Also, this line of argument struck me as a sneaky piece of Dark Arts, though in all likelihood unintentional:
Countering the counterargument that morality is too imprecise to be treated by science, he [Sam Harris] makes an excellent comparison: "healthy" is not a precisely defined concept, but no one is crazy enough to utter that medicine cannot answer questions of health.
Actually, in the overwhelming majority of cases, "healthy" is a very precisely and uncontroversially defined concept. Nobody would claim that I became healthier if I started coughing blood, lost control of a limb, or developed chronic headaches.
However, observe one area where the concept of "health" is actually imprecise and controversial, namely mental health. And guess what: there are many smart and eminently sane people questioning whether, to what extent, and in what situations medicine can legitimately answer questions of health in this area. (I recommend this recent interview with Gary Greenberg as an excellent example.) Moreover, in this area, there are plenty of questions where both ideological and venal interests interfere with the discussion, and as a result, it's unden...
Nobody would claim that I became healthier if I started coughing blood, lost control of a limb, or developed chronic headaches.
Nobody would claim that I became more moral if I started stealing, killed two people for money, or turned into a notorious liar. That there are conditions uncontroversially classified as disease doesn't mean that the boundary is strict and precise.
Bad tactics: mentioning Sam Harris (who got a pretty bad reception here) and choosing somewhat political examples.
Your point seems so true as to be obvious. Even a deontologist cares about the state of the world; if you have a duty to, say, not kill people, it is relevant to know what kills people. That may involve only common-sense knowledge, but it may sometimes require the kind of science done by specialists.
(Even if your duty is to have a "good will," your good will must be somehow connected to the state of the real world; how can you be said to have a "good will" if you feed your wife a liquid without being remotely concerned as to whether it's poison or not?)
Bad tactics: mentioning Sam Harris (who got a pretty bad reception here) and choosing somewhat political examples.
I didn't want to choose issues people already agreed upon or ignored, including Harris himself.
Your point seems so true as to be obvious. ...
Have you not had a conversation that was ended or degraded with "Well morality is subjective anyway, this is all a pointless question."? The goal of the post is to respond as effectively as possible to this disorientation, and unsurprisingly, the most convincing response is an obviously true one... what I'm offering is which obviously true response is most effective. That's what I was getting at when I wrote
Though perhaps obvious, this idea has some seriously persuasive consequences
though maybe I should expand on that in the OP?
All of your examples dealing with morality take a consequentialist stance with regard to ethics. I don't think that anyone has ever doubted that science might be relevant in computing the expected consequences of actions. So, I don't think you are saying anything fundamentally new here by applying science to pairs of ethical maxims rather than to one at a time.
But a lot of people are not consequentialists - they are deontologists (i.e. believers in moral duties). That duties may be in conflict on occasion has also been known for a long time - I'm told this theme was common in Greek tragedy. I'm curious as to whether and how your methodology can find a toehold for science in a duty-based account of morality.
For example:
Where is the conflict, even if science is brought in?
Trouble is, when moral conclusions (and thus also the political and ideological positions that follow from them) depend on the conclusions of science, what force is going to keep scientists objective when they're faced with the resulting biases and perverse incentives? It's not like we have an oracle that would be guaranteed to provide objective and accurate scientific answers regardless of the moral, ideological, and political controversies for which the questions are relevant.
The evidence from the history of science, both past and current, clearly shows...
multifoliaterose:
Most of what you've said so far has been allusive in nature and while I can guess at some of what you might have in mind, I strain to think of examples that would provoke such a strong reaction.
Well, to fully explain my opinions on the role of institutional science and pseudoscience in modern governments, I would first have to explain my overall view of the modern state, which, come to think of it, I did sketch recently in a reply to an earlier question from you. So I'll try to build my answer from there (and ask other readers to read that other comment first if they're confused by this one).
The permanent bureaucracies that in fact run our modern governments, in almost complete independence from the entire political circus we see on TV, are intimately connected with many other, nominally private or "independent" institutions. These entities are formally not a part of the government bureaucracy, but their structure is, for all practical purposes, not separable from it, due to both formal and informal connections, mutual influences, and membership overlaps. (The workings of this whole system are completely outside the awareness of the typical citizen, w...
The problem with this whole line of reasoning is that people really don't change their beliefs even if their reasons for their beliefs are shown to be contradictory with other values or internally logically incoherent. So even if you prove to someone that gay parents are not bad for kids with a huge longitudinal study with random assignment and causal control, a lot of people will simply say it still is inherently immoral for kids to be raised by gays. You can't say they're wrong.
People aren't optimizing for some coherent set of values, we just have a set of purely non-rational feelings about moral issues.
I think your point here is correct. However, the people who believe it's inherently morally wrong for gays to raise kids put a lot of money into convincing other people that it's wrong, and some of the convincees may then share the belief, but not the moral. Rellevant studies can then change the belief back.
Just randomly stumbled upon this old post and found it to be one of the cleaner, most useful takes on the "is morality relative? What do we do with that? What role should science play in this?" debate.
Is not being hypocritical a moral value in itself, or is it above morality? Either way, why?
