Above is video of the speech I gave at Colorado State University, entitled The Science of Morality: No Gods Required.
The video brightens after about 10 minutes, and notice you can watch it in HD. The Q&A at the end cuts off after a while because our recording space ran out.
My first thought is that I was really impressed by Leaders in Free Thought, who sponsored the event. Great work, guys!
My second thought is that I was probably too ambitious in trying to cover divine command ethics, philosophy of language as it relates to meta-ethics, and moral epistemology in a single talk for a lay audience! I’m sure I talked over a lot of heads. Luckily, we did have a lengthy Q & A session afterward.
My third thought is this: The most common misunderstanding occurred when I used the word “survey.” People thought I was saying we should take a survey of what people around the world think is right and wrong, and that can determine what is right and wrong. But as I say in the Q & A, that would be a kind of “planetary subjectivism,” and was not at all what I was saying. The survey and observations around the world would be merely to discern what the subject matter of philosophy is, not what is right and wrong. Once the subject matter of philosophy is known, we can make objectively true statements about that subject matter on the basis of regular scientific evidence.
Here is my script as I intended to recite it from memory, though I’m sure the video is a bit different:
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you all for coming, and my thanks to Leaders in Free Thought, who invited me out here to CSU.
The title of my talk is The Science of Morality: No Gods Required.
And I want to talk about this No Gods Required part first.
A LOT of people think you can’t have morality without God. In fact, when I was younger, I was raised a Christian and I used think you couldn’t have morality without God. I thought: Don’t you need a God who is watching your every move so you can be MOTIVATED to do good? I mean, without the fear of HELL to keep them in line, those crazy atheists must be out there doing whatever they feel like, like eating babies or having orgies or giving drugs to chipmunks and stuff like that.
But then, a few years later I did some studying and I lost my faith in God and I lost my fear of hell, and strangely, I didn’t suddenly want to eat babies or have orgies or give drugs to chipmunks. I still wanted to be honest with people. I still wanted to treat people with dignity. And I still wanted to, like, help save the world or something. And it wasn’t because I wanted to please God or because I feared hell, it was just because those seemed like good things to do!
But maybe that’s not what people mean when they say you can’t have morality without God. They don’t mean that you need God to ACT morally. That’s obviously not true. Heck, the two biggest philanthropists in world history are both atheists. So maybe what they mean when they say you can’t have morality without God is that without God, nothing is REALLY right or REALLY wrong. Without God, it’s all just a matter of human opinion. Without God, it’s all just quarks and electrons bouncing around and there’s no OBJECTIVE VALUE in the world at all.
But moral philosophers have been doing moral philosophy mostly without God for about 300 years, so… what’s the ARGUMENT? Why would you think that objective moral value can’t exist unless there’s a magical diety behind it all?
“Without God, objective moral values don’t exist.”
Now, I want to point out right away that that’s a strange claim to make, because usually, the phrase “OBJECTIVE moral value” means something like “moral value grounded in something beyond the attitudes of a person or persons.” Right? If what you’re calling “moral value” is just based off somebody’s personal attitudes, that’s called SUBJECTIVE morality.
For example: If you say that what’s morally good for Ozzy Osbourne is whatever he thinks is good, and what’s morally good for Paris Hilton is whatever she thinks is good, that’s called Individual Subjectivism.
Or if you say that what’s morally good in Germany is whatever most Germans think is good, and what’s morally good in Japan is whatever most Japanese think is good, that’s called Cultural Subjectivism.
Well, God-based morality says there’s this person named God, and whatever he thinks is good, is good! So this is another subjective theory! If God approved of rape, rape would be good. If God approved of racism, racism would be good. God-based morality is a SUBJECTIVE theory of morality, just by definition.
So remember what William Lane Craig said. He said: “Without God, objective moral values don’t exist.” But actually, it would be better to say: “Objective moral values don’t exist WITH God, because God-based morality is SUBJECTIVE morality.”
So, then, how on earth can somebody like William Lane Craig say that God-based morality is objective?
Well, he does it by using a different definition for what “objective morality” means. For Craig, “objective morality” means “morality grounded in something beyond the attitudes of a particular species of primate: homo sapiens.”
