I hear this a lot: morality is above science. I don't believe it for a moment. Just look at those that believe in ignorance over wisdom, or death over life - they do very, very badly. Empirically these moral codes are useful and effective. That's science right there.
Science is a method, producing statements about facts. A type of behaviour is not a fact (e.g. "killing someone"). It is statement. Therefore morality produces statements about statements. How could a method dealing with statements about facts ever be in competition with a method dealing with statements about statements? That is impossible. In other words, by comparing morality and science, you are comparing apples and oranges.
This is fumbling about a logical explanation to explain the difference between a logical field and a humanistic field.
It's far easier to say that these are two different worlds of truth; one is more quantitative, the other is more qualitative, and the two are intertwined, building truth upon each other. Science does not meaningfully connect with the human race without a profound understanding and application of the humanities. Humanities do not meaningfully derive human truths without a profound understanding of the reality of existence.
The two are so important to each other that it's a wonder they have always resulted in such dichotomous opposing arguments throughout history. It is stupid, even; a human folly of ignorance and small-mindedness, only effectively resolved through a deep and liberal education of both types of knowledge at once. They are paradoxically opposing and yet deeply intertwined, and it would improve both areas of knowledge to have a deeper understanding of—and especially respect for—the other.
There need not be a well-formed simple logical statement to tell us this is true.
Put simply science is necessarily about 'is', and cannot be about 'should'.
(When confronted with that, a typical rejoinder is that there is no 'should' -- life, consciousness, agency, will is all an illusion, all is meaningless and it reduces to physics in the end. The problem with that view though is that you have to throw out truth and knowledge too then)
Are these widely accepted definitions of "fact", "statement", and "science"? Even if the distinction between "fact" and "statement" in this argument is sound, the example statement, "killing someone", is connected to innumerable "facts" of specific historic creatures having killed specific others, and the fact of their individual success or failure to reproduce is inextricably tied to the biological evolution of a moral instinct, and the cultural evolution of a moral code.
Furthermore, all human behavior can be linked to activity in the brain, which can be studied by neuroscience. Finally, empirical surveys of human behaviors and moral opinions exist.
Therefore, morality is within the purview of science.
Game Theory explicitly talks about behavior in a rigorous way. That should be enough of a counterexample.
Science can talk about specific events ("John stabbed Joe with a knife"), it can talk about how people categorize them ("the stabbing had features X, Y, and Z that the typical mind categorizes at "murder"), and it can talk about how typical minds perceive and judge events it has categorized.
Morality is little more than an abstraction that human brains use to make social value judgements that help them fulfill their complicated set of values. If you can understand the values people have and the way these judgements help fulfill them, you've basically aced morality.
I'm not saying it's easy. I know several brilliant people working on this, and they're still getting surprises and uncovering edge cases. What I'm getting at is that statements like "most people think killing people is bad" can be reduced, with great difficulty, into statements about human behaviors and brain activity.
>"most people think killing people is bad" can be reduced, with great difficulty, into statements about human behaviors and brain activity.
I doubt it, but in any case, the important point is that you can't do the same thing for "Killing people is bad." It's an important distinction. Most people think that homosexuality is bad, but we wouldn't want to conclude that it therefore is.
It feels like you can't do the same for "killing is bad" because people mean a bunch of different things by "killing is bad". Each piece, individually, is much more amenable to a reductionist treatment. Let me be more specific.
Suppose Alice gets in an argument with Bob, and stabs him. Is Alice worse off having done that? Is Bob? What is the impact on Bob's family, friends, and co-workers? Is society better off having a policy of arresting people in Alice's situation? And imprisoning them? Or socially disapproving of such action? When you learn that Alice stabbed Bob, how do you feel about it?
This is vaguely the lines which you'd take to talk about human morality in terms of behavior and mental states. This is not an exhaustive breakdown, and there's some parts that "morality" still claims afterwards. The point is that there's only so many things that people can mean by putting moral judgement on something, and there's nothing left when you've addressed them all. Addressing the pieces is usually done by going to human behavior and experiences.
Circling back to people thinking homosexuality is bad - we can make moral judgements about moral judgements. Statements like "'Thinking homosexuality is morally wrong' causes a great deal of pain for the people I care about."
Minor quibble: at one point, scientists believed that you couldn't prove whether or not two particles were identical in every respect. "I don't think that it's possible to prove X" isn't a proof that it's impossible to prove X. I'd rephrase that quote as "I don't know what a proof of X would look like."