If my values contradict, but I don't care about hypocrisy, should it matter to me?
"Teachers should be allowed to physically punish their students." "Children should be raised not to commit violence against others."
These two are contradictory. If a child is taught not to commit violence, they won't be able to become teachers who commit violence against children.
"Birth control should be discouraged." "Teen pregnancy / the spread of STDs is undesirable." Question: Does promoting the use of condoms increase or decrease teen pregnancy rates / the spread of STDs?
"Masturbation should be frowned upon." "Married couples should do their best not to cheat on each other." Question: Does masturbation increase or decrease adulterous impulses over time?
"Gay couples should not be allowed to adopt children." "Children should not be raised in psychologically damaging environments." Question: What are the psychological effects of being raised by gay parents?
tl;dr: Relativism bottoms-out in realism by objectifying relations between subjective notions. This should be communicated using concrete examples that show its practical importance. It implies in particular that morality should think about science, and science should think about morality.
Sam Harris attacks moral uber-relativism when he asserts that "Science can answer moral questions". Countering the counterargument that morality is too imprecise to be treated by science, he makes an excellent comparison: "healthy" is not a precisely defined concept, but no one is crazy enough to utter that medicine cannot answer questions of health.
What needs adding to his presentation (which is worth seeing, though I don't entirely agree with it) is what I consider the strongest concise argument in favor of science's moral relevance: that morality is relative simply means that the task of science is to examine absolute relations between morals. For example, suppose you uphold the following two moral claims:
First of all, note that questions of causality are significantly more accessible to science than people before 2000 thought was possible. Now suppose a cleverly designed, non-invasive causal analysis found that physically punishing children, frequently or infrequently, causes them to be more likely to commit criminal violence as adults. Would you find this discovery irrelevant to your adherence to these morals? Absolutely not. You would reflect and realize that you needed to prioritize them in some way. Most would prioritize the second one, but in any case, science will have made a valid impact.
So although either of the two morals is purely subjective on its own, how these morals interrelate is a question of objective fact. Though perhaps obvious, this idea has some seriously persuasive consequences and is not be taken lightly. Why?
First of all, you might change your morals in response to them not relating to each other in the way you expected. Ideas parse differently when they relate differently. "Teachers should be allowed to physically punish their students" might never feel the same to you after you find out it causes adult violence. Even if it originally felt like a terminal (fundamental) value, your prioritization of (2) might make (1) slowly fade out of your mind over time. In hindsight, you might just see it as an old, misinformed instrumental value that was never in fact terminal.
Second, as we increase the number of morals under consideration, the number of relations for science to consider grows rapidly, as (n2-n)/2: we have many more moral relations than morals themselves. Suddenly the old disjointed list of untouchable maxims called "morals" fades into the background, and we see a throbbing circulatory system of moral relations, objective questions and answers without which no person can competently reflect on her own morality. A highly prevalent moral like "human suffering is undesirable" looks like a major organ: important on its own to a lot of people, and lots of connections in and out for science to examine.
To my best recollection, I have never heard the phrase "it's all relative" used to an effect that didn't involve stopping people from thinking. When the topic of conversation — morality, belief, success, rationality, or what have you — is suddenly revealed or claimed to depend on a context, people find it disorienting, often to the point of feeling the entire discourse has been and will continue to be "meaningless" or "arbitrary". Once this happens, it can be very difficult to persuade them to keep thinking, let alone thinking productively…
To rebuke this sort of conceptual nihilism, it's natural to respond with analogies to other relative concepts that are clearly useful to think about:
"Position, momentum, and energy are only relatively defined as numbers, but we don't abandon scientific study of those, do we?"
While an important observation, this inevitably evokes the "But that's different" analogy-immune response. The real cure is in understanding explicitly what to do with relative notions:
If belief is subjective, let us examine objective relations between beliefs.
If morality is relative, let us examine absolute relations between morals.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, let us examine the eyes of the beholders.
…
To use one of these lines of argument effectively — and it can be very effective — one should follow up immediately with a specific example in the case you're talking about. Don't let the conversation drift in abstraction. If you're talking about morality, there is no shortage of objective moral relations that science can handle, so you can pick one at random to show how easy and common it is:
I'm not advocating here any of these particular moral claims, nor any particular resolution between them, but simply that the answer to the given question — and many other relevant ones — puts you in a much better position to reflect on these issues. Your opinion after you know the answer is more valuable than before.
"But of course science can answer some moral questions... the point is that it can't answer all of them. It can't tell us ultimately what is good or evil."
No. That is not the point. The point is whether you want teachers to beat their students. Do you? Well, science can help you decide. And more importantly, once you do, it should help you in leading others to the same conclusion.
A lesson from history: What happens when you examine objective relations between subjective beliefs? You get probability theory… Bayesian updating… we know this story; it started around 200 years ago, and it ends well.
Now it's morality's turn.
Between the subjective and the subjective lies the objective.
Relative does not mean structureless.
It does not mean arbitrary.
It does not mean meaningless.
Let us not discard the compass along with the map.