that they are "facts about conscious beings".

It is easy to pretend that "values" are arbitrary, or are randomly determined by "culture".Easy to pretend perhaps, but values are not randomly determined by culture. They are selected by culture. They are memes, and memes can have their own evolution. Just because they are a product of evolution does not prove they are innate.

Beth

17th October 2010, 02:48 PM

Science changes the should by illuminating the is and tipping the balance among the oughts in a different direction.

Are you saying 'science tips the balance regarding how we should treat homosexuals because evidence (A) indicates that treating them like (B) leads to outcome (C), which is what we desire?

I think this is a very good argument, but I also realize that this approach can lead to very bad outcomes in implementation. Questions lead, evidence follows. Then, the evidence leads where we looked for evidence.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 02:52 PM

It probably is necessary to crack the precise mechanism to determine whether or not they are "innate".

It's actually not. Twin studies, for example, can help us make these determinations, as do cross-cultural studies. As in every other branch of scientific inquiry, we have means of looking into places where we cannot see directly.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 02:54 PM

No, they are not. "Innate human nature" is an undefined, and quite possibly undefinable concept.

Oh, far from it. In fact, Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" (http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344/) is an excellent overview of the topic, if you're interested.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 02:57 PM

Harris claims that "Science can answer moral questions" so there should at least be some moral questions that science can answer. There appear to be none. He has also not shown how science can tell us what we ought to value.

It not only can, but in everyday practice, it does.

AlBell

17th October 2010, 03:07 PM

Oh, far from it. In fact, Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" (http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344/) is an excellent overview of the topic, if you're interested.
Facts not in evidence.

http://www.bfsr.org/BSI_12_1/12_1schl.pdf

those interested in how well Pinker succeeds in making his
argument for human nature are encouraged to read behavioral biologist Patrick Bateson’s scathing review in Science (September, 2002). Bateson takes Pinker to task for reviving the “wearisome” nature-nurture debate and writes that, “Saloonbar assertions do not lead to the balanced discussion that should be generated on a topic as important as this one.” Bateson even questions the central assumption of Pinker’s title, namely that human nature is still routinely denied. And he cautions that all examples of behaviors that benefit individuals in the modern world are not necessarily products of evolution. As numerous scientists have pointed out, patterns of behavior that seem to be adaptive may be so because they were selected
in our evolutionary history or in individuals’ own lifetimes by learning
experiences.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 03:10 PM

Oughts do no flow directly from the is's. They can't; as they represent two irreconcilable ways of thinking. They flow in completely different directions. Read post 459 again if you have to.

I would recommend that you re-read post 449.

All of our ought's flow directly from our is's, which we can tell by comparing ourselves to other species, for example.

Each of us carries around a set of ought's, which are fundamentally determined by a combination of our evolution (i.e., those traits common to our species, or to even larger biological groups) and our circumstance (i.e., how our individual brains happen to be wired and what happens to us in life).

Moral dilemmas are clashes of these oughts within each of us.

I have a moral dilemma when I find out that my best friend's wife cheated on him because it plays upon conflicting drives which operate in my brain because I'm a member of a social species.

My brain releases chemicals that make me "feel bad" emotionally if I keep a secret from my best friend about something that affects him directly in significant ways, because evolution has put that mechanism in my brain.

But my brain also releases chemicals that make me "feel bad" if I cause avoidable pain to my best friend, for exactly the same reason.

The world, however, has no interest in making existence all nice and neat for me, so I find myself in a situation in which either choice -- tell him or don't -- makes my brain punish me.

That's what we call a moral dilemma. The hard-wired drives that evolution has built into me are giving me a no-win. And I have to choose anyway, because to ignore the situation is to make a choice!

In this case, science would seem to be little help to me.

But then again, maybe not!

For example, if I found research demonstrating that brief, casual affairs by women typically do not have any lasting impact on their marriages, and I also found research demonstrating that knowledge of a wife's affair is usually extremely painful for men and is more likely than not to end a marriage, then my should is tipped!

I accept the lesser pain of keeping the secret because the conflict between my hard-wired drives to be honest with my best friend and to not cause him unnecessary pain are best satisfied by saying nothing, thereby allowing him to continue his happy marriage.

And I can describe all of this without any reference to values, intrinsic good, or instrumental good. Sure, others can use those terms, but they're entirely unnecessary, and (it seems to me) a tremendous distraction.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 03:14 PM

Facts not in evidence.

http://www.bfsr.org/BSI_12_1/12_1schl.pdf

Color me unimpressed:

“Saloonbar assertions do not lead to the balanced discussion that should be generated on a topic as important as this one.”

This book is for a popular audience, yes, but it's extremely well documented, so that accusation is ridiculous.

Also, this fellows approach smacks of behaviorism.

In any case, all I'm doing is recommending the book, not offering it as evidence, because I don't consider "Go read this book" to be a proper argument for anything.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 03:15 PM

Sam Harris on the other hand wants to claim that they are "facts about conscious beings".

I know, and I understand where he's coming from, but I would prefer to simply do without the term altogether.

I don't always agree with Harris, of course.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 03:18 PM

Easy to pretend perhaps, but values are not randomly determined by culture. They are selected by culture. They are memes, and memes can have their own evolution. Just because they are a product of evolution does not prove they are innate.

So now you're proposing culture as a driver of evolution?

Are you serious?

I think that's a bigger claim that you believe it to be.

But no, the urge for reciprocity, the sense of fairness, in-group loyalty, preference for blood kin, these things are not memes. They're universal among people, like having 2 legs.

Yes, some people have one leg -- or even 3! -- but that doesn't change the fact that our biological blueprint calls for 2 legs. It also calls for reciprocity, preference for kin, and so forth.

Kevin_Lowe

17th October 2010, 03:30 PM

Ah I see. Your response was meant to ignore the example from Harris.

Yes, yes, for the third time yes. I was aimed at your remarks about the problem of induction and nothing else. It was meant to ignore everything except your remarks about the problem of induction. Is that okay with you? If you're going to take offence every time I talk about one thing instead of another this is going to be a very tiresome exchange.

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I said.

My point is that you don't get to appropriate the social status of science and proclaim that all moral claims are "pre-scientific thinking". If you try that it demonstrates a misunderstanding of both science and philosophy.

Yeah, I think I've figured out now that it will turn out not to mean whatever it looked like it meant to me. :)

As Dani said, there is no intention here to mislead or obfuscate and if you need me to clarify any specific usage then I am happy to do so. However I'm usually fairly consistent about these kinds of terminological issues, so if I'm talking about "value judgments" I'm probably talking about moral claims.

Right, but since I didn't suggest that it did, I'm not sure why you bothered saying this.

It seemed to me that you were. Perhaps I misunderstood you. I think Harris may well be to blame here, since he uses "value" to mean all sorts of axioms or preferences other than moral value.

This has been my point all along. I hoped that by trying different ways of conveying it, it might eventually be the point you address.

The difficulty is that you are presenting an argument which is incoherent, but which seems plausible to you. So there are a variety of refutations available, all of which are watertight, but you can respond to each of them by saying "But that wasn't really my argument, because my argument cannot be refuted, what I really meant was something else". The benefit of a position which is already self-contradictory is that you lose nothing by being inconsistent about what exactly that position is.

I agree that that it doesn't give you a basis for choosing between two different outcomes. However, why is this to be considered a problem, rather than simply a factual statement? After all, it would be much easier to measure time if there were a lumineferous ether, but we don't call the lack of that ether a "problem" and simply pretend that it is still there instead.

So we do without "ought" claims - so why do we want people to flourish again? Why is Ted Bundy bad, and why are antibiotics good? Why is rape bad, and altruism good? Why should we care if people in Africa starve or lab animals are tortured to death for a paper nobody will ever cite?

As soon as you toss ought claims out the front door, you run around to the back door and let them back in again, but this time you give them a crudely-folded paper hat with "IM FROM SCIUNCE" written on it in crayon.

You already know why not being able to express and discuss moral ideas is a problem, because you (and Harris) have moral ideas.

Well, I don't hold that position, but how is this a contradiction? If you recognize that there are no 'oughts' one can make absolute reference to, then it seems a reasonable step to suggest a replacement (no matter how ill-conceived they may be). It would be a contradiction if you wanted to act as though there were 'oughts' and also concern yourself with the consequences.

Quick correction: Nobody except theists believe in absolute oughts, and I haven't seen any of those in this discussion. The usual term is "objective", which in philosophy means that the claim is held to apply to all people regardless of their particular moral beliefs or lack thereof, as opposed to "subjectivist" where what people think is moral determines what is moral for them.

Moving on, I can tell you in advance this project is doomed. You can't get to ought statements from is statements, as Earthborn very patiently explained. Either you will spin your wheels forever with "is" statements that get you to no moral conclusions, or you will smuggle in "ought" statements by the back door which is what you, Piggy and Harris do.

I agree that this would be fallacious. It also doesn't seem to be a scientific approach, so I wouldn't argue for this. And as I said earlier, I haven't read Harris' book, so I don't know the details, but he also indicated that he was looking for a scientific approach. I think that far too much is being read into the two pictures he used as an example and the creation of various back stories. You don't even have to say that one is 'good' and the other 'bad'. It is sufficient to recognize that there are factual ways to distinguish between the two.

I'll say this yet again: Absolutely nobody at any stage of this thread, ever, has argued that science cannot provide useful facts which combined with moral value claims can help us get to useful conclusions. So if that's the whole point of the slide then nobody has ever disagreed with the point of the slide.

You seem to be equivocating between what is meant by 'ought' under two different circumstances.

I don't think I am - can you explain this accusation?

Piggy

17th October 2010, 03:46 PM

Are you saying 'science tips the balance regarding how we should treat homosexuals because evidence (A) indicates that treating them like (B) leads to outcome (C), which is what we desire?

I think this is a very good argument, but I also realize that this approach can lead to very bad outcomes in implementation. Questions lead, evidence follows. Then, the evidence leads where we looked for evidence.

I'm not sure I follow you here, but no, I don't believe that's a good description of what I'm saying.

I'm saying that we all carry around a set of ought's which overlap to varying degrees, and which for most people are identical for the most fundamental ought's.

Individual moral dilemmas are conflicts among the ought's, leaving us undetermined about what we should do.

(Public moral dilemmas are conflicts among groups of people who have reached conflicting conclusions about the should.)

Science does not change the drives that are built into us.

But if you're a person who is aware of science -- the method and the body of knowledge -- it can have a profound effect on what you think the world ought to look like, and what you think you/we should do.

Sexual desires and disgusts are built into all neurologically normal people, with a certain distribution of variation.

Under normal circumstances, heterosexuality is a more prevalent orientation than homosexuality for our species (not surprisingly) but there is no purely heterosexual society (somewhat surprisingly, at first glance, from an evolutionary point of view) and there is no clean binary break between the two. That's just how we're wired.

We're also wired to prefer our in-groups to out-groups. And we're wired to be prone to religious thinking.

Tribalism and religious fundamentalism are part of a range of possible social realities that crop up when these latter two and some other elements are put into play. They're features of the social "climate", so to speak, which is determined by our biology just as climate and weather are determined by physics and geology.

Some people live in the tropics, others in the tundra. Some people live in fundamentalist cultures, others in secular cultures. But the fundamentalist/secular options are the result of different mixes made possible by the wiring in our brains when it comes into contact with the rest of the world. (We don't see such trends, for example, in the cultures of birds. But we do share with birds other apparently "cultural" behaviors, such as displays of pointless excess among males to win females. Our brains are similar in some ways, different in others.)

You can spend your whole life just going with the flow of your social climate, and that's just the way it is if that's how you live your life.

But what happens when we apply science to the question?

What happens is that it changes or confirms what we conclude we should do!

Science reveals that there is no commandment from God to hate (much less kill) homosexuals, and that homosexuality is not a deadly sin, but simply part of the natural range of human wiring like red hair or left-handedness or a revulsion to strawberries.

So even though our natural drives don't change, science -- or, more accurately, the application of science -- leads us away from the conclusion that homosexuals ought to be killed because God hates them.

Tsukasa Buddha

17th October 2010, 03:46 PM

I would recommend that you re-read post 449.

All of our ought's flow directly from our is's, which we can tell by comparing ourselves to other species, for example.

Each of us carries around a set of ought's, which are fundamentally determined by a combination of our evolution (i.e., those traits common to our species, or to even larger biological groups) and our circumstance (i.e., how our individual brains happen to be wired and what happens to us in life).

Moral dilemmas are clashes of these oughts within each of us.

I have a moral dilemma when I find out that my best friend's wife cheated on him because it plays upon conflicting drives which operate in my brain because I'm a member of a social species.

My brain releases chemicals that make me "feel bad" emotionally if I keep a secret from my best friend about something that affects him directly in significant ways, because evolution has put that mechanism in my brain.

But my brain also releases chemicals that make me "feel bad" if I cause avoidable pain to my best friend, for exactly the same reason.

The world, however, has no interest in making existence all nice and neat for me, so I find myself in a situation in which either choice -- tell him or don't -- makes my brain punish me.

That's what we call a moral dilemma. The hard-wired drives that evolution has built into me are giving me a no-win. And I have to choose anyway, because to ignore the situation is to make a choice!

In this case, science would seem to be little help to me.

But then again, maybe not!

For example, if I found research demonstrating that brief, casual affairs by women typically do not have any lasting impact on their marriages, and I also found research demonstrating that knowledge of a wife's affair is usually extremely painful for men and is more likely than not to end a marriage, then my should is tipped!

I accept the lesser pain of keeping the secret because the conflict between my hard-wired drives to be honest with my best friend and to not cause him unnecessary pain are best satisfied by saying nothing, thereby allowing him to continue his happy marriage.

And I can describe all of this without any reference to values, intrinsic good, or instrumental good. Sure, others can use those terms, but they're entirely unnecessary, and (it seems to me) a tremendous distraction.

You are actually not addressing plenty of the issues in the scenario. Whether your pain of not telling is more or less than your friend's pain of knowing is one. The uncertainty of the future of the marriage is another. The desire for retribution you feel towards the cheating spouse is another. Also, how will the friend react if he finds out you knew and didn't tell?

These, along with your stats, are weighed according to our values. You still haven't shown those to be scientific.

Also, if we do away with "good" and all that, what do we do when we run into problems that science can't solve yet, as you so often remind us?

Kevin_Lowe

17th October 2010, 03:51 PM

But I've already shown that the oughts are not arbitrary, since they flow from the is.

Philosophically sound "oughts" are arbitrary in the sense that they are not based on any prior evidence or reasoning, but only in that sense. They are all based on someone non-scientific ideas about what is good, and people tend not to think that totally random things are good.

For instance, because we are hard-wired to find extreme confinement unpleasant, we feel that we ought not be locked in a closet for days at a time, and because we're hard-wired to be social beings, we feel that our social groups ought not subject their members to such treatment unless some other hard-wired drive conflicts in such a way that, on balance, makes it more desirable than the alternative.

But we're also hard-wired to prefer our in-group over other out-groups. Which means that we often do feel (because all of this is tied up with our emotional systems) that others should not be granted the same rights, because they are evil, or God hates them, or they're inferior, or their ancestors murdered our ancestors, or our safety matters more than theirs, etc.

Again, all of the ought's flow directly from the is's. Moral dilemmas are conflicts -- usually social ones -- among the various ought's which are outcomes of the various is's.

So the argument is, as I said, "I assert that we are biologically inclined to prefer A to B".

The response is, as I said, "We are biologically inclined to prefer all sorts of awful things, and to not prefer all sorts of nice things, so now what?".

Here it comes:

We resolve these conflicts by making should decisions. Science changes the should by illuminating the is and tipping the balance among the oughts in a different direction.

It's "We should cherry-pick the Bs we like from the Bs we don't like, because science will tell us which of them is better. Miraculously, science tells us that modern secular, liberal morality as of 2010 is the one true morality - ain't that nice?".

Convenient (suspiciously so) as this would be, science can't do that, unless our preference for a given B over a given A is based on some misconception about how the universe is. If the preferences are not based on some such misconception, then science has nothing to offer that will help.

(Is it your underlying idea is that with perfect information everyone on Earth would converge on the single perfect moral system? If not, how can science possible resolve conflicts between different well-informed moral views?).

The problem with this is, even in those cases where we do have some relevant misconception science can help with, it's still no use to us unless we are already operating some kind of moral value system that gives us teleological goals for how we want our future behaviour or future world to look like.

This is the same dance over and over again: Assert the truth of moral nihilism, chuck moral oughts out the front door, then whisk them in the back door with a funny hat on and proclaim them objective truths taught to us by science so we can simultaneously embrace nihilism and funny-hat-utilitarianism without having to admit that we ever make an arbitrary "ought" claim. This isn't science, except in the sense that Christian Science is science: it's nonsense nicking the name of science hoping to fool people.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 03:55 PM

You are actually not addressing plenty of the issues in the scenario. Whether your pain of not telling is more or less than your friend's pain of knowing is one. The uncertainty of the future of the marriage is another. The desire for retribution you feel towards the cheating spouse is another. Also, how will the friend react if he finds out you knew and didn't tell?

These, along with your stats, are weighed according to our values. You still haven't shown those to be scientific.

Also, if we do away with "good" and all that, what do we do when we run into problems that science can't solve yet, as you so often remind us?

Oh, come now. Of course I haven't drawn out the complete scenario with all of the potentially pertinent factors. That would be impossible.

I know it's not as simple as the dilemma I sketched out, but the example still holds.

As for the uncertainties, the question is not whether they exist, but whether they're significant enough to prevent my reaching a conclusion and thus remaining in a dilemma.

I mentioned this above with respect to the bombing of Iran. No matter what scenario we imagine, there are simply too many variables and too little information to allow us to predict an actual outcome with any degree of certainty.

And an abstract idea of "good" still will not help us in that situation, or any other situation in which we don't have enough information, or in which our desires remain equally balanced in spite of the information.

Life's tough sometimes, and the world doesn't care if it puts us into lose-lose situations.

Would a notion of "good" have helped resolve Sophie's Dilemma?

Piggy

17th October 2010, 04:00 PM

These, along with your stats, are weighed according to our values. You still haven't shown those to be scientific.

Where do your values come from?

You can't simply point to "culture", because our cultures spring from our biology. They depend entirely on how our brains are wired and the resources we have at hand to carry out the results of the wiring.

It may seem, for example, to be determined by "culture" that men go to the gym and get all blinged up and go out to the dance club to impress women, but it's only at the most superficial level that "culture" determines the form of those rituals. The drives are the same all over the world. And they are not unique to humans.

Kevin_Lowe

17th October 2010, 04:03 PM

Btw, I should mention that "values" is another idea that we would be better off to jettison, along with intrinsic and instrumental good.

It is easy to pretend that "values" are arbitrary, or are randomly determined by "culture".

But this is not true.

The reason we "value" the health of our children is because (only and entirely because) we are human beings and not, say, seahorses.

It is not really a "value", but an instinct. We can't help it.

Compare: The only reason we like rape is that we are human beings descended from chimp-like ancestors and not, say, seahorses. Nonetheless we should rape because it is our nature. It is not really a "value" but an instinct. We can't help it.

When someone's brain is wired so that they don't care about the welfare of their children or enjoy harming their children -- because, after all, people are objects and can be damaged, in utero or post-partum -- they elicit an instinctive emotion of disgust and anger from others.

The reason we want to kill people with a rock when they try to stop us raping is because that sort of behaviour elicits instinctive rage.

Culture certainly plays a role in the shapes that these drives take -- and people often argue, fight, even wage war over those differences -- but the drives are not arbitrary. Nor, for that matter, is our tendency to have conflict over trivialities.

So can we conclude from this that we should rape as much as we can, and that science can morally validate this plan by developing better ways to rape?

I don't think that's a conclusion anybody wants, yet if you reify instinctive drives as a source of moral commandments, with or without funny hats on, it's as valid a conclusion as any other.

It's pretty clear that you have a pre-existing set of moral ideas, such as the idea that egalitarian flourishing is preferable to rape, and that you are trying to reify those pre-existing ideas by cherry-picking "is" claims from science that seem to you to support them and claiming that those particular "is" claims trump competing "is" claims. However you cannot explain the basis by which you choose one claim over another, because it's strictly post hoc. You don't have a coherent story about how we should derive ought claims from scientific facts because the fact is you aren't doing anything of the sort - you're just appropriating bits of science as scaffolding to place around moral ideas that were floating unsupported before you started hunting for science to support them.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 04:05 PM

Philosophically sound "oughts" are arbitrary in the sense that they are not based on any prior evidence or reasoning, but only in that sense. They are all based on someone non-scientific ideas about what is good, and people tend not to think that totally random things are good.

I could not care less what is "philosophically sound", because my arguments are not philosophical.

And I agree that our ought's are not the product of reasoning -- although our drives may have a range of possible ought's which can vary under the influence of reason -- but that does not make them arbitrary.

As I've amply explained, what we think we ought to do, and how the world ought to be, is entirely dependent on the fact that we have the biology of a human being, and not a daffodil or a nurse shark or a marmoset or something else.

They are certainly not based on someone's ideas of what is good, precisely because we don't come to conclusions about that, at the most fundamental level, based on what we think. We have the feeling that things are "good" or "bad" or "right" or "wrong", at the most basic level, because we're born that way, because we're human.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 04:12 PM

So the argument is, as I said, "I assert that we are biologically inclined to prefer A to B".

In some cases yes, in other cases A and B exist as part of a range of possible preferences.

The response is, as I said, "We are biologically inclined to prefer all sorts of awful things, and to not prefer all sorts of nice things, so now what?".

What do you mean, now what? Now nothing. That's just how it is.

It's "We should cherry-pick the Bs we like from the Bs we don't like, because science will tell us which of them is better. Miraculously, science tells us that modern secular, liberal morality as of 2010 is the one true morality - ain't that nice?".