>The trouble is that answering all of those questions still doesn't tell you whether it's right or wrong.
If you answer all the subquestions, then whether it's right or wrong doesn't matter. Let's take a much simpler, analogous question to illustrate the process:
"If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
The controversial part of this is what people mean by "makes a sound". It's easier to break down here because there are only two senses of the it - vibrations in the air versus the qualitative experience of hearing. Once you've answered that it makes vibrations in the air but doesn't cause a hearing experience, whether or not it "makes a sound" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect.
Similarly, if you figure out what people mean by something being "right" or "wrong", you can use those pieces to cause the things that "rightness" and "wrongness" cause without caring about the overall judgement.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. If I have a troubling ethical decision to make, I might very well answer all of your questions and still be unsure whether the action I was going to take was right or wrong.
The trouble is that answering all of those questions still doesn't tell you whether it's right or wrong. (Also, you formulated some of your questions using equally value-loaded terms, such as "better off".)
FWIW I agree with you despite the downvotes you are receiving. So don't feel alone just because your comment sits at minus whatever.
I think the hangup people have is the mistaken idea that analyzing morality devalues it. But that's not the case. It does allow us to identify and discard obsolete morals (witness the sweeping acceptance of gay marriage), but those that survive are stronger for it.
People have a very good reason to be wary of analyzing morality. The analysis falls short of fulfilling all the complicated things that people value, so almost without fail the analysis misses something important and you wind up with an abomination. As an example, a total utilitarian deciding to maximize total utility by spamming warehouses full of awesome living environments for rats.
This, and most of the other arguments in the whole thread, are so highly simplistic. The links between science and humanity are many and complex, and vice versa. There is no winner, there is no right side. They build on each other, enhance each other, and neither science not the humanities has any real meaning in isolation.
Really, the whole dichotomous argument between the two is absolutely ridiculous. We need fewer people on the sides and more who are truly bridges.
you have to wonder if there is some magnetism in people which draws them to polarizing topics (both to build polarizing arguments, and to engage in them). Maybe it's as simple as we are highly competitive, and in the absence of competition, we create rifts just so we can establish who is greater?
Ask Oppenheimer, after the first atomic bomb test, if morality is above science.
"We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him he takes on his multiarmed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"
Suicide bombers see a different purpose to their lives than (presumably) you and I do. By their own measure they are not doing badly, they are doing quite well.
Or consider Richard Dawkin's famous criticisms of Mother Theresa. Mother Theresa unashamedly put religion ahead material comfort among the poor she ministered too. To say she was wrong in so doing is not a statement of fact. It is a statement of ones personal values.
>Suicide bombers see a different purpose to their lives than (presumably) you and I do. By their own measure they are not doing badly, they are doing quite well.
And objectively, suicide bombers are dead, which puts them far behind those of us who remain alive -- at least, by any sensible measure. Of course, when you unravel the story behind the average suicide bomber, you usually find that they were shamed or pressured into the deed, and in fact, have not accomplished, in committing a suicide bombing, all their own noble goals in life.
They are actually sad, pathetic people exploited by powerful clerics to be turned into little more than explosive puppets.
It's question begging because 'any sensible measure' is meant to exclude the subjective measure by which suicide bombers are valuing their own lives. The whole point is that their worldview -- what is important, what is to be valued during our brief time on earth, etc. -- is radically different than yours or mine.
And yet the only argument I seem to get in favor of the worldview that (I believe) you and I largely share is "C'mon. Don't be silly.", which might be rhetorically effective, but is not evidence based.
The important difference is that I am willing to accept that I believe it without proof. You see and the parent seem to need to claim it's 'scientific' and 'rational' to embrace a worldview which values life, freedom, knowledge, etc.
Empirically, its obvious. Most people on the planet value these things. Societies are under selection pressure like organisms. So these things must be advantageous to societies.
So you're willing abandon good and evil in favor of selection pressure? That is to say suicide bombers aren't wrong, they're just the light-colored moths of our day?
The existence of personal values is a fact that has biological and cultural origins that can be studied.
Also, you are conflating one person's opinion with science.
On the subject of cultural differences in morality, these can be surveyed empirically and considered within a framework of natural selection (both biological and cultural). One can choose to derive any moral framework they wish, but scientifically speaking, the moral frameworks that survive are those that can yield the greatest memetic survival advantage of the framework itself.
