Richard Carrier (author of Sense and Goodness Without God) has a longish blog post up about moral ontology, well worth reading if you’re into that sort of thing. (Via Russell Blackford.) Carrier is a secular materialist, but a moral realist: he thinks there are such things as “moral facts” that are “true independent of your opinion or culture.”
Carrier goes to great lengths to explain that these moral facts are not simply “out there” in the same sense that the laws of physics arguably are, but rather that they express relationships between the desires of particular humans and external reality. (The useful analogy is: “bears are scary” is a true fact if you are talking about you or me, but not if you are talking about Superman.)
I don’t buy it. Not to be tiresome, but I have to keep insisting that you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip. You can’t use logic to derive moral commandments solely from facts about the world, even if those facts include human desires. Of course, you can derive moral commandments if you sneak in some moral premise; all I’m trying to say here is that we should be upfront about what those moral premises are, and not try to hide them underneath a pile of unobjectionable-sounding statements.
As a warm-up, here is an example of logic in action:
- All men are mortal.
- Socrates is a man.
- Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
The first two statements are the premises, the last one is the conclusion. (Obviously there are logical forms other than syllogisms, but this is a good paradigmatic example.) Notice the crucial feature: all of the important terms in the conclusion (“Socrates,” “mortal”) actually appeared somewhere in the premises. That’s why you can’t derive “ought” from “is” — you can’t reach a conclusion containing the word “ought” if that word (or something equivalent) doesn’t appear in your premises.
This doesn’t stop people from trying. Carrier uses the following example (slightly, but not unfairly, paraphrased):
- Your car is running low on oil.
- If your car runs out of oil, the engine will seize up.
- You don’t want your car’s engine to seize up.
- Therefore, you ought to change the oil in your car.
At the level of everyday practical reasoning, there’s nothing wrong with this. But if we’re trying to set up a careful foundation for moral philosophy, we should be honest and admit that the logic here is obviously incomplete. There is a missing premise, which should be spelled out explicitly:
- We ought to do that which would bring about what we want.
Crucially, this is a different kind of premise than the other three in this argument; they are facts about the world that could in principle be tested experimentally, while this new one is not.
Someone might suggest that this is isn’t a premise at all, it’s simply the definition of “ought.” The problem there is that it isn’t true. You can’t claim that Wilt Chamberlain was the greatest basketball player of all time, and then defend your claim by defining “greatest basketball player of all time” to be Wilt Chamberlain. When it comes to changing your oil, you might get away with defining “ought” in this way, but when it comes to more contentious issues of moral obligation, you’re going to have to do better.
Alternatively, you’re free to say that this premise is just so obviously true that no reasonable person could possibly disagree. Perhaps so, and that’s an argument we could have. But it’s still a premise. And again, when we get to issues more contentious than keeping your engine going, it will be necessary to make those premises explicit if we want to have a productive conversation. Once our premises start distinguishing between the well-being of individuals and the well-being of groups, you will inevitably find that they begin to seem a bit less self-evident.
Observe the world all you like; you won’t get morality off the ground until you settle on some independent moral assumptions. (And don’t tell me that “science makes assumptions, too” — that’s obviously correct, but the point here is that morality requires assumptions in addition to the assumptions we need to get science off the ground.) We can have a productive conversation about what those assumptions should be once we all admit that they exist.
Might be worth saying (or it may open another can-of-worms?) that for me at least “morality” and “ethics” are somewhat different things. I agree, in principle, with much of what Sean is saying as regards “morality,” a term I’ve never much liked using, but I think “ethics” can have a little firmer foundation (though still a sticky wicket!), that makes it more worthy of discussion.
If you start with something like the “Golden Rule” as axiomatic (‘do unto others as you’d have them do unto you’), you can build a semi-logical, even if not always precise or consistent, societal ethics, but I don’t think you can construct morality from that… just my 2-cents.
I think I agree. Obviously, there is no empirical grounding in the axioms of any moral system. But axioms obviously aren’t facts, they are interesting, useful, or to borrow a phrase from MLK, “self evident”. Of course, it doesn’t follow that reasoning about these matters is useless, indeed its required. Also, its certainly true we “get further” useing scientific methods, with much less problematic hypothesis. But although its more productive, ultimately science is something humans do, and how much of the difficulties you’ve discussed about morality are implicit in science seems debatable. Fortunately, no answer to this question is necessary until you ask what it means.
BTW, in Southern Cal. you may still believe Wilt Chamberlin is the greatest NBA player of all time, but the rest of us have evolved to understand it was MJ.