Where on God's green earth do you get that idea?

I haven't noticed anyone arguing that on this thread. If so, it certainly isn't me.

Let's take the issue of prison education, for example.

On the one hand, our drive for security tells us that it's a good idea to educate prisoners so that a greater number will be able to find work. Some don't want to find work, but some do, so the investment should pay off in marginally safer cities, even though it won't stop recidivism.

On the other hand, our drive for fairness says, "Wait a minute! I work for a living and if I want to get continuing education, I have to pay for it. These guys commit crimes against society, and I'm supposed to foot the bill to give them adult education for free? No ******* way!"

That's a moral dilemma right there.

And I don't see that science gives us an answer, because science does not allow us to simply ignore our human desire for fairness, and it certainly doesn't allow us to ignore the fact that politically unpopular programs simply won't be supported in a democracy.

Kevin_Lowe

17th October 2010, 04:18 PM

I could not care less what is "philosophically sound", because my arguments are not philosophical.

The rest of us care about logic, even if you don't. In fact I'd go so far as to say that you ought to care about logic, and it's bad that you do not.

And I agree that our ought's are not the product of reasoning -- although our drives may have a range of possible ought's which can vary under the influence of reason -- but that does not make them arbitrary.

As I've amply explained, what we think we ought to do, and how the world ought to be, is entirely dependent on the fact that we have the biology of a human being, and not a daffodil or a nurse shark or a marmoset or something else.

"May"? Kant's views were very different to those of Bentham, who were in turn different to those of Mill, or Parfit, or Rawls, or Singer. I think you'll find their views were all the product of reason or an attempt at it.

What you are saying here is true but trivial.

They are certainly not based on someone's ideas of what is good, precisely because we don't come to conclusions about that, at the most fundamental level, based on what we think. We have the feeling that things are "good" or "bad" or "right" or "wrong", at the most basic level, because we're born that way, because we're human.

You keep stating things which are not contested, and then leaping from them to a conclusion which simply doesn't follow: that we can get to "ought" statements just from "is" statements.

You still haven't shown how we can do that, by the way.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 04:21 PM

Is it your underlying idea is that with perfect information everyone on Earth would converge on the single perfect moral system? If not, how can science possible resolve conflicts between different well-informed moral views?

You continue to misunderstand the argument. Willfully so, it would seem, at this point.

We would not converge on a perfect moral system, even with perfect information because (a) we are not all identically wired, and (b) reality is not required to hand us situations in which our various drives are sufficiently imbalanced to produce a clear "winning" choice.

As you know by now, or should, nobody here is arguing or has argued (and Harris certainly isn't, either) that science can provide us all the answers.

Rather, the argument is simply that the dividing wall is an illusion. Science can tell us what we ought to do with our lives, and what is worth dying for -- it has that potential, those topics are not outside its purview -- but this does not mean that it is capable of always providing us with answers to all our moral questions.

ETA: This is really no different from the simple observation that science can tell us what the cosmos looks like, but it's not capable of answering all our particular questions about what the cosmos looks like.

So, for instance, science can tell us that blowing ourselves up in order to protect the honor of the long-dead holy prophet is stupid, because it's based on a view of the world that does not conform to reality. (That's a case of telling us what is and is not worth living/dying for.)

But it cannot necessarily tell us whether or not we should bomb Iran because we suspect they might be lying about their nuclear intentions.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 04:24 PM

Compare: The only reason we like rape is that we are human beings descended from chimp-like ancestors and not, say, seahorses. Nonetheless we should rape because it is our nature. It is not really a "value" but an instinct. We can't help it.

Does not follow because (a) not 100% of men are inclined to rape, and (b) there are a host of other drives that we have as a social species which mitigate against rape.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 04:26 PM

The rest of us care about logic, even if you don't. In fact I'd go so far as to say that you ought to care about logic, and it's bad that you do not.

I care about reason.

I have no use for philosophical boxes.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 04:28 PM

You keep stating things which are not contested, and then leaping from them to a conclusion which simply doesn't follow: that we can get to "ought" statements just from "is" statements.

You still haven't shown how we can do that, by the way.

I've shown it so many times now that I'm tired of doing it.

If you care to ignore it, or to reason from your lexicon of isms, there's nothing I can do about that.

Kevin_Lowe

17th October 2010, 04:37 PM

Does not follow because (a) not 100% of men are inclined to rape,

That doesn't get you anywhere, because some are, particularly in war situations (which we humans throughout our history have very enthusiastically created).

and (b) there are a host of other drives that we have as a social species which mitigate against rape.

Yes indeed, and you decide somehow that they trump the drive to rape (or murder, steal, oppress, exploit or whatever). But how do you do this, without assigning some kind of arbitrary weighting system to our different drives? You can do this by listing what you think are different drives and having them all vote, or by saying some drives get priority over other drives, but since nature hasn't been so kind as to label some of our drives as more important than others for our benefit that would just be arbitrary utilitarianism in a crude paper hat.

It seems to me that you are just eyeballing them and coming up with a conclusion you like, which by a stunning coincidence turns out to be a pretty common set of moral ideas amongst secular skeptics in 2010, but nothing like the common views of social groups from other places and times - what an amazing coincidence, that the one true scientific morality you end up with happens to be the pre-scientific morality you started with!

Perhaps more importantly the sole use of moral philosophy is to deal with the cases which aren't trivially obvious. You don't need to do any deep thinking to get to the conclusion that it's a bad idea to let people rape whoever they want whenever they want, or that it's better for a society to be able to feed its members than not. That isn't exactly a shockingly novel idea, or one that was a genuine source of controversy that you and Harris have helped us out by resolving.

Moral philosophy can, at least in theory if you aren't dealing with openly religious zealots like fundamentalists or openly confused zealots like yourself who reject logic, help us to understand and resolve genuinely difficult issues, like which entities deserve moral consideration in difficult cases, or how we should balance the interests of individuals against the interests of society in difficult cases. When it comes to difficult cases you just throw your hands up and say "Of course my amazing new totally science-based morality can't help us with hard problems... they're too hard! Just give up! The universe isn't obliged to make things clear to us you know!".

Earthborn

17th October 2010, 04:48 PM

So now you're proposing culture as a driver of evolution?Of cultural evolution, yes.

Where do your values come from?My parents taught them to me.

You can't simply point to "culture", because our cultures spring from our biology. They depend entirely on how our brains are wired and the resources we have at hand to carry out the results of the wiring.And of course on the environment in which our brains develop, including our social environment. In other words, our culture.

I could not care less what is "philosophically sound", because my arguments are not philosophical.Yes, they are. Unless of course you are using a rather strange definition of "philosophical".

They are certainly not based on someone's ideas of what is good, precisely because we don't come to conclusions about that, at the most fundamental level, based on what we think. We have the feeling that things are "good" or "bad" or "right" or "wrong", at the most basic level, because we're born that way, because we're human.I fail to see what the difference is between "someone's ideas of what is good" and "the feeling that things are good..."

Does not follow because (a) not 100% of men are inclined to rape, And yet it is supposedly a "human universal (http://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm)".

Kevin_Lowe

17th October 2010, 04:54 PM

I care about reason.

I have no use for philosophical boxes.

They don't care whether you "have a use" for them, we can still use them just fine.

This is exactly like saying "I have invented a new tool! It's a flat-headed metal weight on the end of a stick! I use it to push special flat-headed spikes through wood with repeated blows, it's very clever. I also use it to push special flat-headed spikes with a twisting thread through wood".

Then when we say "That's not exactly new, they are called hammers and nails, everyone knows about them. Oh, by the way, the threaded things are called screws and they work better with these other things called drills and screwdrivers" you respond with "I have no use for your boxes! I transcend your small-minded pre-scientific paradigm with my metal weight on a stick! It's the best way of pushing flat-headed spikes with a twisting thread through wood, and I have already proved this by asserting it over and over!".

Moral nihilism is moral nihilism, and utilitarianism is utilitarianism, and we find those terms very useful boxes for storing the ideas you have been articulating. Complaining that you don't recognise the existence of those boxes doesn't get you out of them, nor does pretending that you aren't in them when it's manifestly obvious you are.

Piscivore

17th October 2010, 04:55 PM

So, for instance, science can tell us that blowing ourselves up in order to protect the honor of the long-dead holy prophet is stupid, because it's based on a view of the world that does not conform to reality. (That's a case of telling us what is and is not worth living/dying for.)

What person that believes that science is a valid world view is likely to think blowing themselves up in order to protect the honor of the long-dead holy prophet is a good idea? What is whatever this thing is you are talking about telling anyone that they don't already know?

And doesn't a person have to first make a judgement that science is a worthwhile worldview before adopting this "new" view?

Piggy

17th October 2010, 06:16 PM

That doesn't get you anywhere, because some are, particularly in war situations (which we humans throughout our history have very enthusiastically created).

You said "we can't help it".

Obviously, we can, because not every man does so.

As for the ones who do, you'd have to explain what you mean by "can't help it".

And even if it were true that they "can't help it", that is not any argument for, say, keeping them out of jail. Rather, it's an argument for putting them in jail.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 06:21 PM

Yes indeed, and you decide somehow that they trump the drive to rape (or murder, steal, oppress, exploit or whatever).

No, I don't.

And what would it mean if I did? Absolutely nothing, because the world does not exist inside my head.

As I've said -- because this is what we clearly observe -- different individuals have different strengths of various drives.

Ted Bundy, for example, had no compunction against lying, stealing, raping, torturing, and killing. (Yes, he was a kleptomaniac and pathological liar in addition to being a serial killer.)

Some people are so paralyzed with dread at the thought of offending others or appearing foolish that they become shut-ins.

Which drives "trump" the other drives depends on the individual wiring.

To attempt to decide, in the abstract, which drives trump the other would be foolish, and a total waste of time.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 06:24 PM

My parents taught them to me.

Oh, did they? What makes you think that? What makes you think you didn't inherit them?

And even if it were true that your family or your culture were the vehicle for transmitting your values, then you have to ask, what causes our cultures?

Piggy

17th October 2010, 06:25 PM

And of course on the environment in which our brains develop, including our social environment. In other words, our culture.

Again, what causes our cultures?

Piggy

17th October 2010, 06:26 PM

Yes, they are. Unless of course you are using a rather strange definition of "philosophical".

I don't consider science a philosophy.

If you do, then that's fine. But in my experience, philosophy is how we kill time until science figures out a way to actually answer the questions.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 06:28 PM

I fail to see what the difference is between "someone's ideas of what is good" and "the feeling that things are good..."

You can't control the feelings and you don't need to think about them.

I don't decide that my brain produces chemicals that make me "feel bad" if I betray my best friend. I don't decide that my brain gets angry if a co-worker takes credit for my hard work. I don't decide to feel emotional pain when I see my children suffer from physical pain.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 06:31 PM

And yet it is supposedly a "human universal (http://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm)".

Yes, and it's getting dull answering this same question over and over.

It's a human universal because it's found in all cultures.

That doesn't mean it's found in 100% of human beings.

The fact that it exists in all cultures indicates that it exists as a built-in range of tendencies, like being left-handed or right-handed or ambidextrous, or having blonde hair or dark hair or red hair.

If you don't understand that explanation, then there's nothing more I can say to you about it.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 06:35 PM

They don't care whether you "have a use" for them, we can still use them just fine.

You can use them for whatever they're good for, which is really nothing outside of philosophy itself.

When Einstein developed the theories of relativity, nobody bothered to check which philosophers his ideas were in line with or out of line with, or which philosophical isms it fit inside of.

Once you approach a question scientifically, the philosophical boxes cease to matter. If the scientific solutions happen to straddle those boxes, it's of no consequence whatsoever.

And since we are discussing the question of a scientific approach to morality, it makes no sense at all to criticize such an approach on the grounds that it doesn't align itself well with a non-scientific approach.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 06:38 PM

What person that believes that science is a valid world view is likely to think blowing themselves up in order to protect the honor of the long-dead holy prophet is a good idea?

That is precisely my point.

And doesn't a person have to first make a judgement that science is a worthwhile worldview before adopting this "new" view?

Of course.

Kevin_Lowe

17th October 2010, 07:04 PM

No, I don't.

And what would it mean if I did? Absolutely nothing, because the world does not exist inside my head.

As I've said -- because this is what we clearly observe -- different individuals have different strengths of various drives.

Ted Bundy, for example, had no compunction against lying, stealing, raping, torturing, and killing. (Yes, he was a kleptomaniac and pathological liar in addition to being a serial killer.)

Some people are so paralyzed with dread at the thought of offending others or appearing foolish that they become shut-ins.

Which drives "trump" the other drives depends on the individual wiring.

To attempt to decide, in the abstract, which drives trump the other would be foolish, and a total waste of time.

Then you're back to either nihilism (if you think these opinions are meaningless) or moral relativism (if you think these opinions should guide our behaviour).

That's a completely different beast to the modified utilitarianism Harris espouses. In fact all three of those views are mutually contradictory.

Before you try it, no, you can't get out of a logical contradiction by saying "It's a new paradigm, I'm a new Einstein, I'm straddling the boundaries of your oudated labels!". All you are actually doing is making a disorganised tactical retreat from one box to the next as logic chases you about.

"No, I'm not a moral objectivist, because moral ideas have no meaning. But I'm not a moral nihilist, because people think they have meaning. But I'm not a moral relativist, because I think my moral ideas are better than those of nasty Islamic people. But I'm not a moral objectivist, because my moral ideas have no meaning..." and so on forever in circles.

Simultaneously endorsing and denying multiple incompatible positions is just confusion, not novel insight.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 07:12 PM

I don't have to be an Einstein. It's not as if I'm the one doing the scientific studies.

The fact remains that scientific inquiry need not have any relationship at all with philosophical schools.

And since I'm only concerned with a scientific approach to morality, your philosophical boxes just don't matter.

ETA: There doesn't have to be any "new paradigm", btw. Philosophical musings do not constitute scientific paradigms.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 07:22 PM

Then you're back to either nihilism (if you think these opinions are meaningless) or moral relativism (if you think these opinions should guide our behaviour).

Fwiw, each individual's mix of drives is what it is. I can't see what could possibly be gained by classifying them as "meaningful" or "meaningless". It's like trying to determine if the differences among the patterns of spots on leopards are "meaningful" or "meaningless".

And it's certainly true that the relative strengths of our individual drives do determine our behavior. What you mean by "opinions" and "guide" I can't imagine.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 07:35 PM

My parents taught them to me.

Regarding my comment above, you might be interested to know that identical twins -- who are never 100% identical, of course -- who are separated at birth and raised apart are no more different from each other, even in terms of personality, than are twins raised together. And they are no more similar to their adopted siblings than they are to total strangers.

We know that extreme conditions can change personality. For instance, a monkey totally deprived of all maternal contact will become highly nervous and socially maladjusted. But it seems to take a very radical set of conditions like that to make any difference.

I can tell you from my own experience, for example.... I have two brothers. We were raised by the same parents, in the same town. My middle brother and I had the same set of friends, even worked at the same jobs with the same people.

We have very similar mannerisms, facial expressions, verbal ticks, and senses of humor.

And yet I'm a highly introverted, politically independent atheist who's prone to extended bouts of depression and has never had any desire to have children; my middle brother is a gregarious workaholic who sees little of his family and is a lifelong Democrat; my oldest brother is a right-wing fundamentalist who sacrifices potentially higher salaries in order to spend more time with his wife and kids.

Genetically identical people tend to have similar outlooks on life, regardless of who raises them. Genetically different people have correspondingly greater dissimilar outlooks on life, even if they're raised together.

Piggy

17th October 2010, 08:09 PM

Yes indeed, and you decide somehow that they trump the drive to rape (or murder, steal, oppress, exploit or whatever). But how do you do this, without assigning some kind of arbitrary weighting system to our different drives? You can do this by listing what you think are different drives and having them all vote, or by saying some drives get priority over other drives, but since nature hasn't been so kind as to label some of our drives as more important than others for our benefit that would just be arbitrary utilitarianism in a crude paper hat.

I have no idea what you mean by voting -- who voting for what? -- but I suppose you could say that the "weighting" each person ends up with is arbitrary precisely to the extent that genetics is arbitrary.

You seem to be looking for (strangely, and for reasons I can't fathom) some sort of "weighting" system that applies to everyone. This is like asking how tall everyone is.

The fact is, we all end up with our own particular mix, determined by a combination of evolution -- which specifies the set of possible drives and the possible range of "weights" -- and our own genetic blueprint, our fetal development, significant physical traumas, significant psychological traumas (e.g., childhood abuse), and so forth.

Ted Bundy's habit of kidnapping women, torturing them, raping them, killing them, and mutilating their bodies wasn't the result of some sort of "opinion" he had about the rights of women. The man was a psychopath.

And he is a highly unusual case because evolution has seen to it that the vast majority of human beings don't have brains wired like that.

So although it is possible, in theory, to determine the range of possible strengths of the various drives, and the actual distribution in the human population, that's as good as you could possibly get.

Piscivore

17th October 2010, 09:03 PM

That is precisely my point.

Of course.

So science cannot lead them to a new "scientific approach to morality" witout them first making a non-scientific judgement that they "ought" to follow science.

No one is "wired" to follow science- it took a lot of pain, effort, false starts and hundreds of years to get here, and science itself tells us we are prone to non-scientific thinking.

Ivor the Engineer

18th October 2010, 03:06 AM

As has been repeatedly pointed out, one can’t cherry pick values from all those possible to generate implicit ought statements and then claim one’s morals are objective.

E.g., why value a friend remaining blissfully ignorant of his wife’s affair(s) higher than his desire to know he runs a higher risk of being cuckold or getting an STI?

All decisions have costs and benefits associated with them. Both costs and benefits have objective and subjective components. Science can compare objective components when they are directly comparable, but it cannot be used to compare subjective components.

With respect to the two photos posted earlier, haven’t we already decided that a world where otherwise healthy men, women and children have horrible lives and deaths because they get less than they need to survive is worth some of us having what we want?

Tsukasa Buddha

18th October 2010, 03:14 AM

Oh, come now. Of course I haven't drawn out the complete scenario with all of the potentially pertinent factors. That would be impossible.

I know it's not as simple as the dilemma I sketched out, but the example still holds.

As for the uncertainties, the question is not whether they exist, but whether they're significant enough to prevent my reaching a conclusion and thus remaining in a dilemma.

I mentioned this above with respect to the bombing of Iran. No matter what scenario we imagine, there are simply too many variables and too little information to allow us to predict an actual outcome with any degree of certainty.

And an abstract idea of "good" still will not help us in that situation, or any other situation in which we don't have enough information, or in which our desires remain equally balanced in spite of the information.

Life's tough sometimes, and the world doesn't care if it puts us into lose-lose situations.

Would a notion of "good" have helped resolve Sophie's Dilemma?

You weren't asked for an airy-fairy, philosophical abstraction. You were asked for an example where science gives us moral values, or even solves moral dilemmas.

And I still want to know if we do away with "good" and all that, what do we do when we run into problems that science can't solve yet, as you so often remind us?

Where do your values come from?

I believe that is a diversion. It doesn't matter where they come from, what matters is I use them to solve moral dilemmas.

fls

18th October 2010, 06:30 AM

I don't think people get irritated thinking about utilitarianism. Maybe they get irritated when someone disguises utilitarianism as science though, but I couldn't tell for sure.

But then this seems to be a problem of their own making. Harris doesn't really state that he would use "well-being" in the same way that it would be used in utilitarianism. For example, he uses the two pictures to illustrate that we would distinguish between the two in terms of well-being, which is more a description of science than of utilitarianism.

My mistake. I'll try to explicitly say it when I'm referring to moral claims, values or judgments. Feel free to ask what I was referring to in previous posts. I've got nothing to hide and it's not my intention to use obscure terms.

I don't think you or anyone else is trying to deliberately obfuscate. It's that it didn't occur to me that you would use a term interchangably for two things I see as different, rather than the same, so it didn't occur to me to ask. Now that I realize this I know to ask.

I should read his post again, but I was guessing those goals are nothing more than moral values.

That was my impression as well.

Linda

Beth

18th October 2010, 06:55 AM

For example, if I found research demonstrating that brief, casual affairs by women typically do not have any lasting impact on their marriages, and I also found research demonstrating that knowledge of a wife's affair is usually extremely painful for men and is more likely than not to end a marriage, then my should is tipped!
I accept the lesser pain of keeping the secret because the conflict between my hard-wired drives to be honest with my best friend and to not cause him unnecessary pain are best satisfied by saying nothing, thereby allowing him to continue his happy marriage.
And I can describe all of this without any reference to values, intrinsic good, or instrumental good. Sure, others can use those terms, but they're entirely unnecessary, and (it seems to me) a tremendous distraction.
Sure, but it can just as easily be described with references to values, intrinsic and instrumental goods. While you may find it unnecessary, other people might find it useful. In addition, when you move on to trying to resolve moral dilemmas involving the clash of ‘oughts’ between different people or different cultures, I think it might be very useful.

BTW, having actually once been in the situation similar to what you described with the genders reversed, I ended up deciding to tell my friend mainly because she was so miserable in the marriage. Scientific information about the preponderant results of a population study would not have made any difference to my choice because I was basing it primarily on my knowledge of the particular individuals involved and their relationship.