Now, I think this is a bit sneaky, and kind of weird. Why would objective and subjective morality be defined in terms of the attitudes of a particular species of primate? That’s kind of strange.
That means if were visited by aliens and somebody decided to define morality in terms of whatever the aliens approved of, that new theory of morality would be an OBJECTIVE theory of morality according to Craig!
And I don’t think that’s what we usually mean when we talk about “objective morality.”
So, look: you can define words however you want, but I don’t think William Lane Craig’s definition of “objective morality” is what ANYBODY thinks of when they talk about “objective morality.” It’s really just a trick so he can pretend that God-based morality is suddenly an “objective” theory of morality even though it’s grounded in the attitudes of a person just like individual subjectivism is.
And by the way, there are other problems with God-based morality that I won’t go into now. There’s The Euthyphro Dilemma, for example, and there’s – a really big one – The Problem of God Not Existing.
So… lots of problems.
So I don’t think that if there was a God that would somehow give us objective morality. That would give us just another version of SUBJECTIVE morality. And I don’t think there’s a good argument for why there CAN’T be objective morality WITHOUT a deity.
But: I still haven’t shown how objective morality DOES exist.
So let’s get back to that first part of my title: The Science of Morality.
The question is this. In a world of quarks and electrons bouncing around, what IS morality? Can we measure it? Can we build a little box that will make little ticks when you hold it next to something that radiates moral value, like a Geiger counter, and then go around the world and figure out which things have moral value and which things don’t?
How could something be REALLY good or bad or REALLY right or wrong if the natural world is all there is?
Well, when we talk about good and bad and right and wrong and morality and value, I think our WORDS tend to trip us up. They tend to confuse us. And I want to illustrate this with a story.
Who wants to be in the story with me? I need somebody in the story with me. Will you be in the story with me? Alright, great. What’s your name? Okay, Kristen. Great. So here’s the story. Kristen and I are on a date.
Kristen and I are on a date, and I’m a sophisticated guy, so we’re at an art museum. And we’re looking at paintings, and we’re looking at sculptures, and then there are those whole rooms that are filled with weird objects and video cameras and TVs and crazy music and stuff and that just kind of ruins the mood between us so I take us back to the paintings and the sculptures and we’re having a nice time, and then we come across THIS.
And Kristen and I stare at this… thing… for a minute and finally I say, “Wow, that is GREAT art. That is… amazing. Really great art.”
And Kristen says, “What? What are you talking about? That’s total crap. It’s just a urinal. That is NOT great art.”
And I say, “No! What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see? This is great art!”
And we go back and forth like this for a while but eventually we ask each other what we MEAN when we say “great art.”
And it turns out that when I said “great art” I meant “something that was intended as art and had a lasting influence on lots of future artists.” But what Kristen meant by “great art” was “something that was intended as art and is seen as beautiful and pleasing by most people who see it.”
Well, we thought we were disagreeing, but it turns out we aren’t disagreeing at all! We were just talking past each other. If we use my definition for great art, well, I’m right that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal had a lasting impact on future artists. So it IS great art by MY definition. And if we use Kristen’s definition for great art, then she’s right, too, because MOST people probably don’t find Duchamp’s urinal to be beautiful or pleasing.
So we’re both right, and we were just talking past each other because the words were tripping us up. We weren’t being clear with our definitions at first.
But now, let me get back to my story. Kristen and I are so worked up that we just decide to keep arguing, anyway. Kristen says that HER definition of “great art” is better than my definition because it’s closer to what MOST people mean when they talk about “great art.” And I say “No, that’s not true, because there are all kinds of ugly paintings and music and things that are considered great art, but definitely aren’t beautiful, and if you look at lists that people make of all the greatest art works of all time, they’re all really influential art works, so my definition of great art is better.”
And we argue back and forth like this for a while and in the end it turns out to be really hard to figure out how you would even decide a question like that. How do you decide which definition for “great art” is the “correct” definition?
I mean, we could look it up in a dictionary, but different dictionaries give different definitions anyway, and they probably all have some definition that’s close to MY definition for “great art”, and they probably all have another definition that’s close to Kristen’S definition, too.