I find Kant’s logical arguments compelling. As I read him, the arguments are reductio ad absurdum. Our premise to be disproved is, “Sometimes lying is right.” Suppose we accept this premise as a moral rule. We see that the rule removes any basis for believing anything anyone says. If we cannot believe anything anyone says, then no one can lie. Thus, the rule that allows lying makes lying impossible, showing that the rule is false. If false, its negation must be true: that is, “It is false that sometimes lying is right,” or “Lying is never right.”
Are there any thoughts on the following analogy to Kant’s moral arguments? I think his moral arguments are akin to “I can fly by flapping my arms as long as I follow the rules of aerodynamics.” Of course, the rules of aerodynamics make it impossible for me to fly by flapping my arms. Thus, the judgment, “I can fly by flapping my arms as long as I follow the rules of aerodynamics” is self-contradictory and false.
PS. I am not the “max” at #20.
I read Carrier’s blog entry before commenting and I agree with Sean that it is unconvincing. Carrier has example towards the end where he explains why rape is immoral. And one of the parts of the argument is
“Because by being an uncompassionate person, your life will suck, more than it would suck if you were a compassionate person. And it is irrational to choose what will make your life suck more, than what you could have chosen instead.” As an empirical claim this is doubtful in general, but more fundamentally the implication is that if you are about to die then raping someone because you want to would be moral.
“Obviously, there is no empirical grounding in the axioms of any moral system.”
So has the categorical imperative never come up in these discussions? Or has it been summarily dismissed because of some aversion to any type of pre-post-modern thinking?
Oh…and as far as games go. Here are some common definitions for a “game”:
1) It has rules
2) There are two or more participants
3) There is a competition (not necessarily between two opposing sides – Chinese checkers readily comes to mind)
The stock market fills all of these definitions and more. Is a stock market a game? No, of course not. But if the “terms of empirically testable qualities” define both “game” and “stock market”, then those qualities are not sufficient to define “game” or “stock market”. In fact, if I may paraphrase Ray, there are no set of empirically testable qualities that will wholly define what a game is. However, we still know that games exist.
“Morality” and “Ideology” have been and continue to be big causes for the horrors that humans visit upon one another. Here’s hoping that one day we get beyond them and start, as a global civilization, living life intentionally.
And with a bit more jazz, a bit more dancing, a bit more laughter 🙂
Shecky:
Interestingly, the difference between “ethics” and “morality” is that the former comes from the Greek “ēthikós” and the latter comes from the Latin “moralis.” They are two different words for the same concept, given that Cicero uses the Latin word for Aristotle’s Greek.
Of course, you can always make up a difference between the two. Many people have. But the origins of the words entail no difference between them.
Sean, your blog completely ignores the definition I used of the word “ought.” The definition you give it here is thus a straw man: it is not the definition I used, and since your criticism is based on it, your criticism is not of any relevance to what I actually argued. Meanwhile you give no reason to reject the definition I did use. You don’t even seem to be aware of what it was, and yet I explicitly stated it, so you cannot be a very careful reader.
Secondly, you are confusing the ontology of moral facts with the moral facts themselves. My blog was about the former, not the latter. I’m even explicit about this at the end of the blog (another example of your not paying attention). Obviously, if by “moral facts” you mean something different than I do, then my ontology doesn’t pertain. It is then on you to identify the ontological basis of your moral talk. Meanwhile, I will have moral imperatives that I can empirically prove are true, which by virtue of that fact, trump any moral claims you make that don’t even pretend to being true.
But that will be a separate debate. Because someone asked what the ontology of my moral talk is, I wrote a blog describing it. You ignore that, and get hung up on the completely unrelated debate over what the moral facts are, rather than what grounds them metaphysically.
If you want to debate what moral facts are, you will have to interact with my extensive work discussing that, which is not this blog, but my book Sense and Goodness without God, and the peer reviewed article I mention in that blog as forthcoming in The End of Christianity.