Are you saying 'science tips the balance regarding how we should treat homosexuals because evidence (A) indicates that treating them like (B) leads to outcome (C), which is what we desire?
I think this is a very good argument, but I also realize that this approach can lead to very bad outcomes in implementation. Questions lead, evidence follows. Then, the evidence leads where we looked for evidence.
Okay. Thanks for correcting me.
[quote]I'm saying that we all carry around a set of [I]ought's which overlap to varying degrees, and which for most people are identical for the most fundamental ought's. Okay. I think this is what Harris is saying as well. I have no argument that such near universal values occur. Back when I took sociology 101, I think they were called ‘mores’. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to clip all of the stuff you posted that are not in conflict with what I, or apparently anyone else posting here, consider true. There seems to be fairly universal agreement on most of that stuff.
Science reveals that there is no commandment from God to hate (much less kill) homosexuals, and that homosexuality is not a deadly sin, This is incorrect. Science reveals no such thing. Science reveals there is no objective evidence to support that claim. That is not the same thing as revealing that no such commandment exists.
but simply part of the natural range of human wiring like red hair or left-handedness or a revulsion to strawberries. The problem using with this description as an argument for tolerance of homosexuality is that being a psychopath, sociopath or pedophile can similarly be considered part of the natural range of human wiring. Should we similarly accept all of these types of behavior? Or is there some reason to distinguish between the different types of behavior based on more than just whether it is part of the natural range of human behavior? I think we can all agree that some behaviors, even if people are naturally wired that way, simply cannot be tolerated by society.

So even though our natural drives don't change, science -- or, more accurately, the application of science -- leads us away from the conclusion that homosexuals ought to be killed because God hates them.

Only when you make unjustifiable “scientific” conclusions about God and his/her/its commandments and about whether or not homosexual behavior “ought” to be tolerated in our society. I think this is where the hidden ‘oughts’ are creeping into your argument.

AlBell

18th October 2010, 07:09 AM

I think this is where the hidden ‘oughts’ are creeping into your argument.
Cutting to the chase, his arguments are nothing else.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:31 AM

So science cannot lead them to a new "scientific approach to morality" witout them first making a non-scientific judgement that they "ought" to follow science.

No one is "wired" to follow science- it took a lot of pain, effort, false starts and hundreds of years to get here, and science itself tells us we are prone to non-scientific thinking.

Well, technically, there's nothing stopping people from making a scientific judgment that they ought to follow science.

Science, after all, is a product of our brains. It's perfectly possible for people to decide, "Hey, science works!" and follow it for that perfectly rational reason rather than some irrational one.

But in any case, aside from that quibble, yes.

So what's your point?

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 07:35 AM

Well, technically, there's nothing stopping people from making a scientific judgment that they ought to follow science.
How? What exactly does that "scientific ought" look like?

Science, after all, is a product of our brains.
So is non-science. And it's a lot more common, and clearly "hard-wired" where science is not.

It's perfectly possible for people to decide, "Hey, science works!" and follow it for that perfectly rational reason rather than some irrational one.
How is that a "rational reason"? Prayer seems to "work" to many people, does that make their religious beliefs a "rational reason"?

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:42 AM

You weren't asked for an airy-fairy, philosophical abstraction. You were asked for an example where science gives us moral values, or even solves moral dilemmas.

And I still want to know if we do away with "good" and all that, what do we do when we run into problems that science can't solve yet, as you so often remind us?

I believe that is a diversion. It doesn't matter where they come from, what matters is I use them to solve moral dilemmas.

Of course it matters where your values come from. If they stem from your biology, then they're (a) not arbitrary and (b) amenable to scientific inquiry.

As for what we do when we run into moral questions that science can't solve, we go with our gut. Or we move to another state to avoid the problem. Or we throw a dart at the wall. What I've never in my life known anyone to do is to actually muse about the nature of "intrinsic good".

And I fail to see what's "airy fairy" about bombing Iran, for example.

I gave you an example in which an understanding of science solves moral dilemmas -- a hypothetical one, but an adequate one, nonetheless. You pointed out that the application depended on the actual details of the case, which is true, but doesn't change anything.

I've also given the example of the question of whether we should blow ourselves up to defend the honor of the long-dead holy man. A scientific understanding of the world leads us to a clear conclusion: No. A religious understanding of the world may lead to "No", but may lead to "Yes".

There's also the question of whether we should eat veal. The answer to that question depends on 2 critical points: (1) Do calves suffer from being confined and force-fed; (2) Do you care about whether other beings suffer?

As with all moral dilemmas, this one involves a mixture of drives (pleasure-seeking, empathy, a sense of justice, the sense of in- and -out-group).

And although science can't change the wiring in your head -- i.e., whether or not you give a damn if other creatures suffer -- it certainly can change your understanding of point 1.

So by answering the question of whether or not calves suffer from confinement and force-feeding (or if, on the other hand, they're like trees or stones and have no conscious experience of the world) science has the power to actually decide the moral dilemma for people who are wired to care about the suffering of other creatures.

For people whose brains are not wired to care about the suffering of others, science will have no impact.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:47 AM

How is that a "rational reason"? Prayer seems to "work" to many people, does that make their religious beliefs a "rational reason"?

I look at the world around me. I notice the undeniable productive power of science: medicines, computers, satellites, skyscrapers, athletic shoes, televisions, and so forth. I notice that religion hasn't progressed one whit in all of human history and is just as effective as random chance, superstition, doing nothing.

I conclude that science works, and religion doesn't, by carefully examining the results.

That's a rational means to accepting science and rejecting religion, and I'll bet it's the means by which the vast majority of people make the switch from one to the other.

I'd be surprised to find many people who come to accept science for non-rational reasons.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:50 AM

E.g., why value a friend remaining blissfully ignorant of his wife’s affair(s) higher than his desire to know he runs a higher risk of being cuckold or getting an STI?

All decisions have costs and benefits associated with them. Both costs and benefits have objective and subjective components. Science can compare objective components when they are directly comparable, but it cannot be used to compare subjective components.

With respect to the two photos posted earlier, haven’t we already decided that a world where otherwise healthy men, women and children have horrible lives and deaths because they get less than they need to survive is worth some of us having what we want?

The "subjective" components you're talking about are the hard wiring. And no, science doesn't change that. Your brain is built the way it is. We all share some of it, but none of us are wired perfectly identically.

What science can do -- as with the veal question -- is to tip the balance among competing desires which is at the heart of all moral questions.

It cannot do that in every case -- just as science cannot tell us what the universe looks like in every case, even though science certainly can and does tell us what the universe looks like -- but it has the power to change our minds about what the world ought to look like and what we believe we should do, even though our brain's wiring remains the same.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:53 AM

Sure, but it can just as easily be described with references to values, intrinsic and instrumental goods. While you may find it unnecessary, other people might find it useful.

That's fine, if you're into philosophical approaches.

My point was only to demonstrate that concepts such as "intrinsic good" are superfluous to a scientific approach to moral questions.

Also, I'm curious if anyone can cite a case in which the notion of "intrinsic good" is actually helpful in solving moral dilemmas.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:58 AM

This is incorrect. Science reveals no such thing. Science reveals there is no objective evidence to support that claim. That is not the same thing as revealing that no such commandment exists.

We disagree about that, but we'll have to let that be. It's been discussed to death on other threads.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 08:03 AM

The problem using with this description as an argument for tolerance of homosexuality is that being a psychopath, sociopath or pedophile can similarly be considered part of the natural range of human wiring. Should we similarly accept all of these types of behavior? Or is there some reason to distinguish between the different types of behavior based on more than just whether it is part of the natural range of human behavior? I think we can all agree that some behaviors, even if people are naturally wired that way, simply cannot be tolerated by society.

Yes, precisely.

As I've said before, multiple drives are involved in moral questions, or else there would be no dilemma.

In the case of pedophilia, there's the issue of harm to children, and of consent. That's why the debate about age limits can be so contentious.

With psychopaths, clearly, there's the issue of physical harm and personal safety, which trumps the other considerations.

Since homosexual behavior among consenting adults does no more harm or good than heterosexual behavior, there's no reason to object on those grounds. The primary objections seem to be grounded in emotions of disgust (which I'll post more on later) and beliefs about the "will of God".

Piggy

18th October 2010, 08:04 AM

Only when you make unjustifiable “scientific” conclusions about God and his/her/its commandments and about whether or not homosexual behavior “ought” to be tolerated in our society. I think this is where the hidden ‘oughts’ are creeping into your argument.

There's no need to hide oughts.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 08:08 AM

Btw, dealing with these rather imprecise notions of "ought" and "is" is getting a bit troublesome.

So this evening or tomorrow I'd like to expand on post 449 and dispense with that language altogether.

Instead, it makes more sense to talk about drives (e.g. hunger), desires (e.g. appetite for food, to satisfy hunger), intentions (e.g., go to the store, or steal some food) to carry out the desires, and so forth.

I'll keep the term "values" because it's so common and it's used in the clip from the OP. I do think we're better off without it, but it still can be useful.

"Culture" is also a useful term, but we will need to add "beliefs", as well as "imprinting" and "inflection".

More to come....

Beth

18th October 2010, 08:14 AM

That's fine, if you're into philosophical approaches.

My point was only to demonstrate that concepts such as "intrinsic good" are superfluous to a scientific approach to moral questions.

Also, I'm curious if anyone can cite a case in which the notion of "intrinsic good" is actually helpful in solving moral dilemmas.

I don't know that I would call it a moral dilemma and we didn't use those terms, but figuring out what is important to us, what we value intrinsically, has been helpful in resolving issues in my marriage.

We disagree about that, but we'll have to let that be. It's been discussed to death on other threads.

I agree, it's been discussed to death in other threads. Unfortunately, such conclusions are key part of the claims you making in this thread. How can science help us resolve this dilemma? :p

Ivor the Engineer

18th October 2010, 08:36 AM

<snip>

I've also given the example of the question of whether we should blow ourselves up to defend the honor of the long-dead holy man. A scientific understanding of the world leads us to a clear conclusion: No. A religious understanding of the world may lead to "No", but may lead to "Yes".

<snip>

Where did you get the idea suicide bombers are blowing themselves up to defend the honour of a long-dead holy man? Could it be instead they consider themselves as warriors in a battle? If it's the latter, are they not similar to the many terrorists throughout history who have affected political change using violence?

Ivor the Engineer

18th October 2010, 09:00 AM

What scientific experiment could be performed to measure one person's wellbeing against another's *without* (sneeking in) an 'ought' as a reference?

Beth

18th October 2010, 09:17 AM

Yes, precisely.

As I've said before, multiple drives are involved in moral questions, or else there would be no dilemma.

In the case of pedophilia, there's the issue of harm to children, and of consent. That's why the debate about age limits can be so contentious.

With psychopaths, clearly, there's the issue of physical harm and personal safety, which trumps the other considerations.

Since homosexual behavior among consenting adults does no more harm or good than heterosexual behavior, there's no reason to object on those grounds. The primary objections seem to be grounded in emotions of disgust (which I'll post more on later) and beliefs about the "will of God".

I totally agree with your reasoning here, but you do seem to be making use of intrinsic values. You don't have to call them that if you don't want to, but I think the complaints in this thread about about the use of such values without acknowledgement.

The values I think you are using are things like "reducing harm to others" and "increasing personal freedom" These are fine values and I share them. But I also recognize that they are values that, even if science can tell us they are biologically based and common to nearly all humans, science does not tell us how to weight values like "individual freedom" and "reducing to harm to others" nor does it define what constitutes "individual freedom" or "harm to others". There is a wide range of definitions of both and those definitions will be dependent on what different people value intrinsically.

For example, when you say that science shows there no reason to object to homosexuality on the basis of harm, you are using a value-based definition of harm, comparing it with heterosexual behavior and applying it only to individuals, not society.

OTOH, I have heard arguments against tolerance of homosexuality on the basis of harm to society in general. I oppose such arguments because the harm to society they are concerned about is not something I object to SO I feel the harm, both to individuals and society, from the restriction of individual freedom is far greater then the harm from tolerating homosexual behavior.

Alternatively, I feel that the harm done by pedophiles, even when they are able to persuade a child to voluntarily participate, exceeds the harm done by the restricting personal freedom to make such activity illegal.

While I might be able to use science to show my assessment is supported by evidence, it would still be based on my definition and weighting of the various kinds of "harm" which are based on my moral values which in turn are based on what I find to be "intrinsically good". Someone can equally use science to show evidence that I am wrong by using different definitions for "harm" both to individuals and society. Unless we come to agreement on the intrinsic values embedded in those definitions, we will continue to use different definitions of harm and science cannot help us resolve that moral dilemma.

Science can certainly help us in finding the peaks (as Harris refers to it) that societies can attain in terms of maximizing what we value most, but only after we define the different things that we value intrinsically - such as the well-being of humans. You seem to be arguing that science can help us decide what we "ought" to value intrinsically. You don't have to use that term, but others can accurately apply it to what you are describing.

Your examples show how science might be used to determine what moral values humans and human cultures commonly share and what moral values they differ on. They also show how science might be used to better determine what courses of action are most likely to attain our goals. I do not think that this is what people posting in this thread are disagreeing with.

AlBell

18th October 2010, 09:29 AM

I do not think that this is what people posting in this thread are disagreeing with.
Indeed. Yet some feel compelled to reinvent the wheel with walls-of-text and flights of fancy.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:59 AM

I look at the world around me. I notice the undeniable productive power of science: medicines, computers, satellites, skyscrapers, athletic shoes, televisions, and so forth. I notice that religion hasn't progressed one whit in all of human history and is just as effective as random chance, superstition, doing nothing.

I conclude that science works, and religion doesn't, by carefully examining the results.
"Effective as" to what end?

Another person looks around them, and looks at the undeniable productive power of science- pollution and widespread environmental damage, nuclear weapons, family farms being plowed under and turned into corporate factory farms, and a million meaningless entertainments turning people away from meaningful relationships with their neighbors in favour of staring at a television or computer screen- filling their lives with confusion, fear, and dismay. They notice that the religion that all the people they trust endorse still gives them a sense of unity, of purpose, and of self worth.

Therefore, they conclude that religion works, and science doesn't, by carefully examining the results.

That's exactly as rational (meaning "in accordance with the principles of logic") a means to rejecting science and retaining religion as yours. And there is no scientific basis for preferring one to the other. If you've got one, I'd love to hear it.

That's a rational means to accepting science and rejecting religion, and I'll bet it's the means by which the vast majority of people make the switch from one to the other.

I'd be surprised to find many people who come to accept science for non-rational reasons.
They both just boil down to the subjective "I like these results better". And while they are both equally "rational", "Rational" =/= "Scientific"

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 10:05 AM

So by answering the question of whether or not calves suffer from confinement and force-feeding (or if, on the other hand, they're like trees or stones and have no conscious experience of the world) science has the power to actually decide the moral dilemma for people who are wired to care about the suffering of other creatures.

For people whose brains are not wired to care about the suffering of others, science will have no impact.

How does this "tossing out everything but science" in the moral arena not enshrine the "Twinkie defense" as the law of the land?

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:15 AM

How does this "tossing out everything but science" in the moral arena not enshrine the "Twinkie defense" as the law of the land?

Whoa, hoss!

I don't recall anyone mentioning tossing out everything but science, whatever that would mean.

In any case, I don't see the Twinkie defense as scientifically valid in the first place.

But even if it were, it still doesn't follow that this somehow absolves anyone from criminal punishment or legal responsibility.

Let's go back to the case of rape: If it does turn out that some people literallly cannot stop themselves from committing rape, this is not an argument against putting them in jail, it's the strongest possible argument one can imagine for putting them in jail!

If they really can't help it, they must be imprisoned for everyone's safety.

At best, such a finding would simply indicate that they should not be ill-treated in jail for punitive reasons. It would also mean that no money should be spent to attempt to rehabilitate them.

Moreover, a scientific view of morality encompasses much more than the wiring of the brain of a person who commits the crime. It also takes into account the fact that victims are wired to want justice, that everyone in the community is wired to desire safety, the potential effects of punishment on the behavior of others who might be tempted to commit crime, and so forth.

This notion that a bio-sci approach to morality will somehow cause us to free all the criminals is entirely wrong-headed.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:23 AM

Btw, it occurs to me that we've been spending too much time on currently unresolved questions.

It's much more instructional to examine those moral questions which have ceased to exist in scientifically advanced cultures, except in some cases where pockets of anti-science sentiment flourish.

For example, we no longer ask....

If it's OK to enslave blacks because they are mentally inferior, or cursed by God.

If it's a sin to tempt the wrath of God by installing lightning rods.

If it's immoral to put kids' souls at risk by teaching evolution. (This only survives, indeed thrives, in anti-science communities.)

If we should risk insulting the spirits by filtering our water, just for our own selfish desire not to get sick.

If we should risk public safety by turning a blind eye to witchcraft.

Also, one of the hallmarks of modern science-based culture is the expansion of the in-group, to accept the equality of other races, people of different faiths, people in other nations, all genders, and so forth.

Hard to say whether that's a direct result of understanding that there's no rational basis for calling them different, or somehow just a result of prosperity, but it's something to note.

And although our laws treat animals as property, we recognize animal cruelty as a crime because we understand that animals have the ability to suffer.

If we really want to know how science does impact our morals, it's best to compare modern and pre-modern society to see which moral questions have gone by the wayside as a result of increased understanding of our world and ourselves.

More later....

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:26 AM

Where did you get the idea suicide bombers are blowing themselves up to defend the honour of a long-dead holy man? Could it be instead they consider themselves as warriors in a battle? If it's the latter, are they not similar to the many terrorists throughout history who have affected political change using violence?

I was speaking specifically about the murder-suicide attempts against journalists and cartoonists who have been deemed to insult the prophet Mohammed.

And with regard to the wider question of murder-suicide as terrorism, promises of other-worldly paradise are the key recruitment tool, which is why it's so much more prevalent among theocratic groups than secular ones.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:28 AM

What scientific experiment could be performed to measure one person's wellbeing against another's *without* (sneeking in) an 'ought' as a reference?

Why would one need an "ought"?

And if one did, why would it need to based on anything except our innate drives, the things we want because we're built the way we're built?

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:33 AM

The values I think you are using are things like "reducing harm to others" and "increasing personal freedom" These are fine values and I share them. But I also recognize that they are values that, even if science can tell us they are biologically based and common to nearly all humans, science does not tell us how to weight values like "individual freedom" and "reducing to harm to others" nor does it define what constitutes "individual freedom" or "harm to others". There is a wide range of definitions of both and those definitions will be dependent on what different people value intrinsically.

Which is not a problem.

Unless you're seeking some non-existent universal formula, which is mere unicorn-hunting.

Science affects us individually (and only by aggregate as groups) by changing our beliefs about ourselves and the world.

In doing that, it changes the mental (and emotional) calculus.

The reason I'm horrified by the murder of witches is precisely because I live in a scientifically advanced culture which has determined that there are no witches.

If I thought witches were going great harm, I might support killing them.

My drives are the same -- e.g. a desire for safety, a desire to punish those who cause unnecessary harm to others -- but my scientifically-grounded world view leads them to be expressed in different ways, by different choices, because I don't see the same world out there as people do who still believe in witches.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:38 AM

While I might be able to use science to show my assessment is supported by evidence, it would still be based on my definition and weighting of the various kinds of "harm" which are based on my moral values which in turn are based on what I find to be "intrinsically good".

Which I don't disagree with, except that I find "intrinsic good" to be a useless term because it doesn't answer the question of why you feel emotionally that these things are good.

An understanding of biology answers that question, and in doing so, makes the notion of IG superfluous.

As I've said many times before, science doesn't change our drives, but it can change what we think should be done to satisfy those drives -- which is tantamount to saying that it can change the answers to moral questions.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:39 AM

Beth

18th October 2010, 10:41 AM

Which is not a problem. I think that it is. In fact, I think that is an example of the primary issue that is being contested - the fact that different people intrinsically value outcomes differently.

My drives are the same -- e.g. a desire for safety, a desire to punish those who cause unnecessary harm to others -- but my scientifically-grounded world view leads them to be expressed in different ways, by different choices, because I don't see the same world out there as people do who still believe in witches.

Okay. I agree with all this, and so do all the other posters here. That isn't the issue that is being contested. I don't think that this is what Harris is talking about either.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:43 AM

"Effective as" to what end?

Another person looks around them, and looks at the undeniable productive power of science- pollution and widespread environmental damage, nuclear weapons, family farms being plowed under and turned into corporate factory farms, and a million meaningless entertainments turning people away from meaningful relationships with their neighbors in favour of staring at a television or computer screen- filling their lives with confusion, fear, and dismay. They notice that the religion that all the people they trust endorse still gives them a sense of unity, of purpose, and of self worth.

Therefore, they conclude that religion works, and science doesn't, by carefully examining the results.

That's exactly as rational (meaning "in accordance with the principles of logic") a means to rejecting science and retaining religion as yours. And there is no scientific basis for preferring one to the other. If you've got one, I'd love to hear it.

It is indeed perfectly rational to decide that religion serves a purpose and therefore to conclude that people should be left in peace to pursue it.

It's also perfectly rational to conclude that science can be an instrument for messing things up.

But science messes things up because it works. That is, it has an effect.

You can argue about the effects of the results, but you can't argue that it gets results! If it didn't, we wouldn't be using satellites to pay for our gasoline at the pump.

The question of whether religion "works" depends on whether you're judging its palliative effect, or its success in doing what it claims to actually do. I was discussing the latter.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:45 AM

I think that it is. In fact, I think that is an example of the primary issue that is being contested - the fact that different people intrinsically value outcomes differently.

When has Harris denied this?

Okay. I agree with all this, and so do all the other posters here. That isn't the issue that is being contested. I don't think that this is what Harris is talking about either.

It is, in fact, the issue, because this is all Harris is saying.

It makes no sense to accept this, and then to object to Harris's thesis.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 10:45 AM

Whoa, hoss!

I don't recall anyone mentioning tossing out everything but science, whatever that would mean.
Well, you don't want any "oughts" or "shoulds", you don't want any "intrinsic goods", and you're dead set against any philosophy or culture, so what non-science things do belong in "moral dilemmas"?

In any case, I don't see the Twinkie defense as scientifically valid in the first place.

But even if it were, it still doesn't follow that this somehow absolves anyone from criminal punishment or legal responsibility.

Let's go back to the case of rape: If it does turn out that some people literallly cannot stop themselves from committing rape, this is not an argument against putting them in jail, it's the strongest possible argument one can imagine for putting them in jail!

