Submitted by Ma3Ke4Li3 t3_ynt30e in philosophy
Reply to comment by eliyah23rd in Michael Shermer argues that science can determine many of our moral values. Morality is aimed at protecting certain human desires, like avoidance of harm (e.g. torture, slavery). Science helps us determine what these desires are and how to best achieve them. by Ma3Ke4Li3
>This just shows what their preference is. It does not entail anything beyond their preference.
Hang on, I think this needs expansion. If, for instance, you asked a large group of people whether they were left handed, right handed, or ambidextrous, the result wouldn't just be dismissed as "That's their preference." We don't understand handedness, but we do know that there is some kind of biological imperative on humans which drives both preference for one hand over another and a ~90/10 ratio of right handedness to left handedness across all human populations.
Why can we automatically assume there is no analogous imperative for moral decisions?
There are objective measures of handedness, and lots of people love to claim ambidexterity when they do not possess it.
So there can be nothing of value to be gained, scientifically or otherwise, from subjectively asking people which hand they prefer? That strikes me as false.
We have a strong understanding, for instance, that because raising a child is an intensely resource-heavy endeavor for humans, cheating on a spouse is generally considered unethical. Thus asking people, "Do you think cheating on your spouse is unethical?" will result in responses that align with that understanding. Simply saying, "Well most people say they prefer that their spouses not cheat on them, but we can't assign any value to that finding because we can't determine whether that's true objectively," isn't accurate.
Maybe I'm not understanding the objection. I could sort of see it that assigning a particular meaning for why people answered a moral question in a certain way is itself unscientific - there are several possible explanation why a person could think killing another is morally wrong, for instance, and it would be difficult to say which of them is the scientific explanation for why humans believe killing to be wrong.
But to say that we cannot glean anything broader from asking people moral questions and finding which questions generate strong agreements among people seems incorrect.
> So there can be nothing of value to be gained, scientifically or otherwise, from subjectively asking people which hand they prefer? That strikes me as false.
Do you think if you determine what the majority of people believe about facts like, for example, whether humans are descended from monkeys, that tells you anything about the actual, factual question? If no, why do you think this question should be treated differently from questions about moral facts? If yes, what conclusion do you think we can draw from the fact of the majority belief about the fact of the matter at hand?
I don't necessarily think that the answer people give to a question is correlated with the factual answer to that question, but I do think there may be value in looking for those questions for which consistent answer profiles are given across human populations. In other words: killing is thought of as a taboo basically everywhere you go, which implies that there may be some scientific underpinning to that taboo. Eating pork or beef is thought of as very taboo to some, but very normal to others, implying that the taboo is less scientific than particular.
In the latter scenario, when there is wide variance in the answers across individuals and populations, I think this method is useless in trying to ascertain truth. Another example is one someone else pointed out, the perceived morality of gay marriage. That is very much something that varies across locale and time, which means just asking people whether it's moral cannot answer the question of the truth of its morality.
My thought was that it could be an interesting idea to understand where there are seeming convergences to moral questions in many populations and use those to delve for where there may be certain moral truths. But it sounds like the author would rather apply the method of asking people what they want for basically everything, and that doesn't seem robust at all.
> I don't necessarily think that the answer people give to a question is correlated with the factual answer to that question, but I do think there may be value in looking for those questions for which consistent answer profiles are given across human populations. In other words: killing is thought of as a taboo basically everywhere you go, which implies that there may be some scientific underpinning to that taboo. Eating pork or beef is thought of as very taboo to some, but very normal to others, implying that the taboo is less scientific than particular.
Majority opinion doesn't really seem to be relevant if you just look at history. What's the majority of people going to say about whether the sun orbits earth or indeed earth is flat, if you ask at various points in history? There is no easily visible correlation between the truth of an opinion and whether or not it's the majority opinion, nor the size of the majority holding it.
> We have a strong understanding, for instance, that because raising a child is an intensely resource-heavy endeavor for humans, cheating on a spouse is generally considered unethical.
But if that's the reason cheating is unethical, than it's not unethical to cheat when you have no kids (and no plans to have them).
That would just mean there's a biological imperative towards certain actions. An appeal to nature would not mean it is objectively moral.
Plus, these things change over time. Ask people what they think of gay marriage now versus fifty years ago. If the people truly determine what is moral, then it was morally wrong fifty years ago.
Hmm. And, to be fair to my hypothetical, it was once believed that left-handedness was evil, which is one of the reasons why the word "sinister" has negative connotations to this day.
So that's the error of this line of reasoning: not that there can be no scientific basis for shared human moral values, but that it is impossible to empirically separate those shared moral human values with a scientific underpinning from individual or societal norms, which are subject to change significantly over time.
The problem is that you have a presupposition what morality is, and try to fit scientific answers to that, which is the wrong way around. If we don't assume that, science can help with finding out what people consider moral, and find reasons why they think so. This will produce an empirical understanding on morality similar to what Shermer is talking about.
I would never argue that there *is* not anything beyond their preference. Only that it does not *entail* anything *beyond* their preference. Of course, if you put them in an fMRI, you could see the details that lead them to express their preference, but as far as I can see, that is besides the point.
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