A fundamental philosophical question for those of us who do not base morality on a deity is what to base it on instead.
One possibility is to try to base ethics on science.
Certainly scientific knowledge, along with other kinds of information, is important to applying our moral values to particular issues. For example, the science of fetal development is relevant to ethical arguments about abortion.
But the real question is whether science alone can tell us right from wrong and good from bad.
Here is a link to an outstanding panel debate about this question held a few years ago at Arizona State University. The panel comprises Steven Pinker, Simon Blackburn, Lawrence Kraus, Peter Singer, Patricia Smith Churchland and Sam Harris. The main Web page divides the remarks by these excellent speakers into portions that make it easier to view and listen. I encourage everyone to spend some time with this if you can, in part because it will enrich the event we have planned for our meeting Sunday, when we will discuss some of the issues I raised in my talk.
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/the-great-debate
Sam Harris argues that morality can be based on science alone. I think it is important to point out that this runs afoul of the observation of David Hume, the 18th century philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, expressed by the slogan that “You can’t get an ought from an is.” This point is made by some on the panel, but I wish it had been made more clear. Here is another way to explain the idea.
Suppose someone makes an argument for a conclusion stating an ethical position, and suppose the argument represents good, logical reasoning. Arguments, as we know, have premises and a conclusion. And in this case, the conclusion is a value judgment. So here is the point of the slogan taken from Hume:
Any good argument with a conclusion that is a value judgment must have at least one premise that is also a value judgment.
In other words, you can’t logically base a value judgment on facts alone. And, since it seems that science is supposed to deal only in facts, Hume’s observation prevents basing morality on science alone. That’s how I see it, anyway.
I am very interested in what others think about whether we need something more than scientific knowledge for ethics. I hope you will reply with comments on this question, whether or not you get a chance to view the online videos from the panel debate.
James Coley says
Here is a link for an interesting article by E. O. Wilson, an expert on ants. He falsely conflates Hume’s Guillotine with what he calls a “transcendental” approach to ethics. There is, of course, nothing wrong with scientists writing about ethics, but this is yet another example of a scientist who misses the point of one of the distinctions I made at my talk on Sunday: the distinction between descriptive ethics, on the one hand, and normative ethics, including ethical theory and applied ethics, on the other.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/04/the-biological-basis-of-morality/377087/
Pete Eisenmann says
I would propose that to frame the argument that science is “facts” misunderstands some basic ideas of science. Interestingly enough, science itself has a logic. There are ideas, testing, measuring, compiling information, results, and then determinations as to the accuracy or inaccuracy of the ideas. Once it is determined that there is enough consistent evidence a theory is proposed. Then the process continues regarding the specific The term “fact” is not used in science.
Science can be the source of our information and theories based evidence of data. An interesting question would be if scientists use the term “fact” or “facts”.
Maybe another way to ask the question for us is, “can we hypothesize if we are able to measure why any individual or group of sentient being(s) makes ethical decisions?”; “are their measurable chemical/bio-mechanical/physiological/psychological agents involved in the ethical behavior of sentient beings?”
James Coley says
You make a good point about science, and it brings to bear the three branches of philosophy besides ethics: logic, epistemology and metaphysics. I don’t know that scientists never use the term “fact” but you are quite right that science has a logic, and it validates the acceptance of theories that work well in explaining data and making empirical predictions. Theory acceptance is ultimately tentative. So words like “fact” or even “truth” seem out of place.
For example, the philosopher of science Karl Popper, author of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, at first rejected the notion of scientific truth, presenting instead a “falsificationist” picture of science as trying to empirically prove a theory false and continuing to accept the theory as long as it is not proven false. (But he was later convinced by the work of Tarski to use ascriptions of “truth” for a scientific claim as a logical equivalent of the claim itself.)
However, to say that science deals only in facts, and that for this reason there is the gap between science and ethics that Hume pointed out, does not rely on any misunderstanding of science, and there should not be too much weight put on the use of the word “fact” in this context. Your observation about science is epistemological, whereas Hume’s distinction is logical and metaphysical. Although science wisely avoids absolute certainty, it seeks to say something about how the world is, and that is not the same as saying how it should be, or how it might be good.
The point is that if, for example, scientific measurements or hypotheses explain why or how sentient beings make ethical decisions, taking chemical, biomechanical, physiological and psychological information into account, this is still not making ethical decisions. In other words, to explain why someone makes a particular value judgment is not to make a value judgment.
Science certainly seems able to answer the question of how someone might decide that, for instance, prostitution is wrong, but this is simply not the same thing as the question of whether prostitution is wrong. The former is a factual question, and the latter is a moral question.
Here’s another example, which is used in the following short video. Evolution might explain why people are carnivores, but that need have no relevance to whether people ought or ought not to be carnivores. You can’t get an “ought” from an “is.”
James Coley says
Here is another relevant discussion.
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2013/10/ethical-questions-science-cant-answer.html
Chris Kaman says
Science can and should be our source of facts on which to base our morality. However, science only provides data for our moral decisions. Our decisions rest upon our value system(s). Ethical humanism attributes worth to everyone, and so a value system based on that requires evaluating how a decision or action affects the quality of human life (be it one person or many). Value systems which value wealth and/or power over human life are immoral/unethical. While few people actually espouse such systems these days, in practice many people do subscribe to the idea that the accumulation of wealth by a few will be good for the many. Here we can turn to economics (a social science to be sure) to help us determine the factual basis of such claims. We can also use data on the healthcare systems across many different nations to help us determine which nations provide better healthcare and then correlate that to which countries have extreme wealth inequality.