If they really can't help it, they must be imprisoned for everyone's safety.

At best, such a finding would simply indicate that they should not be ill-treated in jail for punitive reasons. It would also mean that no money should be spent to attempt to rehabilitate them.
So, why not just kill them?

Moreover, a scientific view of morality encompasses much more than the wiring of the brain of a person who commits the crime. It also takes into account the fact that victims are wired to want justice,
What does that last word mean, scientifically?

that everyone in the community is wired to desire safety, the potential effects of punishment on the behavior of others who might be tempted to commit crime, and so forth.
But that's irrelevant, isn't it? If they're wired to be detered by even one guy being imprisoned, then logically even the thread of imprisonment will prevent them from commiting the crime- and if they are nto wired to be detered, they'll do it anyway.

This notion that a bio-sci approach to morality will somehow cause us to free all the criminals is entirely wrong-headed.
I see- it's a mandate for totalitarian hegemony- anyone scientifically determined to be "wired" differently from the somehow scientifically determined notions of what is "safe" and "healthy" has no rights, is that it?

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 10:53 AM

It is indeed perfectly rational to decide that religion serves a purpose and therefore to conclude that people should be left in peace to pursue it.

It's also perfectly rational to conclude that science can be an instrument for messing things up.

But science messes things up because it works. That is, it has an effect.

You can argue about the effects of the results, but you can't argue that it gets results! If it didn't, we wouldn't be using satellites to pay for our gasoline at the pump.
And we wouldn't have people using it to steal our money. (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&q=identity+theft+at+gas+pumps&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=)

The question of whether religion "works" depends on whether you're judging its palliative effect, or its success in doing what it claims to actually do.
Religion makes many claims. Those you handwave away as "pallative effects" are still effects.

I was discussing the latter.
And you're missing the point. "Having an effect" isn't "good" or "bad", and both science and religion have effects- but you are somehow making the judgement that it is inherently more prefereable to embrace science's effects rather than those of religion. What is the scientific basis for that preference? What you've got here is nothing more than appeal to consequence.

Beth

18th October 2010, 11:14 AM

Which I don't disagree with, except that I find "intrinsic good" to be a useless term because it doesn't answer the question of why you feel emotionally that these things are good.

An understanding of biology answers that question, and in doing so, makes the notion of IG superfluous.

As I've said many times before, science doesn't change our drives, but it can change what we think should be done to satisfy those drives -- which is tantamount to saying that it can change the answers to moral questions. Nobody is arguing that point. Why do you keep pressing it? What is it that you think is missing in our understanding of this point?

That's why I want to get rid of this messy "ought" language.

The problem isn't that we need to remove 'ought' language. Getting rid of the terminology doesn't change what is happening. The problem seems to be that the 'oughts' are still there, but disguised rather than easily apparent. Calling them something else or claiming you don't have any just obfuscates rather than illuminates your argument.

Kevin Lowe's arguments make a great deal of sense to me, even though I have never studied philosophy. An intrinsic good is something that is desired for it's own self, and yes, most of those are probably based in our biology. You can name them drives if you like, but I don't know that would serve to define all possible intrinsic goods because there may be some that are not biology driven.

An instrumental good is desired because it leads to an intrisic good, but instrumental goods can be substituted or altered while still achieving the objective of the intrinisc good. I think it's important to understand which is which because if you know the intrinsic good (the goal of their desire), you can then negotiate about which path to take to get there (the instrumental goods) that other will tolerate while still allowing you to achieve what you desire.

For example, a person might desire wealth in order to feel secure about the survival of their family. A social safety net that would provide a great deal of security about that with the result that the person might place a lower value on accumulating wealth because the intrinsic good (survival of one's family) can still be met.

On the other hand, if someone desires wealth as a means to attain social status, a social safety net won't alter their behavior in regards to accumulating wealth.

There is no disagreement that science can help us understand and plan the best use of our resources to attain our goals. But if we don't have agreement on the future we want to build - which is dependent on we value various intrinsic goods, I don't see how science is going to help with that problem.

Beth

18th October 2010, 11:31 AM

The values I think you are using are things like "reducing harm to others" and "increasing personal freedom" These are fine values and I share them. But I also recognize that they are values that, even if science can tell us they are biologically based and common to nearly all humans, science does not tell us how to weight values like "individual freedom" and "reducing to harm to others" nor does it define what constitutes "individual freedom" or "harm to others". There is a wide range of definitions of both and those definitions will be dependent on what different people value intrinsically.
When has Harris denied this?

You were denying this was a problem. I'm not sure about Harris' stance on it, but I have yet to read his book. I've only seen his Ted talk.

My drives are the same -- e.g. a desire for safety, a desire to punish those who cause unnecessary harm to others -- but my scientifically-grounded world view leads them to be expressed in different ways, by different choices, because I don't see the same world out there as people do who still believe in witches. Okay. I agree with all this, and so do all the other posters here. That isn't the issue that is being contested. I don't think that this is what Harris is talking about either.

It is, in fact, the issue, because this is all Harris is saying.

It makes no sense to accept this, and then to object to Harris's thesis.

I'm not objecting to this aspect of Harris's thesis. As near as I can tell, no one else is either. But I don't think that this is all that he is saying.

Tapio

18th October 2010, 11:43 AM

Science can certainly help us in finding the peaks (as Harris refers to it) that societies can attain in terms of maximizing what we value most, but only after we define the different things that we value intrinsically - such as the well-being of humans. You seem to be arguing that science can help us decide what we "ought" to value intrinsically. You don't have to use that term, but others can accurately apply it to what you are describing.

I'll use this as a trigger to share some thoughts provoked by other posts as well.

How is a scientific experiment aiming to find changes in the consistency of iron in different temperatures any different from a scientific experiment aiming to find changes in the emotions of humans in different situations?

Both have a pre-set aim and frame of work. Both have hypotheses based on what "is" and of what "ought" to happen during the experiment, which are then used as reference points against the actual data. Both experiments need to be planned and executed by the most accurate possible way in order to find out the most accurate possible information. The only difference (to my mind) seems to be in how much more complicated the experiment on humans would be.

I don't see Harris as attempting to argue science can/will show us why we "ought to" use only human well-being as a starting point. I don't see him claiming science dictating any "oughts". I see him more trying to get us out of this mental rat-race of "is vs. ought" which very effectively ties down a vast number of ways to alleviate the suffering in this world (for example by feeding cultural relativism), and to put our focus more on what we could actually accomplish in the real world outside our minds.

In his lectures (haven't read the book yet) he simply uses human well-being as a baseline because it is so relevant, perhaps the most relevant, thing in life to us (yeah, I believe a person choosing to experience pain is still a person making choices regarding his/her well-being).

So people, what's the problem? :)

Earthborn

18th October 2010, 11:59 AM

Oh, did they? What makes you think that? What makes you think you didn't inherit them?The scientific fact that there is no evidence that "values" are hereditary.

And even if it were true that your family or your culture were the vehicle for transmitting your values, then you have to ask, what causes our cultures?Cultural anthropologists, the scientists who study culture, defined culture as "the totality of learnt human behaviour. So our cultures are caused by learning things from other people.

But in my experience, philosophy is how we kill time until science figures out a way to actually answer the questions.I think that is a fine definition of philosophy. :)

I just want to point out that there are questions that cannot ever be answered by science, because they aren't scientific questions. Among these are moral questions.

It's a human universal because it's found in all cultures.... except of course the cultures in which it is not.

The fact remains that scientific inquiry need not have any relationship at all with philosophical schools.Pretty much all scientific inquiry requires either "empiricism" or "rationalism" in some form or another.

Regarding my comment above, you might be interested to know that identical twins -- who are never 100% identical, of course -- who are separated at birth and raised apart are no more different from each other, even in terms of personality, than are twins raised together. And they are no more similar to their adopted siblings than they are to total strangers.Has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what I wrote about values.

Genetically identical people tend to have similar outlooks on life, regardless of who raises them. Genetically different people have correspondingly greater dissimilar outlooks on life, even if they're raised together.This does not prove that values aren't learnt. It just means that genetically identical people tend to pick up similar values from their culture, and genetically different people might pick up different values.

As an analogy, consider obesity. Genetically identical people -- even if separated at birth and raised apart -- tend to have very similar body mass indexes. Still the environmental input (in this case food) is crucial in determining how fat one becomes.

If identical twins have similar characteristics, it is not necessarily true that these characteristics are solely determined by their genetic make-up. It is also possible that their environments have been similar in the ways that have influence on those characteristics. Within Western culture the availability of food is extremely wide spread, but so are many moral values.

What I've never in my life known anyone to do is to actually muse about the nature of "intrinsic good".Many people don't think that deeply on moral issues, and assume many things they consider as "intrinsic good" as self-evident. Only when they discuss moral issues with people who believe in different intrinsic goods do such ideas come to light.

If we really want to know how science does impact our morals, it's best to compare modern and pre-modern society to see which moral questions have gone by the wayside as a result of increased understanding of our world and ourselves.It is perhaps also interesting to see how scientists have changed their approach to moral questions during that time. Increasingly scientists have distanced themselves from morality, claiming that it is their job to find out how the world "is", not how it "ought to be". Slowly but steadily they have purged all teleological and moral thinking from their theories. Even the social sciences tried hard to do this, historians may slip up once in a while, and economists are still struggling to do so. But science has taken the path to rid itself of all "oughts".

To now ask of science to solve moral questions, is to ask it to reverse centuries of scientific progress. It is perhaps not so much that science can't answer moral questions, but rather that scientists have decided it ought not to.

Earthborn

18th October 2010, 12:09 PM

It would also mean that no money should be spent to attempt to rehabilitate them.I don't see how that follows. Just because a person can't help him/herself from committing a certain act, does not mean there can't be treatment that does help him/her.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 12:10 PM

I'll use this as a trigger to share some thoughts provoked by other posts as well.

How is a scientific experiment aiming to find changes in the consistency of iron in different temperatures any different from a scientific experiment aiming to find changes in the emotions of humans in different situations?
Well, for starters, the consistency of iron at different temperatures is always going to be the same, regardless of what bit of iron one tests.

The same does not hold true for emotions and people. Some people will react with glee at the exact same situation at which another reacts with anger.

Both have a pre-set aim and frame of work. Both have hypotheses based on what "is" and of what "ought" to happen during the experiment, which are then used as reference points against the actual data.
You're equivocating "oughts"- the scientific one is a guess or estimation as to what an outcome will be, the moral "ought" is a prescribtion of what outcome is preferable.

Science doesn't care if its "ought" turns out to not match the facts. Morality does.

I don't see Harris as attempting to argue science can/will show us why we "ought to" use only human well-being as a starting point. I don't see him claiming science dictating any "oughts".
Because he already has dictated one- "human well-being". "Alleviate[ing] the suffering in this world".

Ivor the Engineer

18th October 2010, 12:23 PM

Why would one need an "ought"?

You need an ought to determine the direction of increasing wellbeing.

And if one did, why would it need to based on anything except our innate drives, the things we want because we're built the way we're built?

Because individuals rank their innate drives differently.

fls

18th October 2010, 12:28 PM

Yes, yes, for the third time yes. I was aimed at your remarks about the problem of induction and nothing else. It was meant to ignore everything except your remarks about the problem of induction. Is that okay with you?

Yes. Like I said, I didn't realize it at first and then you clarified it.

If you're going to take offence every time I talk about one thing instead of another this is going to be a very tiresome exchange.

Well, here you seem to be implying that it is offensive to discover that you meant something different from what I thought you meant, but later in this post you imply that it is perfectly reasonable to discover this mistake and ask for clarification - that you are happy to do so.

Don't worry. I am able to deal with this apparent contradiction without breaking a sweat. :).

The problem comes from me not realizing that two things which are different to me are the same to you, and vice versa, and therefore failing to realize that a clarification is needed. I'll try to be on my toes.

My point is that you don't get to appropriate the social status of science and proclaim that all moral claims are "pre-scientific thinking". If you try that it demonstrates a misunderstanding of both science and philosophy.

That was not my intention.

As Dani said, there is no intention here to mislead or obfuscate and if you need me to clarify any specific usage then I am happy to do so. However I'm usually fairly consistent about these kinds of terminological issues, so if I'm talking about "value judgments" I'm probably talking about moral claims.

It seemed to me that you were. Perhaps I misunderstood you. I think Harris may well be to blame here, since he uses "value" to mean all sorts of axioms or preferences other than moral value.

I suspect that is it. I tend to use it in the way I am used to with respect to scientific research, plus Harris' use is fresh in my mind (and is similar) since he is the inspiration for this thread.

So we do without "ought" claims - so why do we want people to flourish again? Why is Ted Bundy bad, and why are antibiotics good? Why is rape bad, and altruism good? Why should we care if people in Africa starve or lab animals are tortured to death for a paper nobody will ever cite?

As soon as you toss ought claims out the front door, you run around to the back door and let them back in again, but this time you give them a crudely-folded paper hat with "IM FROM SCIUNCE" written on it in crayon.

You already know why not being able to express and discuss moral ideas is a problem, because you (and Harris) have moral ideas.

To say that there is a distinction between 'ought' and 'is' is to say that a description of what 'is' can be found to be not what it 'ought' to be. Otherwise, as you point out, we have no standing to say that women ought not be forcibly coerced into wearing burquas. Here is an illustration of what I mean.

We can present two scenarios which ought to be answered in the same way. On the one hand, we have a speeding, out of control locomotive, which is heading towards a crash guaranteed to kill all six people on board. Flipping a switch will divert the train to an alternate track and a safe deceleration, but the way is blocked by a person who will be killed by the train. Do you flip the switch? On the other hand, we have six people facing imminent death without a transplant and a healthy person of the right type walks in the door. Do we kill this person in order to transplant her/his organs and save the lives of the six? If you answer yes to one, then you ought to answer yes to the other, as they appear to offer the same choice of outcomes. Yet people consistently offer different answers to the two scenarios. To say that women ought not be forcibly coerced into wearing burquas makes sense if you have some way of discovering that doing so is inconsistent with answers given to the same moral claim within a different scenario. This is merely an illustrative example of some of the research on morals and not meant to be an all-inclusive description.

What I'm interested in is, if 'oughts' are not those occasions when we have discovered that what 'is' is not coherent, what do you think they are (given that you seem to be agreeable to dismissing 'oughts' in terms of a purpose or goal)?

Quick correction: Nobody except theists believe in absolute oughts, and I haven't seen any of those in this discussion. The usual term is "objective", which in philosophy means that the claim is held to apply to all people regardless of their particular moral beliefs or lack thereof, as opposed to "subjectivist" where what people think is moral determines what is moral for them.

Then I was referring to 'objective 'oughts''. Of course, now it means I don't know what you could be referring to with "absolute 'oughts'", but hopefully this won't matter.

Moving on, I can tell you in advance this project is doomed. You can't get to ought statements from is statements, as Earthborn very patiently explained. Either you will spin your wheels forever with "is" statements that get you to no moral conclusions, or you will smuggle in "ought" statements by the back door which is what you, Piggy and Harris do.

Hopefully your explanation of what you mean by 'ought' statements in the absence of teleology will help me understand.

I'll say this yet again: Absolutely nobody at any stage of this thread, ever, has argued that science cannot provide useful facts which combined with moral value claims can help us get to useful conclusions. So if that's the whole point of the slide then nobody has ever disagreed with the point of the slide.

I was thinking that the point of the slide was that science can provide useful facts about moral value claims (in the way I describe above).

I don't think I am - can you explain this accusation?

I'm not clear what you mean by 'ought' if you don't mean what I described above and you don't relate it to a goal or purpose. I don't know if the inconsistency I perceive is from equivocation (which is hard to avoid inadvertently on this topic) or not yet understanding what else you could mean. If you think that Earthborn patiently explained this, then it suggests that you think it is a teleological claim. But on the other hand, you chastised me when I repeated Earthborn's characterization of this kind of thinking as pre-scientific. So I'm just confused without further elaboration on what I asked above.

Linda

Ivor the Engineer

18th October 2010, 12:47 PM

<snip>

Because he already has dictated one- "human well-being". "Alleviate[ing] the suffering in this world".

Ought we:

1) Minimise the suffering of all people
2) Spread the suffering around in equal measure
3) Concentrate suffering onto as few individuals as possible?

Depending on how wellbeing is defined and measured, all are viable strategies.

Which one does Mr. Harris prefer?

Ivor the Engineer

18th October 2010, 01:02 PM

<snip>

...we have no standing to say that women ought not be forcibly coerced into wearing burquas.

<snip>

Correct. It's what we believe ought to be.

Do you think all the science in the world would change the minds of people who do force women to wear burquas?

fls

18th October 2010, 01:26 PM

Do you think all the science in the world would change the minds of people who do force women to wear burquas?

Are you suggesting that the failure of all the science in the world to change the minds of Creationists means that Natural Selection is not a useful theory?

Linda

amused

18th October 2010, 01:27 PM

Ought we:

1) Minimise the suffering of all people
2) Spread the suffering around in equal measure
3) Concentrate suffering onto as few individuals as possible?

Depending on how wellbeing is defined and measured, all are viable strategies.

Which one does Mr. Harris prefer?

Variations of this question get posed a lot, but I don't think Harris would argue that any one choice is the one and only choice for all situations for all time. I get the impression that he would apply fact-finding to a given single situation and then use those facts to find a direction to move up on the well-being scale within that situation. Sort of an applied morality. His 3D map of the moral landscape allows for numerous places that are peaks and valleys, but the idea is that a peak is better than a valley. He's been fuzzy on the details so I guess I'm going to have to read his book. :p

Ivor the Engineer

18th October 2010, 01:40 PM

Are you suggesting that the failure of all the science in the world to change the minds of Creationists means that Natural Selection is not a useful theory?

Linda

Not at all. But the purpose of doing science related to natural selection is not to convince people to change their behaviour, whereas Sam Harris seems to be proposing using science to try convince people their behaviour is morally wrong.

fls

18th October 2010, 01:50 PM

I'm not clear what you mean by 'ought' if you don't mean what I described above and you don't relate it to a goal or purpose. I don't know if the inconsistency I perceive is from equivocation (which is hard to avoid inadvertently on this topic) or not yet understanding what else you could mean. If you think that Earthborn patiently explained this, then it suggests that you think it is a teleological claim. But on the other hand, you chastised me when I repeated Earthborn's characterization of this kind of thinking as pre-scientific. So I'm just confused without further elaboration on what I asked above.

Linda

I've been thinking on this a bit more (especially considering that you and Earthborn seem to indicate very strongly that his/her post was meant to be a condemnation of Harris). Are you saying that it is the idea of addressing moral claims which determines that the approach must be teleological? Else all you are left with are unsatisfactory work-arounds?

Linda

amused

18th October 2010, 02:39 PM

New York Times Book Review - The Moral Landscape (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Appiah-t.html)

In that article he mentions the work of Derek Parfit, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. I'm not familiar, but some of you philosophers might be able to comment about how they relate.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 02:57 PM

We can present two scenarios which ought to be answered in the same way.
Why should they? The value of "people" is not equivilent across the board. I'd let a whole city full of people die rather than let harm come to my children. I'd sacrfice the entire Jersey Shore and everyone associated with it to cure Terry Pratchett's alzheimers, or to get Firefly back on the air.

On the one hand, we have a speeding, out of control locomotive, which is heading towards a crash guaranteed to kill all six people on board. Flipping a switch will divert the train to an alternate track and a safe deceleration, but the way is blocked by a person who will be killed by the train. Do you flip the switch? On the other hand, we have six people facing imminent death without a transplant and a healthy person of the right type walks in the door. Do we kill this person in order to transplant her/his organs and save the lives of the six? If you answer yes to one, then you ought to answer yes to the other, as they appear to offer the same choice of outcomes.
I really *********** hate this hoary old chestnut. It is fundamentally meaningless. The value of "people" is not measured in quantity, like produce.

Kevin_Lowe

18th October 2010, 03:46 PM

To say that there is a distinction between 'ought' and 'is' is to say that a description of what 'is' can be found to be not what it 'ought' to be. Otherwise, as you point out, we have no standing to say that women ought not be forcibly coerced into wearing burquas. Here is an illustration of what I mean.

We can present two scenarios which ought to be answered in the same way. On the one hand, we have a speeding, out of control locomotive, which is heading towards a crash guaranteed to kill all six people on board. Flipping a switch will divert the train to an alternate track and a safe deceleration, but the way is blocked by a person who will be killed by the train. Do you flip the switch? On the other hand, we have six people facing imminent death without a transplant and a healthy person of the right type walks in the door. Do we kill this person in order to transplant her/his organs and save the lives of the six? If you answer yes to one, then you ought to answer yes to the other, as they appear to offer the same choice of outcomes. Yet people consistently offer different answers to the two scenarios.

This is yet another use of "ought". :)

If we were consistent utilitarians we should favour forcible organ donation in such circumstances (although it takes a fair degree of authorial fiat to close off all other options in the case of the involuntary organ donor, and guarantee that the public won't find out about it, and to make organ donation a miracle cure instead of a short-term survival measure).

Not everyone is a utilitarian though: Deontologists like Kant or Jesus care about right actions, not right outcomes, and might well argue for a distinction between diverting a locomotive and killing someone for spare parts which is morally decisive to them even though the utility of the outcomes is identical in each case.

There's also a question of role ethics: Some people think that being a lawyer makes it okay to do lawyer things that would normally be unethical as long as you conform with role-specific legal ethics, for example, because the legal system needs you to do them. Some people by a similar token think that being a doctor carries with it certain obligations, like doing no harm and treating everyone who needs it, that mean you operate (heh) under different moral rules as well.

To say that women ought not be forcibly coerced into wearing burquas makes sense if you have some way of discovering that doing so is inconsistent with answers given to the same moral claim within a different scenario. This is merely an illustrative example of some of the research on morals and not meant to be an all-inclusive description.