And in the end, it’s a question of how we want to use our word-tools.
Remember, words are just tools for communicating ideas. There’s no particular meaning that’s ‘essential’ to the sound “GREEAAATT AAAARRTTTTT.” There’s no essential meaning to that particular pattern of air blowing through my mouth and my meat-parts slapping together in a particular way. We just kind of all agreed roughly what we mean when we put that pattern of sounds together, because that helps us communicate with each other.
The problem is, we didn’t all agree about the meaning of “great art” with enough precision. And that’s what caused the argument between Kristen and I. We were using definitions for “great art” that were in the same ballpark, but definitely NOT the exact same meaning, so we got confused, and it looked like we were disagreeing when we really weren’t.
Now, we don’t have this problem when it comes to a really mature science like physics. Physicists agree to a high degree of accuracy what they’re talking about when they use the word “atom,” and so there’s no confusion when two physicists talk about atoms.
But in some subjects, things are a bit fuzzier, like sociology. For example what’s a “religion”? Well, we all have some agreement on what the word “religion” means, but still, there are lots of different definitions that people are using. So there can be some confusion when two sociologists are having a debate about religion.
But they usually figure out pretty quickly that they each have to define what they mean by religion, and once they’ve done that, then they can go out into the world and take surveys and make observations and see if anything in the world corresponds to their definitions of religion and what they’re saying about it.
But in other subjects, there’s so little consensus on the meaning of key terms of that subject matter that people who debate that subject matter end up talking past each other a lot of the time, like when critics are debating what the greatest art works are, or like when you’re debating with your friends what the best movie of the year was. What does “best movie” mean?
So let’s get back to morality.
I think the same thing is happening in moral philosophy.
You’ve got utilitarians like Sam Harris, who define “morally good” as “that which promotes the well-being of conscious creatures” or something like that. And you’ve got social contract theorists who might define “morally good” as “that set of social rules we would agree to if we didn’t know what kind of life we were going to be born into.” And you’ve got moral subjectivists who define “morally good” as “that which the speaker approves of.” And it’s easy for us to talk past each other, because we’re using different definitions for our words.
But notice I’m not saying all moral theories can be right as long as we define our terms first. Definitely not. If you define “morally good” as “that which is commanded by God,” then nothing is morally good, because nothing is commanded by God, because God doesn’t exist.
Or if you define “morally good” as “that which has intrinsic value,” well, I think that’s going to be a problem, because I’ve never seen any evidence that anything has intrinsic value.
So lots of moral theories are just gonna be WRONG, even IF we are careful to define our terms first.
Now, what’s really interesting here is that if Kristen and I got into a debate about whether Duchamp’s urinal was “great art” or not, I think most of us would be able to see pretty quickly that if we want to resolve the debate and get any ANSWERS, we need to define what we mean by “great art” and then go out into the world and see what matches that definition, if anything.
So… why isn’t this obvious when we have debates about morality?
I think part of the problem might be the PURPOSE of moral discourse. When we use moral talk, usually the whole point is to persuade someone to act a certain way, and to persuade someone, you need to speak with as much authority and power as you can. The whole point of moral talk is so that you can beat somebody over the head with your morals and say, “It’s wrong to protect people who rape children. It’s just wrong!” and in order to persuade them, you want to say “It’s wrong in an absolute, intrinsic way and it’s wrong according to any reasonable definition of morality!” Because the stronger you way it, the more impact you’ll have, and that’s the whole point of moral discourse, whereas it’s not so much the point of art discourse.
And maybe even more important, we evolved to have certain moral motivations because those motivations were beneficial to reproduction in our social species, and so our brains are wired to feel very strongly that some things are just absolutely wrong or absolutely right and definitions don’t change that. And in fact, neurological studies of what the brain is doing when we make moral judgments show that they are mostly emotional judgments that we rationalize later.
So maybe that’s why it’s hard to see that we can get past the word-confusion and start making progress on morality if we just define our terms.
So let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that when you say “morally good” what you mean is “that which promotes the well-being of conscious creatures,” and you provide a definition of consciousness, and you define well-being in terms of a particular brain state. Well, viola! That’s a scientific question! It’s a really, really HARD scientific question, and maybe not one we can answer very well for another few centuries, but it’s still a scientific question. Which acts or laws or desires tend to promote that brain state in conscious creatures? That’s a scientific question.
