Science and Ethics: The Basics

Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has recently been engaged in a debate with Michael Shermer over moral naturalism. This is familiar territory for The Bubble Chamber; one of our earliest debatables examined Sam Harris’s argument for moral naturalism. Reading the back-and-forth between Pigliucci and Shermer it struck me that they dove quickly into particularities, and because of this it was easy to lose sight of the big picture. The main aim of this post is not to advance one ethical position over another, but to clearly set out and explain the positions—to understand the motivations and weaknesses of moral naturalism, supernaturalism, nihilism, and relativism.

What Is at Stake?

In a lecture on this topic I gave last fall, I began with this video of a debate between Sam Harris and Christian apologist William Lane Craig. It is an excellent entrée into the issue, mainly because Craig does such a good job of explaining his side of the argument. Craig is a prolific debater and many of his debates are available on YouTube. I often recommend him to students, especially atheists, as Craig is an expert at defeating the naïve arguments about religion often bandied about by so-called New Atheists such as Harris or Lawrence Krauss.

As Craig observes, he and Harris agree about a great deal. They agree that female genital mutilation is objectively wrong, and they probably agree about most practical moral questions. They also agree that moral values are objective—they are true or false independent of what anyone believes about them. Why the debate, then? Why did Harris feel the need to write a book defending his position (and why is Shermer doing the same)? There seem to be two strong reasons.

First, Harris, Shermer, and their compatriots are very concerned with defending atheism as a foundation for cultural absolutism. The New Atheism movement arose largely in response to the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. Harris’s first book, The End of Faith, was explicitly in reaction to September 11, and his go-to example of a moral-wrong—female genital mutilation—is strongly identified with Islamic practice. Likewise, Shermer’s first example in his blog post that began his debate with Pigliucci:

Question: What is the best form of governance for large modern human societies?

Answer: a liberal democracy with a market economy.

If the New Atheists can convince people that atheism can be a strong foundation for moral objectivism and cultural absolutism, then they counter one of the primary arguments against atheism: that it necessarily leads to nihilism and cultural relativism.

Second, there are points of applied ethics upon which atheists and their religious opponents disagree. Gay marriage and homosexual practice are easy ones. Harris has no problem with homosexual practice, while Craig is clear that homosexual practice is sinful. More generally, by restricting moral values to be about human flourishing or the wellbeing of conscious creatures atheists make considerations of an afterlife or higher being morally irrelevant. This makes tradeoffs between moral values grounded in the natural world and moral values grounded in the supernatural impossible.

What Isn’t at Stake?

What isn’t at stake is the applicability of science to many issues we consider morally salient. Most of us are against poverty and suffering. Nobody reasonable contends that economics is irrelevant to solving poverty or that medical science is irrelevant to alleviating suffering. Few would even deny the possibility that neuroscience might tell us something relevant about happiness and suffering. It has long been philosophical dogma that science is capable of answering instrumental questions—questions like, “What is the best way of accomplishing my goals?”. It is also not controversial to think that science can help us to clarify or revise our aims. As Kant argued, “ought implies can”—we cannot be expected to do the impossible. Science is in the business of demarcating the impossible, and thus is morally relevant in that sense.

The Positions

Moral Naturalism

Moral Naturalism, as advocated by Harris and Shermer, is the position that there are objective moral values, and those values are grounded in the natural world. As mentioned, if moral values are objective they are true or false regardless of what people believe. Even if the Nazis had won World War II and indoctrinated every single person to believe that the holocaust was morally justified, objectivists maintain, it would still have been morally wrong. If moral values are grounded in the natural world, then the truth of fundamental moral premises is established by the state of the natural world.

This contention famously runs afoul of Hume’s is/ought divide. As commonly formulated, Hume’s argument is that no set of “is” premises—statements about the natural world—can logically imply an “ought” conclusion—a statement about how the world ought to be. Consider an example:

P1) Newborn infants are capable of suffering.
P2) Pain causes suffering.
P3) Newborn infants are incapable of intentionally causing harm to others.
———
C) One ought not inflict pain upon newborn infants.

Hume’s argument does not claim that the conclusion or any of the premises are false. Rather, it claims that there is no logical argument from the premises to the conclusion. To fix the argument, a fourth premise would need to be added:

P1) Newborn infants are capable of suffering.
P2) Pain causes suffering.
P3) Newborn infants are incapable of intentionally causing harm to others.
P4) One ought not cause suffering to beings that are capable of suffering and have not intentionally caused harm to others.
———
C) One ought not inflict pain upon newborn infants.

Science might have many things to say about the first three premises.  About the fourth, it seems impossible that science could anything to say, because it seems impossible to ever discover anything about the natural world that would adjudicate on the truth or falsity of this claim.