What I'm interested in is, if 'oughts' are not those occasions when we have discovered that what 'is' is not coherent, what do you think they are (given that you seem to be agreeable to dismissing 'oughts' in terms of a purpose or goal)?

I don't think moral claims can be limited to just situations where we discover that some of our behaviours are logically inconsistent with others. For example if we imagine a society that is consistently horrible, such that there is absolutely no incoherence in the behaviour that "is" in their society, we might still have the urge to criticise that society on the basis that we think they "ought" not to behave that way.

A clear contradiction between the way we treat two cases that should be identical is certainly proof that we are engaging in incoherent or inconsistent thinking, but most conceptions of morality also make it possible to criticise consistently awful behaviour as well as inconsistent behaviour.

Then I was referring to 'objective 'oughts''. Of course, now it means I don't know what you could be referring to with "absolute 'oughts'", but hopefully this won't matter.

The distinction (and it's a bit of a fine one) is that moral absolutists believe that some moral rules apply to everyone and never, ever have exceptions. Moral objectivists believe that some moral rules apply to everyone, but that circumstances can alter cases.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_absolutism) is usually a decent starting point for these sorts of terminological questions.

Hopefully your explanation of what you mean by 'ought' statements in the absence of teleology will help me understand.

I'm pretty sure that's just a misunderstanding: see below.

I'm not clear what you mean by 'ought' if you don't mean what I described above and you don't relate it to a goal or purpose. I don't know if the inconsistency I perceive is from equivocation (which is hard to avoid inadvertently on this topic) or not yet understanding what else you could mean. If you think that Earthborn patiently explained this, then it suggests that you think it is a teleological claim. But on the other hand, you chastised me when I repeated Earthborn's characterization of this kind of thinking as pre-scientific. So I'm just confused without further elaboration on what I asked above.

Ah, okay, I think I see where we got on to separate tracks here.

Teleological interpretations of physical phenomena ("the rock wants to be lower") are pre-scientific.

Teleological statements about or by beings with preferences ("Ted wants an ice cream") aren't pre-scientific at all.

Moral rules almost always (I can think of an exception or two, like the purported "new covenant" Jesus presented which is claimed to have changed the moral rules so the old ones no longer applied) apply forward in time, and hence are teleological in that sense. If I think that murder is wrong now then that implies I should think that murder will be wrong tomorrow and I ought to take steps to prevent future murders. So if we have any "ought" beliefs at all it's highly likely they will have a teleological component.

Piggy was previously arguing that his ideas were the True Scientific Morality and that everything else was pre-scientific, and I thought you were arguing the same point, but clearly you were actually on a different track entirely.

fls

18th October 2010, 04:13 PM

Why should they? The value of "people" is not equivilent across the board. I'd let a whole city full of people die rather than let harm come to my children. I'd sacrfice the entire Jersey Shore and everyone associated with it to cure Terry Pratchett's alzheimers, or to get Firefly back on the air.

Exactly. In the scenarios these are seven (or fourteen) strangers without any way for you to distinguish between them. Useful variations would start to give you ways to distinguish between choices and observe when that alters your choice. For example, in a variation you already alluded to, the tendency to pull the switch would change if the one person on the track was your child.

I really *********** hate this hoary old chestnut. It is fundamentally meaningless. The value of "people" is not measured in quantity, like produce.

These are some of the issues that come into play in medical research when considering cost-benefit vs. cost-utility studies. That is, your concerns are not novel nor unaddressed.

Linda

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:10 PM

No time for the long post tonight, but in anticipation of that, a few thoughts on the notion that it's impossible for science to tell us what we should value, even though science can change our beliefs regarding what is real.....

This is, on the face of it, a rather startling claim. Because in order to be true, it would mean that our values are either entirely fixed, or entirely arbitrary.

But we see that this isn't true, of course.

For instance, religious conversion and political radicalization can bring about profound changes in what people value, what they think the world ought to look like, what they believe people should do.

So are we to believe that an understanding of science -- which also has the power to profoundly alter our beliefs about what the world is and who we are and who others are -- does not have that power?

I don't see why that should be true, either in theory or practice.

Case in point: Stewart Brand.

Back in the '60s and '70s Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalog, was the poster boy for the "back to the land" movement, which valued what was "natural" over what was "synthetic" and "artificial", and valued agrarianism over urbanism.

Now Stewart has done a 180, and works for the Long Now Foundation and the Global Business Network. He has entirely repudiated the crunchy values of his Whole Earth Catalog days and advocates high-density urbanism, nuclear power, and genetically modified crops.

Why? Because science convinced him that he had it wrong, that his "natural is good" values were entirely wrong. In fact, he concluded, there's no reason to value what is "natural" over what is man-made (as if there were even a clear distinction), and if we all went "back to the land" we'd screw things up even worse.

Of course, not all of his values changed. The underlying values of wanting a decent place to live -- which the vast majority of us share -- have remained the same. But a very significant chunk of his value set did change, and changed radically, because the evidence led him to believe that his earlier values were simply incorrect.

Anyway, more tomorrow....

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:13 PM

So, why not just kill them?

The argument against killing them is this: If you make rape a capital crime, there's no incentive not to kill the witness. Therefore, the death penalty should be reserved for murder.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:23 PM

What does that last word mean, scientifically?

Scientifically speaking, justice seems to be rooted in our inborn notion of fairness. Human beings like to feel that the social scales are balanced -- which expresses itself in many different ways, including "let the punishment fit the crime" and mutually destructive cycles of vendetta.

It's the flip-side of our urge for reciprocity.

Young kids go through a stage in which they overgeneralize this notion, just as they overgeneralize the rules of language (e.g., saying "goed" instead of "went"). So a 3 year old may protest quite loudly that his older brother is getting a larger portion than he is, or going to bed later, or getting some other privilege, and be utterly unconsoled by the explanation that his brother is bigger than he is, and that he himself will one day get that same portion, or that same privilege.

Similarly, when people are paired up for a game in which they divvy up a set amount of money, and one player only has veto power over the other person's decision, it would seem, from a rational point of view, that the vetoer would be better off accepting anything that the divvyer offered.

But that's not how it works. If the divvyer keeps too much for himself, and offers too small a sum to the other player, time and again the vetoer will simply scrap the entire deal and both players walk away with nothing. The vetoer harms himself in order to punish the divvyer for being unfair.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:25 PM

But that's irrelevant, isn't it? If they're wired to be detered by even one guy being imprisoned, then logically even the thread of imprisonment will prevent them from commiting the crime- and if they are nto wired to be detered, they'll do it anyway.

I only mentioned the potential for deterrence. What that potential actually is, is debatable. Some argue that there is no deterrent effect.

You know what could answer that question? Scientific research. With solid research in hand, we could form better policy.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:26 PM

I see- it's a mandate for totalitarian hegemony- anyone scientifically determined to be "wired" differently from the somehow scientifically determined notions of what is "safe" and "healthy" has no rights, is that it?

Where are you getting this stuff? I'm afraid I don't understand the leaps you're making when you jump to these conclusions.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:27 PM

And we wouldn't have people using it to steal our money. (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&q=identity+theft+at+gas+pumps&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=)

Precisely.

What's your point?

Seriously, I don't understand what you're on about.

Do you think I'm making some sort of argument for the sanctity and goodness of human nature?!

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:30 PM

And you're missing the point. "Having an effect" isn't "good" or "bad", and both science and religion have effects- but you are somehow making the judgement that it is inherently more prefereable to embrace science's effects rather than those of religion.

No, I'm not.

I was simply responding to your assertion that one could only accept science as a preferable point of view by making some arbitrary judgment.

I pointed out that this is not true: It's possible to make that decision based on reason, based on the observation that science actually works (for good or ill) while the claims of religion are no better than placebo.

Doesn't mean that everyone will actually make that decision. But it is possible to accept science as superior to religion for non-arbitrary reasons. That's all I was saying.

I was certainly not arguing that the outcomes of science are never harmful, or that there's no reason to accept religion.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:35 PM

Nobody is arguing that point. Why do you keep pressing it? What is it that you think is missing in our understanding of this point?

If you agree that science can change the answers to moral questions, then how can you argue that Harris is wrong when he says that science can tell us what we should value?

After all, "What should we value?" is a moral question.

And I find it impossible to argue that the answer to that question has nothing at all to do with what we believe to be real, with what we believe the world to be, with what we believe ourselves to be, with what we believe other persons (or animals) to be.

If science has the power to change our minds about what the world is, what we are, and whether or not there is an afterlife, then how can anyone maintain that it does not have the power to tell us what we ought to value, or what is worth dying for?

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:37 PM

The problem isn't that we need to remove 'ought' language. Getting rid of the terminology doesn't change what is happening.

No, but sloppy language can lead to erroneous conclusions. I've seen it happen time and time again.

So tomorrow I'll expand on post 449 without the "ought" language and instead deal with more precise terminology grounded in a scientific (rather than philosophical) view of the process of human moral reasoning.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:39 PM

There is no disagreement that science can help us understand and plan the best use of our resources to attain our goals. But if we don't have agreement on the future we want to build - which is dependent on we value various intrinsic goods, I don't see how science is going to help with that problem.

My argument is going to be that values don't actually come into play at that level. Since it's late, all I can say is, stay tuned.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:42 PM

This does not prove that values aren't learnt. It just means that genetically identical people tend to pick up similar values from their culture, and genetically different people might pick up different values.

That works out to exactly the same thing. Either way, genetics determines the values you end up with.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:45 PM

To now ask of science to solve moral questions, is to ask it to reverse centuries of scientific progress. It is perhaps not so much that science can't answer moral questions, but rather that scientists have decided it ought not to.

It is never a reversal of progress to shine the light of science on unexplored areas.

It is understandable why science shied away from morality after the scares of fascism, Stalinism, Maoist political re-education, and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. There were all sorts of fears that the scientification of moral reasoning could lead to "social Darwinism", eugenics, and other such things.

But I don't see that those fears have any foundation.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:47 PM

I don't see how that follows. Just because a person can't help him/herself from committing a certain act, does not mean there can't be treatment that does help him/her.

Not if they absolutely, literally, could not help it at all.

The enthusiasm for rehabilitation has been largely based on an unproven (and, I believe, failed) notion that we can change human nature by manipulating the environment and englightening people's minds.

Experience, however, indicates that some people will change, others will not.

Where to draw that line should be determined by objective research, not philosophy or politics.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:48 PM

You need an ought to determine the direction of increasing wellbeing.

Stay tuned. I'm going to argue that we get a much better picture of reality by doing away with all this talk of "oughts".

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:56 PM

We can present two scenarios which ought to be answered in the same way. On the one hand, we have a speeding, out of control locomotive, which is heading towards a crash guaranteed to kill all six people on board. Flipping a switch will divert the train to an alternate track and a safe deceleration, but the way is blocked by a person who will be killed by the train. Do you flip the switch? On the other hand, we have six people facing imminent death without a transplant and a healthy person of the right type walks in the door. Do we kill this person in order to transplant her/his organs and save the lives of the six? If you answer yes to one, then you ought to answer yes to the other, as they appear to offer the same choice of outcomes. Yet people consistently offer different answers to the two scenarios.

Well, this goes back to your earlier statement that we don't make our decisions based on concepts of logically coherent philosophies.

The difference lies in the way we perceive the agency.

In the first scenario, there's going to be a crash, an accident that's going to befall some people. And with my hand on the switch, I'm forced to decide -- by action or inaction -- whether this accident will befall 6 people or 1 person. If I don't flip the switch, I feel responsible for the deaths of 5 people.

In the second scenario, however, we're dealing with disease, which human beings think about very differently from the way we think about accidents. We do not consider it justified to take the life of a healthy person in order to stop disease from taking its course in sick persons.

Which makes perfect sense, given that we evolved for millennia during which medical interventions (and, therefore, choices like this) were not possible, but accidents were, not to mention the evolutionary advantage of preferring to save the lives of healthy people over sick people.

In that scenario, I don't feel responsible for their deaths -- they died because they were sick.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 06:59 PM

Not at all. But the purpose of doing science related to natural selection is not to convince people to change their behaviour, whereas Sam Harris seems to be proposing using science to try convince people their behaviour is morally wrong.

Not necessarily. What he's arguing is that science can help us make those decisions, if we accept science. I don't sense any evangelical fervor on his part.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:03 PM

Piggy was previously arguing that his ideas were the True Scientific Morality and that everything else was pre-scientific

That paints with a rather broad brush, but nevertheless, it is certainly true that once science is successfully applied to an issue, previous philosophy goes by the board. And irretrievably so.

For example, Einstein forever removed space and time from the realm of philosophical speculation. All further progress will now be scientific, not philosophical.

Studies of how the brain processes language have made philosophers like Derrida forever obsolete. (Although several thousand tenured professors of literature are going to have to retire before that process is complete.)

Modern medicine has eternally obliterated philosophical speculation about bodily humors and the like.

Beth

18th October 2010, 07:36 PM

No time for the long post tonight, but in anticipation of that, a few thoughts on the notion that it's impossible for science to tell us what we should value, even though science can change our beliefs regarding what is real.....
No. Your misunderstanding hinges on the terms you keep wanting to jettison - intrinsic and instrumental goods. I think that everyone here agrees that science can be incredibly useful in deciding how to value instrumental goods. The disagreement revolves around whether science can tell us what we should value intrinsically.

While science may be unequaled in it's ability to help us achieve instrumental goods, it can be considered no more or less of a valid claim with regards to the valuation of intrinsic goods - things like freedom and justice - than any other philosophical position. In essence, much like the Christian bible, science can be used to support any set of values for intrinsic goods that human beings want it to support.

If you agree that science can change the answers to moral questions, then how can you argue that Harris is wrong when he says that science can tell us what we should value? Because he seems to be claiming that science can help us determine what intrinsic goods we should value. If that is not the case, then I don't have a disagreement with him.

After all, "What should we value?" is a moral question.
Yes. Again, I think the issue is about intrinsic versus instrumental goods. As long as you keep insisting there is no difference between them, I don't think you'll convince those who feel there is a significant difference between them.

How can science help weigh the relative worth of security versus freedom? Of justice versus compassion? My experience is that before science can help us, we have to define precisely what is meant by the terms - what exactly will be measured and quantified. That phase of science - the part before measurements are taken and hypotheses set up and tested - requires the use of an initial set of values.

If science has the power to change our minds about what the world is, what we are, and whether or not there is an afterlife, then how can anyone maintain that it does not have the power to tell us what we ought to value, or what is worth dying for?
Because we all, each and every one of us, decide for ourselves what we value. Yes, biological drives are instrumental in that process. Yes, science can inform our choices and better delineate the costs and benefits. But, in the end, we all decide for ourselves how to live our lives and what, if anything, we think is worth dying for.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:52 PM

No. Your misunderstanding hinges on the terms you keep wanting to jettison - intrinsic and instrumental goods. I think that everyone here agrees that science can be incredibly useful in deciding how to value instrumental goods. The disagreement revolves around whether science can tell us what we should value intrinsically.

While science may be unequaled in it's ability to help us achieve instrumental goods, it can be considered no more or less of a valid claim with regards to the valuation of intrinsic goods - things like freedom and justice - than any other philosophical position. In essence, much like the Christian bible, science can be used to support any set of values for intrinsic goods that human beings want it to support.

My problem with "intrinsic good" is that it's a misleading term. It gives the impression that the "good" (whatever that may be) inheres in the action or thing.

It's much more accurate and useful to speak of genetically determined drives.

Eating when you're hungry can be viewed as an "intrinsic good", but there's no explanatory power there. On the other hand, eating when you're hungry can be viewed as a mechanism (the result of evolution) to stop your brain from punishing you because you're putting yourself in physical danger of starvation, and that has explanatory power.

"Intrinsic goods" are not testable. Genetically determined drives are.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:55 PM

Because he seems to be claiming that science can help us determine what intrinsic goods we should value. If that is not the case, then I don't have a disagreement with him.

All I can say, yet again, is that if you drop this philosophical notion of intrinsic good -- which you should do, since he's arguing for a scientific rather than philosophical approach to morality -- then his argument will make a lot more sense.

Trying to tease out his stance on intrinsic good here is kind of like trying to tease out the scientific stance on sin.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 07:57 PM

Again, I think the issue is about intrinsic versus instrumental goods. As long as you keep insisting there is no difference between them, I don't think you'll convince those who feel there is a significant difference between them.

I've never argued that there's no difference.

I've argued that both terms are irrelevant to a scientific view of morality. We can, and should, do without them.

There are better ways to frame the issue.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 08:05 PM

How can science help weigh the relative worth of security versus freedom? Of justice versus compassion? My experience is that before science can help us, we have to define precisely what is meant by the terms - what exactly will be measured and quantified. That phase of science - the part before measurements are taken and hypotheses set up and tested - requires the use of an initial set of values.

Actually, it does not. No initial values are required. Instead, we observe human behavior and look for the patterns and causes.

Science is not concerned with any search for any absolute relative weights for any of these drives, btw. For the same reason that science is not concerned with the search for an absolute relationship between the length of the foot and the width of the skull.

Suppose we did arrive at an average, based on measuring every individual's feet and skulls all around the globe. What good would that do? What would it tell us? Probably nothing.

The best we can do is to identify the drives -- even though we do not yet know the mechanisms that produce them -- which are common to all groups of humans, and to make observations regarding their distribution, and how they are employed in various types of situations.

If you take different individuals in different situations, you're going to find that they apply different weights to the various drives, such as a desire for justice, compassion for others, the desire for security, and the desire for autonomy.

There are no absolute weights to be found, so science does not look for them.

Beth

18th October 2010, 08:32 PM

My problem with "intrinsic good" is that it's a misleading term. It gives the impression that the "good" (whatever that may be) inheres in the action or thing.

It's much more accurate and useful to speak of genetically determined drives.

Eating when you're hungry can be viewed as an "intrinsic good", but there's no explanatory power there. On the other hand, eating when you're hungry can be viewed as a mechanism (the result of evolution) to stop your brain from punishing you because you're putting yourself in physical danger of starvation, and that has explanatory power.

"Intrinsic goods" are not testable. Genetically determined drives are.

I'll agree, intrinsic goods are often not testable. But neither are the genetically determined drives you've been talking about. For example, if there is a genetically determined drive for "fairness", it's not any more testable than justice.

Further I am not sure that 'intrinsic goods' are entirely based on genetically determined drives, although that is possible.

That phase of science - the part before measurements are taken and hypotheses set up and tested - requires the use of an initial set of values. Actually, it does not. No initial values are required. Instead, we observe human behavior and look for the patterns and causes. We may simply have to disagree here. Observing behavior and looking for patterns and causes is exactly the phase I'm talking about - the part before measurements are taken and hypotheses set up and tested - and that does make use of an initial set of values. Why do you think it does not?

The best we can do is to identify the drives -- even though we do not yet know the mechanisms that produce them -- which are common to all groups of humans, and to make observations regarding their distribution, and how they are employed in various types of situations.

If you take different individuals in different situations, you're going to find that they apply different weights to the various drives, such as a desire for justice, compassion for others, the desire for security, and the desire for autonomy.

There are no absolute weights to be found, so science does not look for them.

Yes. This is describing the 'is'. I don't think there is any disagreement that science can do this. What do you think that science can then do with this information in order to help us determine how we 'ought' to value those things?

Piggy

18th October 2010, 08:38 PM

Piggy

18th October 2010, 08:41 PM

Observing behavior and looking for patterns and causes is exactly the phase I'm talking about - the part before measurements are taken and hypotheses set up and tested - and that does make use of an initial set of values. Why do you think it does not?

I'm afraid you'll have to argue why in the world it should.

We observe patterns in the world, and we explore them to determine if they really are patterns and, if they are, what are their causes. This requires no value judgments.

No set of values is necessary to determine the possible shapes of galaxies, or the various forms of energy. Similarly, no set of values is necessary to determine the basic drives hard-wired into the brain.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 08:53 PM

Yes. This is describing the 'is'. I don't think there is any disagreement that science can do this. What do you think that science can then do with this information in order to help us determine how we 'ought' to value those things?

I'll explain that in more detail tomorrow. But for now, I'll say that science doesn't so much help us determine how we ought to value things, but rather it changes how we do value things by changing our understanding of what is real, because our values do not usually exist at the level of drives.

Take, for example, these values:

Valuing what is natural over what is man-made
Valuing ones nation over others (e.g., the belief that America is the greatest nation on earth and in history)
Valuing paternalism (i.e., the need for the stronger sex to protect the weaker sex by enforced social inequality)
Valuing the habits and world-views of indigenous pre-industrial peoples over those of industrial colonizers
Asserting that slavery is beneficial to the enslaved because their race is inferior and incapable of managing its own affairs
Valuing the "sanctity" of the "nuclear family" over all other possible arrangements as the foundation of a stable society

All of these values are the product of inherent drives that we have just because we are human, combined with a set of beliefs about the world and about human beings.

Most of our values exist at that level.

Science cannot change the drives, but an understanding of the world illuminated by science can indeed change our beliefs about the world, and when that part of the equation changes, the values can change. And often do.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 08:56 PM

Precisely.

What's your point?

Seriously, I don't understand what you're on about.

Do you think I'm making some sort of argument for the sanctity and goodness of human nature?!

No, but it seems sometimes like you're making an argument for the sanctity and goodness of science.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:03 PM

No, I'm not.

I was simply responding to your assertion that one could only accept science as a preferable point of view by making some arbitrary judgment.

I pointed out that this is not true: It's possible to make that decision based on reason, based on the observation that science actually works (for good or ill) while the claims of religion are no better than placebo.
For a certain definition of "works", only.

And which definition of "works" one chooses is tied entirely to the ends one first must arbitrarily decide one wishes to achieve.