I’m agnostic, but I think debating the ontology of morality with supernaturalists is about as much fun as watching a debate b/w Kant and Kouldn’t. Supernaturalists are authoritarians, and Black/White-ians. Either a law is divine or it holds little value to them. Either an action is eternally meaningful or it is meaningless. They are not willing to consider that things might be meaningful for limited lengths of time. Neither are they willing to consider that just because somebody says something or reads it in a book they happen to adore, doesn’t make that saying or teaching automatically more true than something written by someone else in some other book. They are authoritarians and eternalians. And if you take away their ontological security blanket even hypothetically, they will cry that everything’s lost, everything’s meaningless, and they imagine everyone is left with simply a desire to rape and murder. They won’t sit still long enough to discuss the complex social behaviors of large-brained mammals from porpoises to elephants and apes. No actual observations of nature appeal to them, not even their own nature, so they won’t even look inside themselves and see how much they would naturally not like to have their lives taken from them simply at some other person’s whim, or have other things taken from them at some other person’s whim. They don’t feel that connected with humanity, they want to only feel connected to a higher authority, especially one that can make eternal promises. Aside from that they repeat Dostoevsky’s line about everything being permitted in a godless world. This terrifies them, even after you remind them that everything is permitted even in THIS world. Child molesters in the clergy to earthquakes and asteroids. Homosex-experimenting and drug-experimenting Presidents of the National Society of Evangelicals to Popes like the Borgias and the Inquisition, and Calvin seeking to get heretics executed. It’s all permitted. From Job’s wife and kids being slaughtered so God can win a bet with Satan, to God’s own son being slaughtered so God can finally forgive people their sins. It’s all permitted in this world. So quoting Dostoevsky is not an argument, since everything is permitted in this world anyway.
Above, when I mentioned not liking having your life or other things taken away from you at some other person’s whim, I was referring to one of the commonsense bases behind the creation of human laws.
How can you hope to snap someone out of the authoritarian mindset? How do you convince them that words on paper are words on paper that have no intrinsic authority, but that the human mind invented culture and language and books and ethical notions and opinions and laws, and therefore the human mind should be studied within the milieu of human cultural history and natural history as well? Moreover, if you are debating an authoritarian (“God said it, it must be true”) who does not doubt that it is “God” who “said” such things, and who does not doubt that he knows the meaning of each command, and who does not doubt that page after page of the book that this person adores for its moral perfection also depicts God as a mass murderer, even an eternally wrathful punisher, then that person has taken things to the max. Perhaps challenge them to speak about why others might not want to defend such a book’s description of God. The book is their authority, so ask them why they think others might not find it to be so “authoritative.” See what they say.
MARY MIDGLEY [philosopher] ON MORALITY:
Darwin proposed that creatures like us who, by their nature, are riven by strong emotional conflicts, and who have also the intelligence to be aware of those conflicts, absolutely need to develop a morality because they need a priority system by which to resolve them. The need for morality is a corollary of conflicts plus intellect:
“Man, from the activity of his mental faculties, cannot avoid reflection… Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well-developed, or anything like as well-developed as in man.”(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man)
That, Darwin said, is why we have within us the rudiments of such a priority system and why we have also an intense need to develop those rudiments. We try to shape our moralities in accordance with our deepest wishes so that we can in some degree harmonize our muddled and conflict-ridden emotional constitution, thus finding ourselves a way of life that suits it so far as is possible.
These systems are, therefore, something far deeper than mere social contracts made for convenience. They are not optional. They are a profound attempt–though of course usually an unsuccessful one–to shape our conflict-ridden life in a way that gives priority to the things that we care about most.
If this is right, then we are creatures whose evolved nature absolutely requires that we develop a morality. We need it in order to find our way in the world. The idea that we could live without any distinction between right and wrong is as strange as the idea that we–being creatures subject to gravitation–could live without any idea of up and down. That at least is Darwin’s idea and it seems to me to be one that deserves attention.
Mary Midgley, “Wickedness: An Open Debate,” The Philosopher’s Magazine, No. 14, Spring 2001
Dr. Carrier
In your book Sense and Goodness without God, the review at Amazon says,
“arguing from scientific evidence that there is only a physical, natural world without gods or spirits, [but that] we can still live a life of love, meaning, and joy.”
Isn’t this “love, meaning, and joy” an illusion within this physical, natural world? It may feel like love etc. but we are being fooled – it’s just chemistry and biology making us feel this way. Pure physicalists will say it just has social purpose – keeping us together, looking after each other. Then morality too is an illusion.
Now there is some interesting work going on here:
http://www.horizonresearch.org/ and http://www.nourfoundation.com/
A very large international team of doctors (UK, USA, Europe) led by Dr. Sam Parnia, a resuscitation expert, exploring the boundaries of consciousness during states close to death. There is also other work published which strongly suggests veridicality during these “brain-dead states”.
Some scientists have already published work which seems to suggest there may be a continuation of consciousness. If true this says that a sense of moral purpose continues on in that we behave morally during life but it is NOT the illusion as discussed above. Our interactions with others during life develops morality. Although the so-called “physical” goes, a moral being with awareness remains. Or not. Ignoring the lessons of human love and its interactions with others may produce some other nonphysical being entirely.