A similar line of attack against moral naturalism is G.E. Moore’s “Open Question Argument”. Many naturalists and other ethicists attempt to get around Hume’s argument by redefining morality. Harris, for example, claims that moral virtues are those that promote the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Shermer claims moral virtues are grounded in the flourishing of individual organisms. These effectively get around Hume’s problem by assuming an “ought” premise in the definition of morality. If moral virtue is by definition about the wellbeing of conscious creatures, then it follows naturally that anything that promotes the wellbeing of conscious creatures must be morally virtuous. Against this line of argument, Moore argued that it is an open question whether, say, promoting the wellbeing of conscious creatures really is good. Even if everyone agrees that it is good, it makes sense to ask the question whether it is. Because it makes sense to ask the question, moral virtue cannot be by definition about the wellbeing of conscious creatures. The conclusion of Moore’s argument is that you cannot define away the is/ought problem; Shermer and Harris must provide an explicit premise of the sort “We ought to promote the wellbeing of conscious creatures.” Even if everyone agrees with this premise, it still must be stated, and there is no way for science to judge whether it is true or false.

Moral Supernaturalism

Supernaturalism holds that objective moral values are grounded in the existence and nature of a supernatural being. This is Craig’s position (from the video above):

God is by definition the greatest conceivable being, and therefore the highest good. Indeed He is not merely perfectly good, He is the locus and paradigm of moral value. God’s own holy and loving nature provides the absolute standard against which all actions are measured. He is, by nature, loving, generous, faithful, kind, and so forth. Thus, if God exists, objective moral values exist, wholly independent of human beings.

This argument potentially avoids the pitfalls of naturalism by positing the existence of a perfectly good and all-knowing entity. If such a being exists, that being can be taken as an absolute authority on morality. Hume’s problem is avoided because the being can provide the relevant foundational moral premises to which naturalists have no access. Moore’s problem is avoided because the being is not good by definition but by its very nature.

The standard retort to supernaturalism is called “Euthyphro’s Problem”, after Plato’s dialogue of the same name. In that dialogue, Socrates meets Euthyphro as Euthyphro is leaving the courts to which Socrates has been summoned to answer the charges of impiety for which he would eventually be condemned to death. Euthyphro has just laid charges of his own, against his father for murdering one of their servants. Socrates asks Euthyphro why he is so confident that he is in the moral right in laying charges against his own father. Euthyphro answers that he knows he is in the right because it is what the Gods demand—it is the pious course of action. In response, Socrates questions Euthyphro about how he can know that what the Gods claim to be morally right really is, and Euthyphro ultimately has no answer. Thus Euthyphro’s Problem: Even if there is an all-powerful being that claims to be perfectly good, how could we know that this is truly the case? In avoiding the need for a foundational naturalistic moral premise, the supernaturalist is forced to replace it with a premise about the goodness of a supernatural being, and again there appears to be no way to objectively justify such a premise.

Nihilism

Nihilism is the position that there are no objective moral values. Morality, according to nihilists, is either a matter of opinion, or simply a mistake of language. For what it’s worth, this is my position.

The most common objections to nihilism are not logical but political or social. Nihilists seem unable to condemn anything as morally wrong, and this seems to reduce all moral claims to ones of taste or preference. Who is to say, from a nihilist’s perspective, that the murderer is any less justified in his or her desire to kill than the potential victim is in his or her desire to live? In many ways, nihilism seems to be the philosophical position that corresponds most closely to sociopathy or psychopathy. It doesn’t help the nihilist to claim that, since there are no objective moral values, nobody else is bound by them either, because if everyone else thinks they are bound by objective moral values then they might as well be. Nihilists, in short, are scary.

Nihilism can also be objected to on the basis of consistency. Nihilists, generally, aren’t globally skeptical. They don’t claim to doubt the existence of the external world, or even the well-accepted claims of science. But the existence of the external world and the claims of science can no more be logically demonstrated than the existence of objective moral values can. So why be skeptical about one but not the other?

Moral Relativism / Conventionalism

Moral relativists or conventionalists hold that there can be moral values relative to a society or an individual, but there is nothing objective about those morals. At the extreme, there may be moral premises that every person on Earth, or every person who meets some standard of normalcy, holds. In that case, it makes sense to have discussions about actions relative to those shared values. However, if an individual or society holds different and conflicting fundamental values, there is no way for the relativist to adjudicate the conflict.

Relativists claim to be operating according to some moral strictures, and thus it might be less socially or politically troublesome to be a relativist than a nihilist. However, relativists can get themselves into logical trouble when pressed on particular moral claims. For instance, does it make sense to say, “I believe that murder is wrong, but I recognize that somebody else may hold the opposite view with equal justification”? How can one believe something while acknowledging that the opposite view could be held just as easily? This seems to run afoul of common accounts of belief given by philosophers. When pressed, therefore, relativism might simply collapse to nihilism.

Conclusion & Further Reading

This post has barely scratched the surface of what philosophers call “metaethics”. Philosophers have been debating these positions at least since Plato’s time in Ancient Greece, with no certain conclusions. I hope, however, that this has been a useful guide to understanding the basics of the debate. And to be honest, I think New Atheists such as Harris and Shermer make philosophical blunders that can easily be recognized with no more than a basic understanding.

For a more thorough review of the field, I recommend starting with entries from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP):

• “Metaethics” (SEP)
• “Moral Naturalism” (SEP)
• “Metaethics” (IEP)