Doesn't mean that everyone will actually make that decision. But it is possible to accept science as superior to religion for non-arbitrary reasons. That's all I was saying.
And you are wrong. Name one non-arbitrary reason to choose science over religion- and no, "it works" isn't non-arbitrary. Ask the Amish about that.

I was certainly not arguing that the outcomes of science are never harmful, or that there's no reason to accept religion.
Then you're admitting that choosing science is in fact arbitrary.

Seriously, you've got this huge set of blinders on soley seemingly because you cannot seem to see your own set of preferences aren't shared by every human.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:12 PM

No, but it seems sometimes like you're making an argument for the sanctity and goodness of science.

Well, let me assure you that I am not.

I'm a milltown boy, and I live out in the country, and when I drive through the "big city" my brain sees it as an enormous maw sucking up water and crops and minerals and spewing out pollution and babies.

Seriously, I literally see this in my head. I can't help but visualize the water running through the buildings and dumping into the sewers, the turbines in the rivers and the piles in the nuclear plants sending electricity through the wires, the concrete and plastic piled endlessly upon itself, the mountains of junk being hauled off to landfills or simply tossed out into streets and vacant lots.

And I think, "This cannot keep going".

At the same time, there I am, in my truck, listening to my CDs, with vaccines in my blood, synthetic shoes on my feet, mass-produced food in my belly.

I accepted a long time ago that I work for the devil. I could choose to do otherwise, but I'm not going to.

The way I see it, there just ain't no free lunch. Whatever we do to boost crops, there's a price. Whatever we do to stop disease, there's a price. Whatever we do to extend life, there's a price. Whatever we do to increase comfort, there's a price.

It's the law of conservation of stuff. Science can't really help us. It can only shuffle things around.

Truth is, we've borrowed all our conveniences from our descendants or from other people somewhere else on the planet. No way around it.

Science is only good if you're on the good end of it.

That's the way I see it, anyway.

</tangent>

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:13 PM

For a certain definition of "works", only.

And which definition of "works" one chooses is tied entirely to the ends one first must arbitrarily decide one wishes to achieve.

Well, we differ in our thinking about whether or not that's actually arbitrary.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:15 PM

Where are you getting this stuff? I'm afraid I don't understand the leaps you're making when you jump to these conclusions.

I'm trying to find out what exactly you are proposing this "science based morality" looks like, and what use it is. From what you've articulated so far, it seems pretty meaningless. It can influence one's values (as long as one first values what science has to say), but it cannot come up with a single value that one did not already have. It's universal, because we all share the same physiology, but then it's different for everybody because everyone's "wired" differently.

Maybe you didn't mean to, but you missed this question:
"You don't want any "oughts" or "shoulds", you don't want any "intrinsic goods", and you're dead set against any philosophy or culture, so what non-science things do belong in "moral dilemmas"?"

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:18 PM

And you are wrong. Name one non-arbitrary reason to choose science over religion- and no, "it works" isn't non-arbitrary. Ask the Amish about that.

I don't believe the Amish will dispute that it works. They simply don't care for the results.

My reasons for choosing science over religion are certainly not arbitrary.

Science gets results. Religion does not. When I examine the claims of religion, I find that they are not only unsubstantiated, but unsubtantiable.

This does not mean that I think the results of science are always to our benefit. It works for good or ill, to heal illness or murder people by the thousands.

It's just that science is accurate.

Religion, however, writes checks that it can't cash. Prayer doesn't make any difference. Religious rituals are not effective. And the various gods do not exist because they can't exist.

So I reject religion because it can't make good on its claims, just like a scam artist can't make good on his claims.

Science does follow through, even if we sometimes wish it hadn't.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:19 PM

Well, we differ in our thinking about whether or not that's actually arbitrary.

My defintion is "subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion". Thus, my statement parses to:

"For a certain definition of "works", only.

And which definition of "works" one chooses is tied entirely to the ends one first must decide, subject to one's individual will or judgment without restriction and contingent solely upon one's discretion, one wishes to achieve. "

What is different about your thinking?

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:20 PM

Then you're admitting that choosing science is in fact arbitrary.

Absolutely not.

Hexes do not work, bombs do.

This says nothing about the desirableness of bombs.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:25 PM

My defintion is "subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion". Thus, my statement parses to:

"For a certain definition of "works", only.

And which definition of "works" one chooses is tied entirely to the ends one first must decide, subject to one's individual will or judgment without restriction and contingent solely upon one's discretion, one wishes to achieve. "

What is different about your thinking?

For me, it's about fulfilling promises.

Religion promises things it can't deliver.

Science delivers.

Religion tells you that your prayers will be heard. They won't.

Religion tells you that there's an afterlife. There isn't.

Religions tells you a god created the universe. It didn't.

Science tells you the universe is expanding. It is.

Science tells you we can build computers. We can.

Science tells you genetics determines our biology. It does.

It's as simple as that.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:28 PM

I'm trying to find out what exactly you are proposing this "science based morality" looks like, and what use it is. From what you've articulated so far, it seems pretty meaningless. It can influence one's values (as long as one first values what science has to say), but it cannot come up with a single value that one did not already have. It's universal, because we all share the same physiology, but then it's different for everybody because everyone's "wired" differently.

Maybe you didn't mean to, but you missed this question:
"You don't want any "oughts" or "shoulds", you don't want any "intrinsic goods", and you're dead set against any philosophy or culture, so what non-science things do belong in "moral dilemmas"?"

It's late, my friend.

Hopefully tomorrow night's post will clear up some of this.

If not, I'll welcome more questions lobbed my way.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:29 PM

I don't believe the Amish will dispute that it works. They simply don't care for the results.
Right, because, for them, Religion gets the results they want, not science.

My reasons for choosing science over religion are certainly not arbitrary.
Yes, they are, you just cannot see past your own point of view far enough to see it.

Science gets results. Religion does not.
For the religious, it does get results. They are just not the results that are important to you.

When I examine the claims of religion, I find that they are not only unsubstantiated, but unsubtantiable.
Which claims?

This does not mean that I think the results of science are always to our benefit. It works for good or ill, to heal illness or murder people by the thousands.

It's just that science is accurate.
Why is that important?

Religion, however, writes checks that it can't cash. Prayer doesn't make any difference.
It makes an emotional difference, or people wouldn't do it. Just because that's not important to you doesn't mean it is worthless to everyone.

Religious rituals are not effective.
They are emotional effective, or people wouldn't do it. Just because that's not important to you doesn't mean it is worthless to everyone.

And the various gods do not exist because they can't exist.
That's a whole different discussion, and irrelevant to this one.

So I reject religion because it can't make good on its claims, just like a scam artists can't make good on his claims.
That depends on what claims one is talking about. If no one ever got anything out of it, no one would do it. Or do you think that people are just that stupid?

Science does follow through, even if we sometimes wish it hadn't.
Why is "following through" important, especially if sometimes you don't like the results?

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:38 PM

For me, it's about fulfilling promises.

Religion promises things it can't deliver.

Science delivers.

Religion tells you that your prayers will be heard. They won't.

Religion tells you that there's an afterlife. There isn't.

Religions tells you a god created the universe. It didn't.

Science tells you the universe is expanding. It is.

Science tells you we can build computers. We can.

Science tells you genetics determines our biology. It does.

It's as simple as that.
How is that not in line with "which definition of "works" one chooses is tied entirely to the ends one first must decide, subject to one's individual will or judgment without restriction and contingent solely upon one's discretion, one wishes to achieve"?

You first decided, contingent solely upon your own discretion ("for me"), that "it's about fulfilling promises". The value you place on science follows from that decision. That's the definition of "arbitrary".

Other people have first decided "for them" that "keeping promises" in such a way is less important than "makes them feel good".

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:38 PM

Right, because, for them, Religion gets the results they want, not science.

Which is fine.

But that does not change the point I was making -- which is that it is possible to accept science over religion for rational, rather than arbitrary, reasons.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:39 PM

Yes, they are, you just cannot see past your own point of view far enough to see it.

That's quite a claim. It requires unpacking.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:40 PM

Absolutely not.

Hexes do not work, bombs do.

This says nothing about the desirableness of bombs.

You've got a rather naive and frankly nonsensical notion about what religion actually consists of and what is involved. "Hexes", really?

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:42 PM

Which is fine.

But that does not change the point I was making -- which is that it is possible to accept science over religion for rational, rather than arbitrary, reasons.

And you've yet to actually offer one.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:43 PM

For the religious, it does get results. They are just not the results that are important to you.

No, this is not correct.

Religions makes claims they cannot deliver on.

Prayer has been studied. It does not work beyond the placebo effect.

Scripture has been studied. It is not what the religions tout it to be.

Religion does not fulfill its claims.

If religion actually claimed to be a psychological palliative, that would be one thing, but this is not what it claims.

Piscivore, I like you and respect you, but believe me, you don't want to get into an argument with me about the hard and cold facts regarding religion.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:44 PM

Why is "following through" important, especially if sometimes you don't like the results?

It's important because it's the only way to judge the validity of claims.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:45 PM

You've got a rather naive and frankly nonsensical notion about what religion actually consists of and what is involved. "Hexes", really?

You don't think hexes are components of certain religions?

I don't guess I have anything to say about that.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:47 PM

And you've yet to actually offer one.

I've described it more than once, my friend.

Objectively, science delivers, religion does not (unless you count a placebo effect as "delivering").

That's a rational basis for preferring science to religion.

End of story.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:48 PM

That's quite a claim. It requires unpacking.

Start with your appalingly ignorant notions of what people value about religion, along with your seeming disregard for people's emotional needs, and conclude with the fact that you keep using "rational" as if it were equivilent to "objective".

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:50 PM

You don't think hexes are components of certain religions?
Voodoo, maybe. In the movies. And low-quality fantasy literature.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:51 PM

I've described it more than once, my friend.
And you've been shown why it's is in fact arbitrary.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:52 PM

Start with your appalingly ignorant notions of what people value about religion, along with your seeming disregard for people's emotional needs, and conclude with the fact that you keep using "rational" as if it were equivilent to "objective".

I'm sorry, but we were not discussing what people value about religion.

I've already said that there are reasons to accept religion.

In fact, I believe that if we were to erase all evidence and memory of religion right now, it would be re-invented within a week. (And I mean that literally.)

There's a reason that religion is a part of every society on the planet throughout history and most assuredly long before.

The only thing I am saying is that there are rational, non-arbitrary reasons to prefer science over religion.

You are simply wrong when you assert that the choice can only be arbitrary, and you have offered exactly zero evidence in support of that assertion.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:54 PM

And you've been shown why it's is in fact arbitrary.

No, I have not.

You have offered not one single argument in favor of this position.

All you have done is to show that there are reasons why people accept religion, which I do not dispute.

This does not, in any way or by any stretch of the imagination, demonstrate that there are no rational, non-arbitrary reasons for preferring science to religion.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 09:55 PM

Voodoo, maybe. In the movies. And low-quality fantasy literature.

You need to read up on contemporary African religion, for example. In many parts of Africa, hexes are taken very seriously, and people are even killed based on accusations of casting hexes.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 09:56 PM

It's important because it's the only way to judge the validity of claims.
Really? Do we need to set off nuclear winter to test the validity of the claim that it will actually happen?

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 10:00 PM

No, I have not.

You have offered not one single argument in favor of this position.
http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=6456923&postcount=675

This does not, in any way or by any stretch of the imagination, demonstrate that there are no rational, non-arbitrary reasons for preferring science to religion.
I didn't say that there weren't any, I just said you haven't given one yet.

You are simply wrong when you assert that the choice can only be arbitrary, and you have offered exactly zero evidence in support of that assertion.
You offered your own in 672.

Piggy

18th October 2010, 10:00 PM

Really? Do we need to set off nuclear winter to test the validity of the claim that it will actually happen?

Don't be obtuse.

In fact, yes, we actually would need to engage in a global thermonuclear event to determine if nuclear winter would actually occur.

But this is not advisable.

In cases where we cannot, or should not, follow through in order to validate a claim, we do the best we can with simulation.

But this is, of course, not necessary when it comes to religion.

We can study intercessory prayer, for example, and we have. It doesn't work.

Scripture has been studied scientifically, and in no case has there been any reason to conclude that it supports any sort of supernatural claims.

At this point, Piscivore, you've stopped engaging in any sort of coherent argument.

Time to clock out.

I'll see you tomorrow.

Piscivore

18th October 2010, 10:06 PM

Piscivore, I like you and respect you, but believe me, you don't want to get into an argument with me about the hard and cold facts regarding religion.

You're getting hung up on the superstitious trappings and superficial ephemera of the institution, and disregarding the actual effects it has on people. If there was no value to be found in it, people wouldn't value it. Even scientist and other "logical" and "reasonable" people believe in religion, sometimes strongly. Instead of endlessly repeating the stuff that you've found problems with, you might try asking what it is they do value.

Democracy Simulator

18th October 2010, 11:01 PM

Let's stick to facts.

Sam Harris says explicitly:

"There is not a description of the way the world is that can tell us the way the world ought to be ... I think that this is quite clearly untrue."

Is he referring here to the is/ought problem? Or is he not? Harris has studied philosophy. His language here seems clear. Or does he mean something else? Now what could that be?

I think that this sentence encapsulates his terrible equivocation which leads to an 18 page thread. My answer to Harris is that he has not answered the is/ought problem. If you believe that he has answered it successfully, or that he actually didn't mean to reference the is/ought problem, then please give argument.

If, on the other hand you think:

Given that human well-being is desired and that we know the specifics of situation A (thanks to science), we ought to move to situation B (Piggy)

or

Moral behaviour can be studied by science (Skeptic Ginger)

or

I am a Moral Anti-Realist (or something like it) (fls)

or

You shouldn't get too hung up on one point (various)

Then I do not need to continue in this discussion. If you could let me know that would be great.;)

Please take it up with me if I have materially misrepresented your contributions, but we need to cut to the chase.

Earthborn

19th October 2010, 12:01 AM

... a few thoughts on the notion that it's impossible for science to tell us what we should value, even though science can change our beliefs regarding what is real.....

(snip)

Case in point: Stewart Brand.

(snip)

Of course, not all of his values changed. The underlying values of wanting a decent place to live -- which the vast majority of us share -- have remained the same.The way you are describing it does not imply that his values changed at all. It seems like instead his ideas changed on how a life according to those values can be achieved.

That works out to exactly the same thing. Either way, genetics determines the values you end up with.Only in sufficiently similar environments.

It is never a reversal of progress to shine the light of science on unexplored areas.Morality is not an unexplored area. Science can study morality in the sense that it can study how people tend to make moral decisions. The scientists who do however don't consider it to be their jobs to judge the morality they are studying. They may study what values people have, but do not prescribe what values they ought to have.

It is understandable why science shied away from morality after the scares of fascism, Stalinism, Maoist political re-education, and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. There were all sorts of fears that the scientification of moral reasoning could lead to "social Darwinism", eugenics, and other such things.It started way earlier than any of that. Scientists started to divorce science from morality in the late Middle Ages, when teleological thinking started to be replaced by thinking in terms of cause and effect. And science started to be successful because what happens can be studied, while what ought to happen cannot. As a result scientists started thinking they should study the world as it was, as it is and not as it ought to be. This shift in thinking led to what we now sometimes call "The Scientific Revolution".

The Theory of Evolution was a major leap in this sort of thinking; it explained how organisms are adapted to a particular niche without having to assume they had to be designed to fit their destiny. Instead of needing a forward looking Creator designing organisms the way they "ought" to be, it could explain how organisms came to be that way by their ancestral history. It did away with "ought" even for life, and replaced it with "is". It did away with the implied morality in Creation, because instead of a benevolent Creator there needed to be only an undirected and amoral process.

The enthusiasm for rehabilitation has been largely based on an unproven (and, I believe, failed) notion that we can change human nature by manipulating the environment and englightening people's minds.Just because attempts at rehabilitation haven't always been successful in the past doesn't prove that all attempts in the future are futile and no money should be spent on it ever. Since you are so fond of biological science approaches it is particularly strange that you have failed to notice that in many cases criminals -- especially those with uncontrollable compulsions -- have shown to be biologically or genetically disordered, and that implies that some biological intervention may be possible in the future. It may therefore be well worth the money to investigate how they can be rehabilitated.

Experience, however, indicates that some people will change, others will not.So, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't? Sounds a lot like a lots of other scientific endeavours, including many highly successful ones.

Tapio

19th October 2010, 12:12 AM

Well, for starters, the consistency of iron at different temperatures is always going to be the same, regardless of what bit of iron one tests.

The same does not hold true for emotions and people. Some people will react with glee at the exact same situation at which another reacts with anger.

Do you intentionally not try to understand the point I'm making? In any case, we wouldn't know the consistency of iron in different temperatures* unless we would have done scientific research into the matter.

Please, would you be so kind to show me real differences (ones that make the experiment on human emotions less scientific because of it's moral basis) in how these experiments are prepared, performed and analyzed? Because I can't see any and I'd very much like to see the fault in my logic if there is some.

*which is not the same - in great heat, the crystal structure of iron "loosens" and more carbon "floats" in (by instantly cooling the mixture we get steel, which is faintly larger in volume than iron). At least this is what I've been taught.

You're equivocating "oughts"- the scientific one is a guess or estimation as to what an outcome will be, the moral "ought" is a prescribtion of what outcome is preferable.

I wasn't talking about moral "oughts". I was only comparing two scientific experiments. And I don't think Harris is either when trying to remove the separation of facts and values. The whole point he seems to be making is that in practice the division is only a fantasized one, with no connection to the way we actually act.

Science doesn't care if its "ought" turns out to not match the facts. Morality does.

All the more need for science-based morality. :) But, while science might not care, scientists certainly do.

Because he already has dictated one- "human well-being". "Alleviate[ing] the suffering in this world".

As does every single scientist about to perform an experiment (dictates "oughts", that is).

Dragoonster

19th October 2010, 02:27 AM

I've described it more than once, my friend.

Objectively, science delivers, religion does not (unless you count a placebo effect as "delivering").

That's a rational basis for preferring science to religion.

End of story.

Objectively science delivers on (scientific) questions, with scientific evidence.

Subjectively religion delivers (like it or not) on moral questions. So do many other moralities, some more akin to "science" or "atheism", but for the wiser never basing themselves on them.

Properly ne'er the two (science and morals/ethics) shall meet, at their "is". The two are class differences. Once the "is" is decided of course science or whatever can contribute, but the "is" is philosophy, not science.

Then I do not need to continue in this discussion. If you could let me know that would be great.

Sam Harris desires to reduce morals to scientific axioms. Starting irrationally from his subjective preference on his particular world-view. Half of the people defending him in this thread don't know what he actually proposed. He proposed an indefensible ridiculously biased stance, which should be dismissed as easily as any theist or naturalist or whomever.

Sam Harris, Piggy, you, etc: put up or shut up. What is your axiomatic basis for "science as morals"??????? Justify your answer.

Tapio

19th October 2010, 02:53 AM

Sam Harris desires to reduce morals to scientific axioms. Starting irrationally from his subjective preference on his particular world-view. Half of the people defending him in this thread don't know what he actually proposed. He proposed an indefensible ridiculously biased stance, which should be dismissed as easily as any theist or naturalist or whomever.

I'd really like to get my thoughts on this on some solid ground. Could you show me the exact phrases by which Harris takes this "indefensible ridiculously biased stance"?

Dragoonster

19th October 2010, 02:58 AM

I'd really like to get my thoughts on this on some solid ground. Could you show me the exact phrases by which Harris takes this "indefensible ridiculously biased stance"?

Did you see the original TED and/or read his subsequent (and similarly ridiculous imo) rebuttal or explanation? Harris was championing a radical change in moral basis, yet from no philosophical basis.

If he wasn't what is this thread all about? What is the brand new thing Harris came upon? Everyone here arguing against him acknowledges that science can aid in deciding "ought" steps to take after "is" morals have been defined. There are philosophers centuries back who have contributed to this. So what is Harris' new big thing? If it isn't finding a new "is", then why pay any attention to him?

eta: I think I put forth some quotes from him back on page 2 or 3, if you're looking for self-owning phrases from Harris himself. The dude is an amateur at this topic, with stars in his eyes.

Tapio

19th October 2010, 03:15 AM

eta: I think I put forth some quotes from him back on page 2 or 3, if you're looking for self-owning phrases from Harris himself. The dude is an amateur at this topic, with stars in his eyes.

Thanks, will refresh my memory. And yes, I've been following what's been happening after TED. Catch you later!

Ivor the Engineer

19th October 2010, 03:24 AM

My problem with "intrinsic good" is that it's a misleading term. It gives the impression that the "good" (whatever that may be) inheres in the action or thing.

It's much more accurate and useful to speak of genetically determined drives.

<snip>

No it isn't. Sure, there appear to be a common set of drives most of us share. But the spanner in the works for Mr. Harris and his 'let's use science to determine what we should do' approach is that it ignores the different weights each of us place on the drives we share, as well as ignoring the drives we do not share with others.

E.g., On a scale of 1 to 10:

Person/Group A: Freedom=8; Fairness=5.
Person/Group B: Freedom=5; Fairness=8.

Do you seriously think all the science in the word could convince A and B to agree what ought to be from what is, or produce an 'ought' to optimise overall 'wellbeing' without presupposing how 'wellbeing' ought to be determined in the first place?

Have you ever travelled outside your own country?

Dragoonster

19th October 2010, 03:28 AM

Thanks, will refresh my memory. And yes, I've been following what's been happening after TED. Catch you later!

:) His TED talk started off engaging but my eyes quickly rolled and then my teeth gnashed. I wasn't one to put up a link to a good rebuttal (and I think Harris' insufficient counter) but I think someone did early in the thread.

I don't mind arguments for this even if I fundamentally disagree, but I think you and others have been making much better arguments than Harris himself.