There really is an objective fact of the world about whether communism or capitalism does a better job of promoting the well-being of conscious creatures. There’s an objective fact of the world about whether legalized abortion promotes the well-being of conscious creatures. There’s an objective fact of the world about whether or not female genital mutilation promotes the well-being of conscious creatures. Those things might be very, very hard to measure with current technology, but IN PRINCIPLE those are scientific questions about quarks and electrons and the natural world.
And they don’t depend on any person’s attitudes, either. Even if the Nazis had won World War II and brainwashed everybody into thinking that killing people who aren’t white Europeans is okay, it would still be an objective fact that killing non-white people would NOT generally promote the well-being of conscious creatures. That would still be an objective fact.
So Sam Harris’ theory would still be an OBJECTIVE theory of morality, because whether something is good or bad would be independent of the attitudes of people.
But now, this might not satisfy you. You might say, “Okay, Luke. Sure. I get it. If we define ‘morally good’ this way, then we can go out and measure what’s morally good or not according to that definition. And if we define ‘morally good’ in this OTHER way, then we can go out and measure what’s morally good or not according to THAT definition. But I wanna know what’s REALLY good or bad! Which set of definitions SHOULD we go with?”
And when I hear that concern raised, there are two ways I’m tempted to answer.
At first, I want to say “No. That’s it. I know you WANT morality to be not just objective but also be, I dunno, written into the fabric of the universe, or something, whatever that means. I know you WANT there to be one true definition of morality, but that’s just not how language evolves. People use moral terms in many different ways, so there is no ‘one true definition’ for moral terms. So sit down, think about this carefully, get over it, and then maybe go out there and do the science of morality! Go measure and test and figure out what it is that promotes the well-being of conscious creatures, or whichever set of objective facts about the world you want to investigate.”
So that’s one way I’m tempted to reply to this question.
The other way I’m tempted to reply is that while I don’t think it makes sense to talk about One True Theory of Morality, because that’s not how language works, I still think there might be something kinda LIKE that. And here’s what I mean.
There are some limits on what you can reasonably call a theory of morality. You can’t give a 30 minute talk about how gravity is really just an effect of the curvature of spacetime and then suddenly tell everyone that you’ve just explained your theory of morality. No, what you have is a theory of gravity, not a theory of morality. It’s just not useful to suddenly redefine your words so radically that for you those words refer to things that nobody else in history has ever meant by them.
So, some theories or sets of claims are going to be more “about morality” than other theories are, at least in terms of the ideas that go along with morality when most people talk about morality.
But then, there might be a certain theory you could come up with that fits the assumptions of common moral discourse better than any other theory. We could go out and take big surveys of people and come up with lists of the ideas the are most commonly associated with moral talk – ideas like obligation and permission and praise and condemnation and rights and duties and actions that are “above and beyond the call of duty” and all those kinds of things that we talk about when we talk about morality. And some of these ideas would be more central to moral discourse than others. And then you could come up with a theory that makes sense of most of those ideas, and maybe that theory would be more “about morality” than other moral theories are.
Of course, you’d also want all the claims of your theory to be TRUE. So you couldn’t come up with a moral theory that would account for EVERYTHING different people and cultures think about morality, because different concepts of morality can contradict each other, and also they sometimes refer to things that don’t exist like gods and intrinsic value. But you could still come up with a moral theory that incorporates lots of common ideas associated with moral talk better than any other theory of morality and your theory could be one that makes only true claims.
So what’s the picture, here? There’s all these dozens of moral theories out there. The first, most obvious step is to pick out just the few that make only true claims. And then from those, you can pick the one that can account for the assumptions of moral discourse most closely.
And if you could do that, you wouldn’t have the One True Theory of Morality, but you might have the One Most Universal Theory of Morality or something like that. And then you could go out and measure what is really, truly, objectively morally good according to that theory, and what is really, truly, objectively morally bad according to that theory, and you could get real answers to moral questions, and, perhaps – 2500 years after Socrates – we could finally have The Science of Morality.