This work is very challenging. On the Nour Foundation site are some very interesting and lively debates (videos) on this. A conference at the United Nations in 2008.
See “Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness” with extended interviews with the doctors, neuropsychiatrists and physicists (Dr. Henry Stapp).
Richard– Thanks for commenting. I must not be understanding what you are saying, or not being very clear myself, since I’m not sure how your comment engages with what I was trying to say.
You define “ought” as “that which we would do if we were reasoning logically and knew and understood all the relevant facts of our situation.” I didn’t refer to your definition, as I didn’t think it was relevant to my point. The “ought” axiom I suggested in the example wasn’t meant to be a definition, simply an example of how the notion of “ought” needs to be included in one’s premises. (And I certainly don’t want to defend that particular axiom.) I’m not trying to debate what moral facts are true, just the very narrow point that they do not reduce to empirical facts.
Even if we accept your definition of “ought,” the need for a separate moral axiom still stands. I can have all the relevant facts, and reason logically about them to my hearts content; that will never tell me how I ought to behave, unless either those facts or the assumed principles of logic include some statement about what ought to be the case.
And in the above,
“you won’t get morality off the ground until you settle on some independent moral assumptions. (And don’t tell me that “science makes assumptions, too” — that’s obviously correct, but the point here is that morality requires assumptions in addition to the assumptions we need to get science off the ground.”
Well, if morality is developed during life and continues on after, then you get moral beings but in another form – but in each case morality is actually a deep part of these modes of being.
Dr. Carrier:
I hope I can avoid your ire and get an answer to my question. You say, “I will have moral imperatives that I can empirically prove are true . . . .” Can you provide an example of a moral imperative proved empirically? For instance, how can you prove that slavery, lying or adultery are morally wrong using empirical methods?
It can be useful to think of lifeforms as heat engines- or if you want to be trendy, computers. What distinguishes life is its ability to partition the environment into high- and low-entropy regions. Gravity does that too, but the low entropy region is on the ‘inside’. Therefore, anything that ‘fights gravity’ is morally good. In engineering and design, efficient devices are often considered beautiful, and beauty is probably an adaptation for recognizing life…
Dear Dr. Carrier,
I tried to read your blog seriously but could not seriously categorize and manipulate the concepts you were trying to categorize and manipulate. When you mentioned the bear I had to think about Dick Kearney who lived in Alaska with the bears. And it went downhill from there, including the pictures. But something you wrote struck me as not quite right. You wrote,
“But irrationality and ignorance are contrary to any interest you might have, and are therefore always what you ought to avoid, i.e. in no possible world is it wise to take the advice of the irrational and the ignorant, and that is as true of giving yourself advice as taking it from anyone else.”
But if Mother Nature, who never thinks about anything except babies, dolls, scraps of cloth, flowers and plants, recipes, etc. in a completely irrational way (from my perspective) and is ignorant of anything except babies, dolls, etc. — if she advises me to take a shower, I believe I am wise to follow her advice, and in consequence I am fulfilled and happy. And, in my own irrational ignorance, I want to make her happy, and am willing to work to that end. In your world, is that against my interest?
Re: Edward T. Babinski #35.
I don’t understand your concept of “need,” as in our needing morality. You liken it to our need to have the ideas of up and down given our dependence on gravity, but I don’t see the connection. Do we “need” moral ideas such that we shall die without them? Do we “need” these ideas lest we go insane without them?
You say that Darwin thought we “absolutely need to develop a morality because [we] need a priority system by which to resolve them [our conflicting emotions]. How is it that morality is a priority system that resolves my emotions. That’s the job of psychology and not ethics, but I’ll consider whatever use of “morality” you have in mind. It would help if you could distinguish between manners and morals, and maybe mores. We teach children manners to help them assign priorities to their emotions: “If you want a pleasant experience with other people, then you should wait your turn.” But we usually think that manners and morals are different.
What is the difference between Richard’s theory and the theory of “selfish altruism”? The latter is known for a long time so I’m sure there are already a lot of debates about it. Without being familiar with these, I will just give two objections that I can think of.
One is that it doesn’t cover all behaviors that is supposed to be moral, and will conclude some very immoral things to be moral, since it is ultimately based on selfishness. It also depends very much on how each individual thinks. I’m sure that (unfortunately) there are many people in this world who try everything to benefit themselves at others’ expense, while not at all feeling bad about it, since they think they are just “fighting for survival in society”. This is probably not the moral behavior Richard has in mind. I think the key issue here is prisoner’s dilemma: that there are situations in which all individuals pursuing their own interests will not produce a good result for anyone. The point of morality is to prevent people from pursuing their interests in these cases, so basing morality on selfishness is problematic from the very beginning.