I don't know if anyone else has pointed out that Harris is (possibly) vehemently anti-Islam, and (also possibly) a large part of his TED talk was aimed at/against Islamic traditions. IMO he's struggling as hard as he can to justify the Western moral mindset...which is why "what if forcing women into burkas gains overall well-being?" is such a killer question to him. I don't think he really sets science as his determinate factor. He is trying to use science to justify his preset agenda.

Sure, Burka forcing is bad, but science alone isn't going to judge it as bad.

Tapio

19th October 2010, 04:01 AM

Just had to write this up, from the longer talk.

Sam Harris:
To conclude ... what I'm asking you to acknowledge is, that given what we can value is a matter of human and animal well-being... Given that that must be constrained by the laws of nature - now we're talking about a domain of facts... And given that it's possible for both individuals and even whole cultures to value the wrong things, which is to say it's possible for people to have priorities which cause needless human misery, and to fail to have priorities that would open doors to human flourishing...

And I think this is the greatest challenge we face as a civilization. We have to find some way of building a global society based on shared values. We have to converge on the same economic and environmental and political goals. And it seems to me patently obvious we don't have a thousand years to do that. The necessary peace and the purpose of my writing my current book is before any scientific details are sought, at the very least we have to acknowledge that there's a context in which to talk about right and wrong answers.

Also, in the Q&A:
The concept of health is just as loose as the concept of well-being. The act of defining my terms - defining a science of morality in terms of the well-being of conscious creatures, is no more tendentious or merely preferential than defining physics in terms of an attempt to understand the behavior of matter and energy.

So? Thinking about this hard I find myself quite baffled by these words. Maybe I just ought to wait until I read the book before giving any more comments...yeah, that's what I'll do. bye!

Ivor the Engineer

19th October 2010, 04:24 AM

We have to converge on the same economic and environmental and political goals.

No, we don't.

Tapio

19th October 2010, 05:46 AM

No, we don't.

Do you think we can survive as a civilization over the next thousand years without a converging of the sort Harris mentions?

Ivor the Engineer

19th October 2010, 06:14 AM

Do you think we can survive as a civilization over the next thousand years without a converging of the sort Harris mentions?

Yes. That's not to say we don't have to change how we go about certain things to stay within the limits of what is sustainable.

amused

19th October 2010, 06:20 AM

I don't know if anyone else has pointed out that Harris is (possibly) vehemently anti-Islam, and (also possibly) a large part of his TED talk was aimed at/against Islamic traditions. IMO he's struggling as hard as he can to justify the Western moral mindset...which is why "what if forcing women into burkas gains overall well-being?" is such a killer question to him. I don't think he really sets science as his determinate factor. He is trying to use science to justify his preset agenda.

Sure, Burka forcing is bad, but science alone isn't going to judge it as bad.

Harris is known as one of the Four Horsemen - Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett - who are vehemently anti-religion. I think Harris is using Islam because it's such an easy target. I don't think he cares much at all for the Western religious moral mindset, but he may have concluded that it will be easier to win over Western fence-sitters by pointing at a 'them'. It's not really fair, but it gets the ball rolling.

Paulhoff

19th October 2010, 06:32 AM

So, having a black book and saying that the morals in it come from a so-called god makes it OK to use it as a guide to morals.

Paul

:) :) :)

AlBell

19th October 2010, 08:41 AM

So, having a black book and saying that the morals in it come from a so-called god makes it OK to use it as a guide to morals.

Paul

:) :) :)
Or you can believe the Harris/Piggy version will be an improvement and accepted by popular acclaim.

Anyone know of any secular humanist moral guidelines that are not based on the earlier (religious) tracts and subsequent revision by theologians? Which is essence was substituting a more recent person's thinking on earlier (strictly human, I believe we all agree) versions?

fls

19th October 2010, 09:18 AM

This is yet another use of "ought". :)

Why? It appears to be what we have been talking about - finding grounds to say that women ought not be forcibly coerced into wearing burqas.

If we were consistent utilitarians we should favour forcible organ donation in such circumstances

Sure. But we're not suggesting a utilitarian approach.

Not everyone is a utilitarian though: Deontologists like Kant or Jesus care about right actions, not right outcomes, and might well argue for a distinction between diverting a locomotive and killing someone for spare parts which is morally decisive to them even though the utility of the outcomes is identical in each case.

Exactly. These examples demonstrate that we care about something other than utility (hence the reason utilitarianism is not in play) if two scenarios which are the same in terms of utility lead to different choices. It means that we have a way to distinguish between choices based on right actions vs. right outcomes without appealing to long-dead authority figures.

I don't think moral claims can be limited to just situations where we discover that some of our behaviours are logically inconsistent with others. For example if we imagine a society that is consistently horrible, such that there is absolutely no incoherence in the behaviour that "is" in their society, we might still have the urge to criticise that society on the basis that we think they "ought" not to behave that way.

We wouldn't be able to treat a horrible, but logically consistent society, as different. The knowledge that Piggy has been referring to tells us that it cannot be presumed that those people living in that horrible society are different from the rest of humanity - that they are there because they are wired differently or fail to have much of anything in common with other humans. So it becomes of interest to figure why a horrible society is the same as ours.

If we look at self-interest, there appears to be a difference between a terrorist who blows himself up in a crowded mall and my husband taking me to a nice restaurant for dinner, but if we break it down we might show that they are the same in that they are both hoping for sex (from the promised 72 virgins for the terrorist). And we can recognize that this is something they can be wrong about and whether they are wrong is discoverable.

Getting back to the horrible society, what we would try to understand is why/how they are the same as as those societies which are not horrible, and then discover whether the apparent horribleness is because they are wrong with respect to their choices. And what is meant by that, is that they would make a different choice if they had the information that they were wrong. If it were known that the terrorist altered his choice to blow himself up based on the promise of 72 virgins (per the kind of scenario investigation i mentioned earlier), then if he received overwhelming information from sources he considered credible and trustworthy that this was wrong, then he ought not blow himself up. If those in a horrible society are, like us, trying to ensure some degree of security, and it is those things which they think provide security which also make it horrible , then knowledge that they are wrong about their security provides grounds for saying that it ought not be horrible.

Note that this is different from saying that science can inform moral claims. In that case, that source of the credible and trustworthy information would be science. Instead, this is what science has to say about the moral claims.

A clear contradiction between the way we treat two cases that should be identical is certainly proof that we are engaging in incoherent or inconsistent thinking, but most conceptions of morality also make it possible to criticise consistently awful behaviour as well as inconsistent behaviour.

Well, we may end up concluding that we are not rational agents, but that's not how we proceed. As Piggy explained more thoroughly in post 652, incoherent or inconsistent answers are not taken to represent human's ability to be rational, but rather reflects how well we managed to explain our moral values. If two scenarios are the same in terms of utility, but we still distinguish between them, then utility is an insufficient explanation. Piggy goes on to explain how the two can be distinguished in terms of the responsible agent. And of course, this can also be tested anew with two scenarios which appear to have the same responsible agent.

I'm pretty sure that's just a misunderstanding: see below.
Ah, okay, I think I see where we got on to separate tracks here.

Teleological interpretations of physical phenomena ("the rock wants to be lower") are pre-scientific.

Teleological statements about or by beings with preferences ("Ted wants an ice cream") aren't pre-scientific at all.

You may call it teleological, but it is also, as Harris points out, a factual statement about a conscious being.

Moral rules almost always (I can think of an exception or two, like the purported "new covenant" Jesus presented which is claimed to have changed the moral rules so the old ones no longer applied) apply forward in time, and hence are teleological in that sense. If I think that murder is wrong now then that implies I should think that murder will be wrong tomorrow and I ought to take steps to prevent future murders. So if we have any "ought" beliefs at all it's highly likely they will have a teleological component.

But this doesn't seem to be at all meaningful. Again, to think that there is some sort of distinction to be made out of considering the past, present and future separately doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with how we approach questions from a scientific perspective. And after all, it is science which has shown us that that these are sort of artifacts of conscious experience, rather than objective labels which can be applied to an event.

Piggy was previously arguing that his ideas were the True Scientific Morality and that everything else was pre-scientific, and I thought you were arguing the same point, but clearly you were actually on a different track entirely.

Piggy and I are arguing two different perspectives (and he isn't arguing for a True Scientific Morality), but I think they converge onto the same general location. Which is also typical of a scientific approach.

Linda

fls

19th October 2010, 09:24 AM

Piscivore

19th October 2010, 10:10 AM

Do you intentionally not try to understand the point I'm making? In any case, we wouldn't know the consistency of iron in different temperatures* unless we would have done scientific research into the matter.
Right, but the reason scientific research can give us a coherent answer is that iron under the the same conditions reacts the same way for everybody. People don't.

*which is not the same - in great heat, the crystal structure of iron "loosens" and more carbon "floats" in (by instantly cooling the mixture we get steel, which is faintly larger in volume than iron). At least this is what I've been taught.
I didn't mean that iron acts the same in 60F as it does in 2000F, I meant that no matter what iron you chose to heat to 2000F, it will all behave the same.

Please, would you be so kind to show me real differences (ones that make the experiment on human emotions less scientific because of it's moral basis)
I never said that experiments on human emotions were less scientific because of it's moral basis. Emotions don't have a moral basis, that's backwards. Moral are based at least as much on emotion as science- perhaps moreso.

Please, would you be so kind to show me real differences in how these experiments are prepared, performed and analyzed?
What experiments are you talking about? are there any actual experiments you're talking about, or are they just imaginary ones you're postulating to support your hypothetical?

I wasn't talking about moral "oughts". I was only comparing two scientific experiments.
Were you? Can you cite them?

And I don't think Harris is either when trying to remove the separation of facts and values. The whole point he seems to be making is that in practice the division is only a fantasized one, with no connection to the way we actually act.
It's not. Because quite a lot of the way we act is based on emotion, which often has little or nothing to do with fact. This is something both he and piggy gloss over or ignore completely, either because it is inconvenient to their desire for the Vulcan-like "rational" species necessary to make this "scientific morality" actually function, or simple short-sightedness. It seems pretty common for people to assume that their own point of view is the only one possible for humans.

All the more need for science-based morality. :) But, while science might not care, scientists certainly do.
Do they? How?

As does every single scientist about to perform an experiment (dictates "oughts", that is).
Again, you are equivocating your "oughts".

Piscivore

19th October 2010, 10:13 AM

At this point, Piscivore, you've stopped engaging in any sort of coherent argument.

It wasn't an argument, it was a question. I'm just trying to find the edges of this thing you're proposing.

fls

19th October 2010, 10:53 AM

I am a Moral Anti-Realist (or something like it) (fls)

If it helps, I think morals are as real as i.

Linda

Piscivore

19th October 2010, 11:11 AM

You need to read up on contemporary African religion, for example. In many parts of Africa, hexes are taken very seriously, and people are even killed based on accusations of casting hexes.

Is that part of an actual religion, or is it just an word-of-mouth unassociated folk belief?

Piggy

19th October 2010, 11:40 AM

You're getting hung up on the superstitious trappings and superficial ephemera of the institution, and disregarding the actual effects it has on people. If there was no value to be found in it, people wouldn't value it. Even scientist and other "logical" and "reasonable" people believe in religion, sometimes strongly. Instead of endlessly repeating the stuff that you've found problems with, you might try asking what it is they do value.

No, Piscivore, I'm sorry but you're just off on a tangent.

All I said was that it's incorrect to assert that the choice of science over a non-scientific view must be arbitrary; one can make the choice based on reason.

Which is true.

I didn't say one must.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 11:48 AM

Given that human well-being is desired and that we know the specifics of situation A (thanks to science), we ought to move to situation B (Piggy)

Not exactly.

First, I think is/ought is a horribly sloppy (and unscientific) way of framing the issue in the first place.

Second, my position (which I'll explain in detail tonight) is that science can and does change our values by changing our reality and changing our beliefs -- because values are a combination of our desires (which are anchored in our drives which are anchored in our genetics, but inflected by our circumstance, including culture, as well as the quirks of our individual wiring) and our beliefs (i.e., what we think about our world, ourselves, and others -- which can certainly be changed by science).

I'd like to give a description of the process, as well as a couple of examples: the historical shift in attitudes toward witchcraft, and the current shift in attitudes toward homosexuality.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 11:49 AM

Is that part of an actual religion, or is it just an word-of-mouth unassociated folk belief?

There's no important difference.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 11:50 AM

The way you are describing it does not imply that his values changed at all. It seems like instead his ideas changed on how a life according to those values can be achieved.

I figured someone would cherry-pick it that way. Oh well.

Piscivore

19th October 2010, 11:52 AM

No, Piscivore, I'm sorry but you're just off on a tangent.

All I said was that it's incorrect to assert that the choice of science over a non-scientific view must be arbitrary;
I didn't assert that.

one can make the choice based on reason.

Which is true.

I didn't say one must.
But what you described as your "reasonable" choice isn't, because it is entirely dependant on an arbitrary choice you made just before it.
http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=6456923&postcount=675

Piggy

19th October 2010, 11:53 AM

Morality is not an unexplored area. Science can study morality in the sense that it can study how people tend to make moral decisions. The scientists who do however don't consider it to be their jobs to judge the morality they are studying. They may study what values people have, but do not prescribe what values they ought to have.

Correct.

By the same token, science does not prescribe what beliefs people ought to have. They are free to believe that the moon landing was a hoax, or that the earth is flat, or that the universe is 6,000 years old. Nevertheless, scientific methods can be used to refute all of these ideas.

Piscivore

19th October 2010, 11:53 AM

There's no important difference.

What makes the difference "not important"?

Piggy

19th October 2010, 11:54 AM

The Theory of Evolution was a major leap in this sort of thinking

And yet, the theory has drastically changed our views of reality, which in turn has had a tremendous impact on our values.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 11:57 AM

Sam Harris desires to reduce morals to scientific axioms. Starting irrationally from his subjective preference on his particular world-view. Half of the people defending him in this thread don't know what he actually proposed. He proposed an indefensible ridiculously biased stance, which should be dismissed as easily as any theist or naturalist or whomever.

Sam Harris, Piggy, you, etc: put up or shut up. What is your axiomatic basis for "science as morals"??????? Justify your answer.

Oh, please.

I've been "putting up" for some time now.

And I'd like to see some in-context quotes to support your claim there about Harris wanting to reduce morality to scientific axioms.

Anyway, there will be further "putting up" in a later post this evening.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 11:59 AM

No it isn't. Sure, there appear to be a common set of drives most of us share. But the spanner in the works for Mr. Harris and his 'let's use science to determine what we should do' approach is that it ignores the different weights each of us place on the drives we share, as well as ignoring the drives we do not share with others.

E.g., On a scale of 1 to 10:

Person/Group A: Freedom=8; Fairness=5.
Person/Group B: Freedom=5; Fairness=8.

Do you seriously think all the science in the word could convince A and B to agree what ought to be from what is, or produce an 'ought' to optimise overall 'wellbeing' without presupposing how 'wellbeing' ought to be determined in the first place?

Have you ever travelled outside your own country?

Have you actually read any of my posts?

I've been arguing in favor of this point for some time against your argument regarding some alleged universal weighting. You're now essentially quoting my own arguments back to me.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 12:03 PM

So? Thinking about this hard I find myself quite baffled by these words. Maybe I just ought to wait until I read the book before giving any more comments...yeah, that's what I'll do. bye!

It's pretty simple, really.

He's saying that it is possible for science to help us understand those conditions that make us feel happy and fulfilled, just as it's possible for science to help us understand those conditions that make us physically healthy.

And furthermore, it's possible for science to help us determine the most successful ways -- technologically, politically, socially, even individually -- to create those conditions for the greatest number of people.

Hard to argue against that, I'd say.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 12:08 PM

What makes the difference "not important"?

Now we're on a tangent of a tangent. It might make an interesting new thread, but it's irrelevant here.

Ivor the Engineer

19th October 2010, 01:19 PM

Well, this goes back to your earlier statement that we don't make our decisions based on concepts of logically coherent philosophies.

The difference lies in the way we perceive the agency.

In the first scenario, there's going to be a crash, an accident that's going to befall some people. And with my hand on the switch, I'm forced to decide -- by action or inaction -- whether this accident will befall 6 people or 1 person. If I don't flip the switch, I feel responsible for the deaths of 5 people.

In the second scenario, however, we're dealing with disease, which human beings think about very differently from the way we think about accidents. We do not consider it justified to take the life of a healthy person in order to stop disease from taking its course in sick persons.

Which makes perfect sense, given that we evolved for millennia during which medical interventions (and, therefore, choices like this) were not possible, but accidents were, not to mention the evolutionary advantage of preferring to save the lives of healthy people over sick people.

In that scenario, I don't feel responsible for their deaths -- they died because they were sick.

I agree. I hadn't yet explained how we use this information, and now that you have, I don't have to. :)

Linda

I think the reason people choose to let the six with a disease die to spare the life of the innocent is because the benefits are not very great compared to the perceived unfairness of killing an innocent person. E.g., if six billion lives were going to be saved I think many people would be willing to kill the innocent person, particularly if they or their family were part of the six billion!

Similarly, add a little more detail onto the characters of the people in the rail road scenario and a person's choice could be flipped there as well. E.g., add that the six are convicted paedophiles and the one is a pregnant woman and I think most people in my culture would choose to kill the six rather than the one.

What I'm trying to point out is that hypothetical moral dilemmas such as those you presented don't cast much light on moral reasoning because what we think we ought to do is very sensitive to context and the individual components are not linearly mixed and compared to a fixed threshold.

Beth

19th October 2010, 01:19 PM

I'll agree, intrinsic goods are often not testable. But neither are the genetically determined drives you've been talking about. For example, if there is a genetically determined drive for "fairness", it's not any more testable than justice.
Oh, sure it is. In fact, there are some very interesting recent tests indicating that dogs have a sense of fairness. And no one would argue that "dog culture" is responsible for it.
The presence of a fairness sense in dogs, chimps, and other animals, plus the presence of a sense of fairness -- duly acted upon -- in all human cultures is a clear indication that we're hard-wired for it.
I’m sorry, I phrased that badly. It’s not that we cannot test whether there is a “sense” of fairness, but, like justice, we cannot test whether fairness exists separately from our conception of fairness.
Observing behavior and looking for patterns and causes is exactly the phase I'm talking about - the part before measurements are taken and hypotheses set up and tested - and that does make use of an initial set of values. Why do you think it does not?
I'm afraid you'll have to argue why in the world it should.
We observe patterns in the world, and we explore them to determine if they really are patterns and, if they are, what are their causes. This requires no value judgments.
Yes, it does. The act of deciding that whatever it is being studied is worth the time and resources to observe it is a value judgment. If we did not value what we term ‘patterns’, we would not bother to note them in our observations.
No set of values is necessary to determine the possible shapes of galaxies, or the various forms of energy. Similarly, no set of values is necessary to determine the basic drives hard-wired into the brain.
This may be true for the possible shapes of galaxies. I’m not so sure about the ‘basic drives hard-wired into the brain’. But this depends on your equating these hard-wired drives with ‘intrinsic values’. I’m not sold on that yet. I can think of too many examples of people controlling their basic drives in order to achieve other goals. Those other goals may well be unrelated to these instinctual hard-wired drives. For example, consider the thousands of men who pledge celibacy in order to become monks or priests? Clearly, they must value something else above the drive to have sex or reproduce. What hard-wired drive would cause that behavior?
I'll explain that in more detail tomorrow. But for now, I'll say that science doesn't so much help us determine how we ought to value things, but rather it changes how we do value things by changing our understanding of what is real Assuming that by ‘real’, you mean ‘physical reality’, I have no disagreement with this. I’m not sure anyone else posting here does either.

Science cannot change the drives, but an understanding of the world illuminated by science can indeed change our beliefs about the world, and when that part of the equation changes, the values can change. And often do.
If, as you’ve indicated earlier in this thread, you are using the term “drive” as a substitute for ‘intrinsic good’ (post 656) , then you are saying here what I and several others have been saying along. That science cannot determine what we value intrinsically.

It's pretty simple, really.

He's saying that it is possible for science to help us understand those conditions that make us feel happy and fulfilled, just as it's possible for science to help us understand those conditions that make us physically healthy.

And furthermore, it's possible for science to help us determine the most successful ways -- technologically, politically, socially, even individually -- to create those conditions for the greatest number of people.

Hard to argue against that, I'd say.

I don't think anyone is arguing against that. They are arguing against other claims he has made, particularly his claim that the is/ought distinction is illusionary.

Piscivore

19th October 2010, 01:21 PM

Now we're on a tangent of a tangent. It might make an interesting new thread, but it's irrelevant here.

It's not a tanget, it's where you're hiding your "oughts".

Ivor the Engineer

19th October 2010, 02:26 PM

Have you actually read any of my posts?

I've been arguing in favor of this point for some time against your argument regarding some alleged universal weighting. You're now essentially quoting my own arguments back to me.

How are you going to use science so that Beerina and Fiona agree on what constitutes wellbeing?

ETA: What experiment are you going to perform to determine what the optimum level of discounting of the future people should use when deciding what ought to be done?

fls

19th October 2010, 02:38 PM

What I'm trying to point out is that hypothetical moral dilemmas such as those you presented don't cast much light on moral reasoning because what we think we ought to do is very sensitive to context and the individual components are not linearly mixed and compared to a fixed threshold.

What I'm trying to point out is that the formulaic approach you've been asking about fails to be useful because it is very sensitive to context and the individual components are not linearly mixed and compared to fixed thresholds.

Linda

Ivor the Engineer

19th October 2010, 02:59 PM

What I'm trying to point out is that the formulaic approach you've been asking about fails to be useful because it is very sensitive to context and the individual components are not linearly mixed and compared to fixed thresholds.

Linda

We can't all be as sophisticated as you Linda. I'll leave you to it.

Dragoonster

19th October 2010, 03:32 PM

Oh, please.

I've been "putting up" for some time now.