Now, if we decide to do this – if we develop the SCIENCE of morality – what advantages can we look forward to? As I see it, the main advantage is this: We could come to know and agree on the moral facts through reason and evidence rather than through our conflicting intuitions.
Let me explain. How do most of us make moral judgments today? I think most of us take the advice of Jiminy Cricket. “Let your conscience be your guide.” We close our eyes and we think about whether stealing music off the internet is right or wrong, and it either feels right or it doesn’t, and that’s how we decide whether it’s right or wrong.
Of course it’s not ALL intuition. There’s usually SOME reasoning involved. For example you might have an intuition that pain is always bad, and through a series of logical arguments you might discover that in order to be consistent with that value you already hold intuitively, you really shouldn’t be contributing to the massive pain of millions of animals by buying factory farmed meat. But maybe you have a different intuition, that fairness is more valuable than the absence of pain. And then you might reason from there to different conclusions. But we always come back to our intuitions about right and wrong.
But let’s look at this again: “Let your conscience be your guide.” I think Jiminy Cricket’s advice is bad advice. How could that be bad advice?
First, remember that this is the SAME advice people used 200 years ago when most people approved of slavery, racism, sexism, and homophobia. When your moral judgments depend on your conscience, your moral judgments turn out to be an accident of the culture you live in, and you could end up endorsing some really awful stuff.
The second reason to NOT “let your conscience be your guide” is that it doesn’t make any evolutionary sense. Why would primate brains have evolved a special morality module that was able to accurately detect moral truths by intuition? There’s no evidence that this happened. And, the fact that people all around the world disagree so much about morality shows that even if we DID evolve a conscience, it is extremely faulty and not to be trusted.
The third reason to NOT “let your conscience be your guide” is that it turns out that our intuitive moral judgments are hugely influenced by irrelevant factors. Let me give you a few examples. If I walk up to you and say, “Hi! I’m taking a survey on morality. Would you like to participate? It’ll only take a minute.” And you say “Sure,” and I’m holding a warm cup of coffee so I say, “Here, would you hold this for a second?” And I grab my thing down here and I say “thanks” and take the cup back, when you fill out the survey now, you will make more generous moral judgments about the situations described on the survey than if I had NOT had you hold the warm cup of coffee for two seconds.
That’s what happens when researchers conduct this experiment. Our moral intuitions are very fickle.
Or, if you take the survey when you’re in the presence of freshly baked bread, your moral judgments will be different than if you’re NOT in the presence of freshly baked bread.
Here’s another one. If I’m a researcher, and I go to a novelty store and buy a can of FART SPRAY, and I spray a little bit in a room – just a little bit, you can’t really even tell that it smells bad, but subconsciously you can smell it – and then I invite a bunch of you into the room to fill out the survey, you will give less generous moral judgments than if I had NOT sprayed the fart spray in the room. That’s what happens.
I can even change your moral judgments with magnets. There’s a thing called a transcranial magnetic stimulation where if I point these magnets at a certain part of your brain just behind your right ear, it’s called the right temporal-parietal junction, I’ll temporarily disrupt communication in that part of the brain. And if I do that, the moral judgments you give will be more focused on the outcome of the actions your judging, whereas normally you would take into account not just the outcome of the actions but also the intent of the person who is acting. Our moral judgments change when somebody is pointing a magnet at the RTPJ right here behind the right ear.
So I can change your moral judgments with a warm cup of coffee, with freshly baked bread, with fart spray, and with magnets.
So for these three reasons, things are not looking good for our moral intuitions. Things are not looking good for Jiminy Cricket.
But look what happens if we develop a science of morality! NOW how do we get at moral truth?
WE DO SCIENCE!
We already know science works. Science cures diseases and flies us to the moon and gives us more new knowledge every YEAR than we gained during the entire Christian Dark Ages. When we make morality a science, we can leave our faulty intuitions behind and get REAL ANSWERS on moral questions that we can come to agree on.
I mean think about it. Special relativity is pretty counter-intuitive. Special relativity says if I stay here and I send my twin in a rocket to Beetlejuice and back, my twin will now be YOUNGER than I am. He won’t just LOOK younger. He will actually BE younger. That makes NO SENSE to my intuitions. But guess what? I accept it. Because the scientific evidence strongly supports it.