Another problem is the following: in Richard’s theory what is moral depends on the state of the society, for example on what the society thinks is good or bad. But the society is ultimately made by ourselves, so the question remains as to which state we should put it in. Richard gave the example of democracy versus tyranny. In this case most people will be better off in a democracy, but maybe not everyone, for example the ruling class. So apparently according to some tyranny should be better. Of course this is an extreme example, but there are surely examples of pairs of possible societies where half of the people are better off in the second and the other half worse off, considering both material and psychological aspects (if you think that cannot be, at least that is a strong proposition that need to be proved). Then one cannot say which society is more “moral” from a purely individual perspective. One has to somehow compare how much difference switching from the first society to the second will make to each person. But then maybe we are going somewhere.
For Edward T. Babinski: That’s quite a rant you have at #34. You begin with a non-sequitur and then launch into a series of ad hominem claims. Very effective rhetoric, but is there a rational critique about Kant that I missed?
http://www.philosophy1001.com and go to lecture #1. I thought everybody knew this already.
Sean,
Following up on what John said in 11. (I think) …
Do you have any reason for supposing that empirical facts are all the facts there are?
I agree with you that the core methodological commitment of science is experimental testing. I would say that the empirical facts are (roughly) the answers to all those questions that are decidable by experimentation.
But there are other (non-scientific) methodologies as well. For example, one might endorse a method of reflective equilibrium, which seems especially plausible for moral questions. Do you have some reason for thinking that the answers to those questions that are decidable by the method of reflective equilibrium but not by the method of science/experimentation are not facts? Or maybe some skepticism that there are any such answers?
I apologize if this point has been made already, but I feel the need to bring it up. Sean, you point this out as a missing premise:
“We ought to do that which would bring about what we want.”
You act as though this is a premise which needs evidence of some kind. I think many people, including myself, would say that the quoted sentence is definitionally true. That is what the word “ought” means. To say you you think “ought” to do something IS TO SAY that you want it brought about.
It’s not something that needs to be proved., any more than you need to prove “mortal means you will die” needs to be proved. It’s definitional.
You define “ought” as “that which we would do if we were reasoning logically and knew and understood all the relevant facts of our situation.
“All the relevant facts of our situation” should include all the consequences of each of the choices we make. But these could be unknowable. Maybe if you pickpocketed somebody, he’d be searching his pockets, and hence not be crossing the road, where a car running a red light hits and kills him. But since you can’t know that, if you were reasoning logically and had just some of the relevant facts, it is possible that moral behavior would preclude picking his pocket. Then again, letting this guy get killed might save the world from a devastating war 50 years in the future. Or it results in the next Einstein being stillborn. I claim these are all relevant but unknowable facts.
Really there is no situation where you can know all the relevant facts. Therefore you cannot establish an ought without some assumptions, even if you don’t buy any of Sean’s arguments. All you can say is that is perhaps,”considering only the immediate action and aftermath, and disregarding all particular contexts, rare events, etc., one ought not to pickpocket”. Not much of a moral rule.
DamnYankees:
I don’t think your claim is definitional. Heck, it’s not even true. Suppose that “We ought to do that which would bring about what we want” were true. Then suppose that I want to enslave my neighbor. Therefore, I ought to enslave my neighbor. Right?
@Max
You would enslave your neighbors if that is what you wanted to do, but you have other wants, such as not going to jail, not having to fight your neighbor, and not being a terrible person in the eyes of others and yourself. When you realize that you may have more than one desire, and some of those desires conflict, you have to think about what is it that you want more than anything else. Basically, it is like an economic decision: what is the cost for the benefit. Since having a slave has many costs and the benefits are mitigated by the fact that whatever you want your slave to do would be better done by another in almost all cases (especially as a slave doesn’t want to do a job), and hiring someone is also cheaper than having to feed, house, care for another person entirely–especially one that would rather run away or kill you.
Thus, it is more reasonable to not enslave your neighbor because that will cause you to not fulfill other desires and likely not even fulfill the one desire you have. To do otherwise would then be irrational.
To do morality, you need to look at the whole of what it is you want and what things will bring about the desired outcomes. That I think was Carrier’s main point, that and the one thing you want to be more than anything else is to be happy/fulfilled/content (as Carrier argues). Slavery doesn’t tend to bring fulfillment, and antisocial behaviors also tend to make the sociopaths unhappy.