And I'd like to see some in-context quotes to support your claim there about Harris wanting to reduce morality to scientific axioms.

Anyway, there will be further "putting up" in a later post this evening.

Here's a transcript of his TED speech:

http://dotsub.com/view/bda8b283-118a-4c15-954c-7a6d31b62fef/viewTranscript/eng

And some quotes that, to me, make clear he thinks science should be the "is", despite his attempts to mask this (my bolding):

So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it's often said that science can not give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there is no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the wellbeing of conscious creatures.

So, he apparently thinks that science can indeed give us a foundation for morality. Aka axioms. And he gives us his particular axiom here--wellbeing of conscious creatures is supposedly, for some reason he doesn't explain, a goal. Why not "values are facts about the pleasure of conscious creatures" or "values are facts about the altruism of conscious creatures"?? He never explains.

Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don't we feel compassion for rocks? It's because we don't think rocks can suffer.

Why does he assume we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? As was noted very early in the thread, many of us DO have ethical obligations towards mountains.

Now, let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space, or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question. I don't think, for instance, that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child, or whether we should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, or whether you can deduct the full cost of TED as a business expense. (Laughter) But if questions affect human wellbeing then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. And just admitting this -- just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish -- will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future.

No one is questioning that there are such answers to questions of human flourishing.

His enormous mistake is in starting with "human flourishing is a (the) desirable goal of all morality". Same for "well-being meaning flourishing". Science doesn't tell us that. Throughout the talk he speaks as if it's already been decided though. He never strictly defines "well-being", just trots out a bunch of examples of emotional arguments that the audience would tend to agree with.

If we were to film an imam lecturing about the moral virtues of forcing women to wear burkas, most of his audience would agree with him, in the right Islamic country/neighborhood. So, sure, science could also help answer "what's the best way to satisfy Allah's commands?" if "Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about following the Koran" has already been decided.

He wants to have his cake and eat it too. To pretend that his proposed moral system/decision-calculus has at its foundation science, and that all he's doing is applying/weighing objective facts to an obvious "well-being" form of morality. Yet an imam could do the same to an "Allah" form of morality, and be just as "scientific" once that axiom is already established, finding the best way for "Allah moral flourishing" by objectively weighing facts.

Harris has not established the "is" at all, except for it being a specific type of moral axiom he favors that everyone on Earth should for some reason magically agree with him on.

eta: I think I mixed up my own ises and oughts here

Piggy

19th October 2010, 04:06 PM

Piggy

19th October 2010, 04:08 PM

Yes, it does. The act of deciding that whatever it is being studied is worth the time and resources to observe it is a value judgment. If we did not value what we term ‘patterns’, we would not bother to note them in our observations.

So you're saying we investigate things we find worth investigating?

Ok.

So what?

And of course, you then have to ask why we find it worth investigating. Is it just an arbitrary decision, or is it because our brains are wired to find such things interesting, compelling, or useful?

Piggy

19th October 2010, 04:12 PM

If, as you’ve indicated earlier in this thread, you are using the term “drive” as a substitute for ‘intrinsic good’ (post 656) , then you are saying here what I and several others have been saying along. That science cannot determine what we value intrinsically.

It should be clear by now that I'm not equating the two. If I were, I'd just use IG. ("Values", for instance, is a close enough match that it serves just as well -- not so with IG.)

And to propose that science cannot determine what we value intrinsically is simply ridiculous.

Humans are objects just like any other object. Dynamic, complex objects, yes, but still objects. We can be studied just like anything else.

If it's true that there are things we do value intrinsically, simply because we're born with a human body/brain, then of course science can determine what those things are.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 04:13 PM

I don't think anyone is arguing against that. They are arguing against other claims he has made, particularly his claim that the is/ought distinction is illusionary.

Provide the quote in context, please, for that claim, because I do not believe he said anything like that.

He said that the wall separating scientific inquiry and moral dilemmas is illusory. Not at all the same thing.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 04:14 PM

How are you going to use science so that Beerina and Fiona agree on what constitutes wellbeing?

ETA: What experiment are you going to perform to determine what the optimum level of discounting of the future people should use when deciding what ought to be done?

Why are you asking me to do something I've been saying all along can't be done?

Piggy

19th October 2010, 04:18 PM

So, he apparently thinks that science can indeed give us a foundation for morality. Aka axioms. And he gives us his particular axiom here--wellbeing of conscious creatures is supposedly, for some reason he doesn't explain, a goal. Why not "values are facts about the pleasure of conscious creatures" or "values are facts about the altruism of conscious creatures"?? He never explains.

A foundation, yes. This does not equate to the notion that science will provide us with axioms we may then use to construct all our moral geometry. (He explicitly denies this in the talk, in fact.)

And it makes no sense to ask why he did not say things he did not say. Why not "Values are facts about the spinal cords of conscious creatures"? He never explains.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 04:20 PM

Why does he assume we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? As was noted very early in the thread, many of us DO have ethical obligations towards mountains.

I think he would agree wholeheartedly that many people believe they have ethical obligations toward mountains, although modern Westerners with a scientific worldview do not feel this way because they have "compassion" for the mountain, the way we have compassion for, say, our dogs.

And do you really know anyone who literally has compassion for rocks -- not mountains, rocks -- and feels an ethical obligation toward them?

Piggy

19th October 2010, 04:23 PM

His enormous mistake is in starting with "human flourishing is a (the) desirable goal of all morality". Same for "well-being meaning flourishing". Science doesn't tell us that. Throughout the talk he speaks as if it's already been decided though. He never strictly defines "well-being", just trots out a bunch of examples of emotional arguments that the audience would tend to agree with.

But he doesn't claim that science tells us this. Elsewhere he says quite clearly that science doesn't need to tell us this.

And for my money, "trotting out a bunch of examples" is a pretty good way of defining a thing like "well-being".

Dragoonster

19th October 2010, 04:24 PM

Provide the quote in context, please, for that claim, because I do not believe he said anything like that.

He said that the wall separating scientific inquiry and moral dilemmas is illusory. Not at all the same thing.

He seems to be claiming that science can answer the ought, at the very start of his speech:

I'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values. Now, it's generally understood that questions of morality -- questions of good and evil and right and wrong -- are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And, consequently, most people -- I think most people probably here -- think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, "What is worth living for?" "What is worth dying for?" "What constitutes a good life?"

So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.

If by "this" in "this is an illusion" refers to the first paragraph, then "this" includes that bolded section. He's saying science can indeed tell us what we ought to value.

Dragoonster

19th October 2010, 04:34 PM

I think he would agree wholeheartedly that many people believe they have ethical obligations toward mountains, although modern Westerners with a scientific worldview do not feel this way because they have "compassion" for the mountain, the way we have compassion for, say, our dogs.

And do you really know anyone who literally has compassion for rocks -- not mountains, rocks -- and feels an ethical obligation toward them?

Compassion? I don't know anyone, though I suppose even some in the West might think rocks are part of a Universal soul or something.

So I agree I don't think it's unethical if ethics is only concerned with conduct towards conscious beings, or living beings in the case of trees. But there are certainly moralities in the world that view certain rocks or trees etc. as sacred, and damaging them would be unethical even if no humans suffered from it. Again I think Harris is putting the cart before the horse, assuming that his model that people shouldn't or don't feel (compassion-based ethical) obligations towards rocks is the correct one.

Dragoonster

19th October 2010, 04:45 PM

But he doesn't claim that science tells us this. Elsewhere he says quite clearly that science doesn't need to tell us this.

And elsewhere he says quite clearly science can tell us this. As I said earlier his speech is, at best, confusing and seems contradictory on several points/claims. If science can tell us "ought", and he does say it can in the above quote, then he must've already decided, by science, that "well-being is desirable" is the prime moral "ought". But he doesn't explain why/how science has determined this.

Skeptic Ginger

19th October 2010, 04:52 PM

I’m sorry, I phrased that badly. It’s not that we cannot test whether there is a “sense” of fairness, but, like justice, we cannot test whether fairness exists separately from our conception of fairness. The question I have is why does it need to? This whole idea things don't exist if they don't exist separately from the brain is an arbitrary requirement.

Is a thought real? Is electricity running through a wire real? Does conscious thought not really exist because consciousness doesn't exist outside the brain?

Yes, it does. The act of deciding that whatever it is being studied is worth the time and resources to observe it is a value judgment. If we did not value what we term ‘patterns’, we would not bother to note them in our observations. So is your premise here one cannot look at the decision on the decision scientifically?

Take the concept of beauty. I can not only look at what is determined to be beauty, but also how that determination evolved and what nature and nurture inputs went into the current determination of beauty by an individual and so on.

I come back to what I asked before, if these processes are not part of the physical Universe, then where do these values come from? Pixie dust sprinkled into the eyes of newborns? Magic sky Daddy wand waving? I simply fail to see the alternative here.

It comes back to viewing science as some kind of decision making process. That's a false description of science. A huge part of science is simply exploring and describing the Universe.

This may be true for the possible shapes of galaxies. I’m not so sure about the ‘basic drives hard-wired into the brain’. But this depends on your equating these hard-wired drives with ‘intrinsic values’. I’m not sold on that yet. I can think of too many examples of people controlling their basic drives in order to achieve other goals. You seem to be making the false assumption here that basic drives are monolithic and distinct. Physical drives are flexible and can merge with one another. Breathing is a fixed drive. Appetite has a lot of variation potential.

Those other goals may well be unrelated to these instinctual hard-wired drives. For example, consider the thousands of men who pledge celibacy in order to become monks or priests? Clearly, they must value something else above the drive to have sex or reproduce. What hard-wired drive would cause that behavior? Behavioral drives are complex, but they are not magical. They are physical. I don't mean physical as in the chemical trigger to breathe. But rather, physical as in they are a culmination of the impact of nature and nurture on the biological brain.

If, as you’ve indicated earlier in this thread, you are using the term “drive” as a substitute for ‘intrinsic good’ (post 656) , then you are saying here what I and several others have been saying along. That science cannot determine what we value intrinsically. Put in those terms, it's obvious that of course science can.

Piggy

19th October 2010, 07:11 PM

Ok, time for the long post....

Here, I want to get away from this painfully imprecise language of "is" and "ought" and instead deal with merely annoyingly imprecise terms such as "drives", "desires", and "intentions" to describe a scientific rather than philosophical approach to morality.

Unfortunately, science has not yet figured out how our brains do everything (or even most things) they do, or even what the full slate of functions of the brain is.

So, for instance, we know that humans -- as well as some other animals -- have a compulsion to seek fairness. We will even incur costs to ourselves to punish cheaters or to enforce justice (as in the divvy/veto experiment cited above).

In the debate over capital punishment, for example, an opponent might point out that a sentence of life without parole serves the purpose of protecting society from the murderer while punishing him. A proponent may then counter that he doesn't want his tax dollars providing food, shelter, and clothing to a murderer. When the opponent points out that it's actually more expensive to execute an inmate than to house him for the rest of his life (we'll assume this is true for the sake of argument), this makes no difference to the proponent, because it's not the dollar amount that concerns him: it's what the money is going for.

He would rather accept a larger tax burden to see justice served, and to have the punishment fit the crime.

There are a number of such drives that shape our behavior and our cultures. No one has yet figured out how a drive such as fairness is encoded and enacted in our brains, but we can clearly tell from experience, experimentation, and field study that it is there.

Other drives include hunger, thirst, avoidance of humiliation, avoidance of physical pain, avoidance of disgust, protection of children, preference for blood kin, preference for in-groups over out-groups, libido (sex drive), vicarious suffering from knowledge of the suffering of loved ones, security, autonomy, avoidance of extreme physical restraint, and reciprocation. These drives are not present to the same degree in every individual, and in rare cases a necessary drive may be absent altogether in some persons (such as true masochists, who enjoy the sensation of physical pain.)

In our day-to-day lives, these drives often work in collaboration, but they often clash with each other as well. When they -- or the desires, intentions, and values they give rise to -- clash in ways that involve other people (or, sometimes, symbols or memories of other people or even imagined beings such as deities) or the disgust mechanism, and which are not amenable to strictly rational resolution, then we have what we call a moral dilemma.

Now, some drives are easier to suss out than others. Take hunger, for instance.

It's easy to see why we evolved to have a hunger drive. Because starvation is fatal, our brains have evolved to punish us with great pain if we fail to eat. Unfortunately, this means that we suffer tremendously in situations where we are unable to eat, for whatever reason. (Evolution does not care about this.)

Thirst is another such drive, as is the compulsion to breathe.

The need to satisfy our drives is manifested in desires. And unlike most drives, desires can be inflected by our experiences.

Of course, the urge to expel carbon dioxide from our lungs and to inhale is so immediately physical (because, of course, failing to breathe results so quickly in death) that it's universal. You can train yourself to improve your lung power and your endurance, but that's about the extent of it.

The desires associated with satisfying hunger, however, can be inflected by experience.

So, for example, if you grow up in the USA, your desire for food is likely to include cow flesh, but the idea of eating grubs or spiders or raw horse flesh provokes a reaction of disgust (yet another drive). If you grow up in other parts of the world, cow flesh may be a disgusting food, or you may have a desire for grubs and spiders (of the proper type and properly prepared, of course), or stop by the store for a pint of raw horse flesh ice cream.

How our desires are inflected is also not known, but there is no doubt that they can be, and often are. Imprinting is one possible mechanism.

Most of you will be familiar with images of Konrad Lorenz who raised a clutch of goslings that followed him around as if he were their mother, because their brains -- following their genetically determined developmental routine -- imprinted on him (or perhaps his boots) rather than the mama goose they would normally have been exposed to in the wild.

Libido is also inflected by experience, as well as by the way our individual brains are formed. The sex drive is universal, but there is a range of possible sexual desire. (And imprinting may be at least partly responsible for certain dysfunctional sexual desires such as pedophilia.)

Culture is a source of inflection. Or, more accurately, culture is a feedback system by which inflections are perpetuated. Our cultures are determined by our drives, which are determined by our biology, but they take many forms due to the variability of drives within individuals and the interplay of that variation with external circumstances such as geography and climate.

Now, to satisfy our desires, in order to obey the mandates of our drives, we form various intentions. That is, I feel hungry, I desire the kind of food I find appetising, so I intend to go to the kitchen and eat an orange and some crackers. (Nobody knows how the brain does this, either.)

Our intentions are dependent upon our beliefs about the world and about ourselves and others. If I did not believe that there were oranges and crackers in my kitchen, I would not go into the kitchen to get them, even if they were really there. I would instead intend to do something else to satisfy my desire to assuage my hunger drive.

If my beliefs change in a sigificant way, so do my intentions. My wife says, "Honey, there's oranges and crackers in here, you know," and I say, "Oh, goody!" and put the sardines back in the pantry.

Persistent and important beliefs, or clusters of beliefs, relating to moral issues can be called values.

For instance, around where I live, the "sanctity of the family" is a common value. This is the notion that the so-called nuclear family (a married man and woman raising children together) is the foundation of a stable, civil society. Other arrangements -- such as communal child-rearing, single-parent families, couples "living together", or same-sex marriage -- are of lesser value or are even harmful. Some may have no choice but to raise children alone, but this is still viewed as less desirable than the nuclear family.

Other values include a preference for the "natural" over the synthetic, a preference for religion (even a religion one thinks is wrong) over atheism, showing respect for national symbols, sexual modesty in public, reverence for the original intent of the Constitution, defense of the equality of all people, respect for physical toughness, the sanctity of intellectual freedom, and the perceived need for racial purity, but the list is endless.

All of these values derive from a combination of the more complex drives and desires (such as perceptions of purity/impurity, boundaries between in- and out-groups, respect for authority, disgust, and libido) with personal and cultural inflections, emotional associations, and beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world. As such, they tend to be resistant, but not immune, to change by strictly rational means.

They are not, however, entirely fixed. For example, political radicalization can result in a person who previously valued peace deciding that armed aggression, even against innocent persons, is desirable or even necessary. Religious conversion can result in a person who valued secularism and intellectual freedom deciding that certain scientific notions should not be taught in public schools.

And, of course, the opposite is true. People who leave the church can become aggressively anti-religion, and political radicals can come to painfully regret their actions and begin working for peace.

Because science is our best tool for discovering facts about the world, and about ourselves since we are simply another part of the world, it too has the power to change our values.

In fact, science can change values over a span of generations by actually changing reality itself, because science is not just a method and a body of knowledge, it is also a human endeavor with tangible products.

There were more satellites orbiting earth in the year 2000 than there were in 1900 as a direct result of science. You are reading my words (and perceiving my thoughts) right now because of science. There is less small pox, Guinea worm, and river blindness now than there was in the early 20th century because of science.

As for beliefs, people who are aware of basic scientific advancements now live in an expanding universe of billions of star systems, in which time and space are not fixed, in which species evolve over thousands of years, in which everything is made of atoms, in which black holes lurk in deep space and particles and anti-particles pop in and out of existence. This is not the world that the authors of the Bible believed they were living in.

As a result, our values and their values are not the same.

The fact that we no longer have purges of witches in the United States (with rare exceptions -- one may argue that the jailing of the "West Memphis Three" is such a case) but that these still occur in parts of Africa is largely due to the fact that a scientific worldview, ushered in first by Humanism and then by the Enlightenment, has simply erased the concept from our minds.

There simply is no moral issue regarding witches for us to deal with. We no longer have to pose to ourselves the moral question of what should be done about witches, what sort of evidence we should allow, how to balance safety and liberty in questionable cases, and so forth.

But can science be a deciding factor in what we value here and now? Well, yes. Take, for instance, the sanctity of the nuclear family. Scientific investigation can demonstrate, for instance, that other family structures can exist, and even be the norm, in stable, civil societies.

Recent studies have shown, for example, that children raised by homosexual couples thrive just as well as kids raised in traditional nuclear families.

And in fact, the entire issue of gay rights is in flux, and has been over the past few decades, and scientific inquiry is a huge player in the changing values in the USA regarding homosexuality.

One key to changing attitudes was the physchological reclassification of homosexuality, which used to be considered a mental disorder, and now is not. It took the public at large some time to catch up with that change, and we are still in the process of catching up, but it's happening.

The discovery of homosexuality in animals, and the dissemination of that information via print and electronic media, was another factor affecting people's perception of reality, and in turn their values. This is especially true for young people, a great many of whom simply accept that there are "gay penguins", for instance, because they've seen it on YouTube, and have never heard of homosexuality being called a mental disorder, and consider the notion of gays as "sinful" to be laughable because they live in a largely secular subculture.

So science can affect our values, both personally and as a culture, by changing reality and by changing our beliefs about reality.

I mentioned Stewart Brand earlier in this thread, the "environmental heretic" who went from valuing "natural" and "agrarian" over "synthetic" and "urban", and publicly advocating that people ought to move "back to the land" in the '60s and '70s, to valuing high-tech solutions and publicly advocating that people ought to live in high-density cities today, because of his exposure to scientific inquiry which changed his views of reality.

What Sam Harris is calling for is a simple recognition that science indeed has something to say about what we value.

In fact, it can tell us what we should value, given the innate drives that we share and the common ground which exists among our various desires.

This does not mean that it can answer all our questions. He is very explicit about that.

Which is not a contradiction in terms.

For example, science can tell us what the universe looks like. But it cannot answer all our questions about what the universe looks like.

Science cannot tell us what the position and momentum are of any particle at any moment in time. It cannot tell us what the features of the universe are beyond our light cone. It cannot tell us what the moon looked like 3 billion years ago. For two adjacent water molecules at the top of a waterfall, it cannot tell us what their distance apart will be when they reach the bottom.

Nevertheless, it can answer some very fundamental questions about the world we live in, to the satisfaction of everyone who accepts the proven validity of the scientific method.

And there is no reason why it cannot do the same for moral issues, such as whether we should allow slavery (which still exists), whether women should be denied political rights, whether homosexuals should be jailed, whether genetically modified crops should be banned, whether insults to religions or races should be punishable, or whether we should incur some degree of present sacrifice in order to stop or slow environmental degradation.

Those who do not accept science will not, of course, accept the conclusions which science helps us reach on these matters, except coincidentally. But that's no reason to deny that those of us who do accept the validity of science can use it to come to some degree of consensus on these so-called moral issues.

Harris is correct when he asserts that the wall of separation between morality and scientific inquiry is illusory.

Our drives and the most fundamental common ground shared by our most basic desires are not arbitrary. They are hard wired into us. We have them because we are human. And they are what determine the difference between suffering and well-being.

To watch your child die of starvation is bad because it causes intense suffering, and no one has to make any decision about that for it to be true. To play with your child on the beach and then have a full meal is good because our brains reward us for it, and no one has to make any decision about that for it to be true either.

To deny this is indeed, in Harris's words, "profoundly stupid".

Science can, and does, help us understand how to maximize what is good at the most basic level -- good because we have human bodies and brains -- by easing misery and increasing health and happiness.

This does not mean science is perfect. It has often done harm in the attempt to do good. And it has sometimes been used intentionally to increase the suffering of others, out of malice or greed.

And in fact, because science has such a pervasive influence on our lives, science must be involved in the process of finding solutions to human misery, if we are to take up that task at all.

Yes, we can choose not to make the effort. But the history of civilization has been a history of the expansion of the in-group to include larger numbers and kinds of people, even other kinds of creatures. And the investigations of science are confirming, even speeding up, that process, as we discover the deep psychological similarities among all races, between genders, and even among species.

So let's not pretend that science has nothing to say about what we ought to value, or about which actions are good and which actions should be condemned.

Science shows, for example, that there are no inferior races who deserve to be enslaved or who don't suffer from it in the same way we would ourselves. Science shows that there are no witches who should be murdered in order to protect public safety. Science shows that we ignore the climate at our own peril.

Science not only can, but does affect our values. And science can be a tool of use in deciding moral questions, if we choose to use it.

To say that science does not have any power tell us what we ought to value, that it has no role in deciding moral questions, is simply false.