And the same thing can happen if we make morality into a science. We can come to agree on the moral facts even if our intuitions don’t agree, because we CAN agree on what the scientific evidence says. And that’s the good news of the science of morality.
So just to review:
We DON’T need gods to have morality – and in fact, grounding your morality in God just makes morality SUBjective, because it’s grounded in the attitudes of a person.
Second, we can have a science of morality if we limit ourselves to the theories of morality that make only true claims, and then we pick the one that captures the most ideas from our moral talk.
And third, when we develop the science of morality, we can finally really KNOW moral facts, and come to agreement about them, just like we come to agreement on other scientific facts, because our moral conclusions will be based not on our conflicting intuitions, but on scientific evidence.
Now I will admit, moral questions will be harder to answer when we make morality a science, ‘cuz we can’t just close our eyes and get the answer anymore. We have to send thousands and thousands of trained scientists out into the world to measure and test what really is moral according to the best theory of morality available.
But it can be done, and it’s what we NEED to do if we want to really, truly know how to make the world a better place.
Transcript of Q & A section
QUESTION: Where can I go to hear more of your stuff and learn more about this.
LUKE: I have a website called CommonSenseAtheism.com. It’s mostly focused on philosophy of religion and moral philosophy. On there I have a podcast called ‘Morality in the Real World’ where a philosopher friend and I are developing this kind of approach and then getting more specific about specific moral claims and whether they’re true or not, but it takes a long time to do that, and so each episode is about 10 minutes and we’re probably gonna do 100 episodes or something before we really solve any philosophical problems.
If you want to check out more of this: CommonSenseAtheism.com. Also if you want, you can click ‘contact’ on there and say “Hey, I was interested by this particular part” and I’ll even be able to send you papers to read if you really want to dive deep into that. So yeah: CommonSenseAtheism.com.
QUESTION: You seem to have two options here, either morality is about intuitions, which you reject, or it’s about scientific investigation, but what about the option of morality being about facts of reason, about rational thought – the categorical imperative. Why reject those? We wouldn’t expect to find such things scientifically, because they’re not the kinds of things you can find. So why reject that?
LUKE: Yeah. So the question is, maybe I’ve given a false dichotomy. I said that we could do morality by consulting our intuitions, or we could do morality by science. But maybe there’s a third method: we could do morality by reasoning through it. There’s a couple different ways you might do that.
One way is you start with your intuitions and you reason from that. So you might start with the intuition that pain is just bad, always morally bad. And then from there you might be persuaded by a series of logical arguments that if you hold that value already, if your’e gonna be consistent with that value that you already hold intuitively, then you shouldn’t be eating factory farmed meat. And that would be reason, but it always goes back to an intuitive moral judgment.
But what you asked about was another option of reasoning toward morality – the categorical imperative. It’s really hard for me to answer that. If there was such a thing as a categorical imperative such that, I mean one way to cash it out is that it would be somehow fundamentally irrational to do things that are immoral, or it would contradict human identity is another way to cash that out. I’ve looked at those and I wish that I could make one of those theories work, I just can’t. It would make morality much easier, because we could solve moral problems from our armchairs, and we could think about it, and we wouldn’t have to send scientists out into the world.
So I’m still exploring that and would very much like it to turn out to be the case that that works, and just can’t find any way to make it work. Now maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody else already has, but you’re right I just kinda skipped over that whole option and that’s seriously a research program worth doing. There are some reasons why I’m not optimistic about that research program.
QUESTION: The little country of Bhutan has an interesting way of tracking its health among it’s people. It’s called Gross National Happiness. I think you could make a case that if you track Gross National Happiness and morality in those parallels, because we can track certain aspects of happiness: security, food safety, other things that other people need to achieve happiness – morality is simply a human condition… it seems like this would be one way to approach the scientific [approach to morality].
LUKE: …Bhutan is measuring not so much Gross National Product because it’s not doing so well on that front, but it’s measuring Gross National Happiness, and it is doing surprisingly well on that front given its economic status. Maybe one way to cash out the definition of morality is to talk about, basically, whatever maximizes human happiness. That’s what we should be concerned with when we’re talking about morality. And this is actually a pretty popular view. And if you are able to provide a specific enough definition for what happiness is, you could go out and measure what it is that promotes the most happiness. This would be hedonic utilitarianism or preference satisfaction utilitarianism or desire satisfaction consequentialism.
There are a couple of reasons why that isn’t my view. I mean, the intuition here from John Stuart Mill or even from Aristotle is that happiness is the only thing that we value or desire, and I think that’s gonna turn out to be false. We can often sacrifice happiness for other things that we desire. So I think that is a theory worth doing as a science – it’s certainly worth figuring out what it is that promotes happiness, I think we would all care about that – but I think we’re going to be able to find a theory that both makes more abundant true claims and is also more about the subject matter of morality in terms of capturing the assumptions of everyday moral discourse around the world. I’m hopeful that we can do even better than that.
But even apart from whether we want to semantically make the decision to call that morality, obviously we all care about what it is that produces happiness, so that’s a valid research program anyway.
QUESTION: I’m not sure how you’re reaching beyond just a large-scale intersubjective morality. So you speak pretty poorly about subjective accounts of morality – whatever God says is right is right, whatever Britney Spears thinks is right is right – and that seemed problematic, it seems you don’t favor that very much. So you go on where you say okay let’s try to capture overall moral discourse of people around the globe as best we can. Put that together. That to me just sounds like an intersubjective approach to morality, which you could make arguments for that.
But I don’t see how science helps much with that in the intersubjective and scientific realm because let’s say we do that. We get everybody’s opinions about what they think is right or wrong. We put it together, and now we have the most popular intersubjective theory take on what is right and what is wrong. That doesn’t sound like it would really help me in my moral thinking process.
So for example let’s say hedonism – you know whatever produces the most pleasure, a utilitarian approach. That is what most people agree is morally agree. So I realize that, and then I’m faced with a moral decision, and I calculate how much happiness it will produce and how much it won’t, and in the end I still think my intuitions tell me it’s wrong, even though this intersubjective morality says it’s right. It doesn’t seem like it would be very useful to me in that situation. I would just disagree with it.
And for example this intersubjective approach might be biased toward what time you’re at. Say a century ago you take the opinion of in general what do most people think about slavery: is it right, is it wrong? Well, okay, most people think it’s right. Now I’m on my own and I think it’s wrong, and I do the science calculation and most people think it’s right, I still think it’s wrong , it still doesn’t seem to be that useful.
So I guess I’m saying it feels like the science will always have the is-ought gap between… you can determine what IS out there, but that doesn’t necessarily determine what OUGHT to be out there. And the intersubjective approach doesn’t seem like it would really help my moral intuitions much. I would still go by my moral intuitions, not by general people’s moral intuitions.
LUKE: There were, like, 7 or 8 issues in there… You said that I seemed pretty harsh on moral subjectivism. I’m actually not that harsh on moral subjectivism, I just don’t like it being called moral objectivism. So my complaint was that Dr. Craig was calling a morally subjective theory a morally objective theory. Actually I think it would be pretty easy to make a morally subjective theory that was correct according to its own definitions. If I define “morally good” in terms of what Luke Muehlhauser approves of, that’s a subjective moral theory, and I could make rather trivially true claims. Like for example, ice cream has a great deal of moral value on that view. That would be very easy to measure.
The problem is more the semantic issue. I don’t think it would capture very much of what we mean by morality.
There are a whole bunch of questions you raised where I think we’re agreeing on more than you might think. Really what I’m trying to do here is not so much accept the problem of moral definitions or what’s the One True Moral Theory and then solve it. What I’m more trying to do is just say it’s a bad question and dissolve it. So I say there’s not gonna be just one true moral theory. There’s gonna be a lot of different theories that have lots to do with what we usually talk about with regard to morality. Some of them might be about how do we produce the most happiness, how do we produce the most pleasure – and those are all scientific questions.
So what you were saying about how even if we did this whole survey-taking of what the assumptions of moral discourse are and we picked the one theory that captured the most of those assumptions and we defined morality in terms of that, I would wanna say that that whole time when we’re doing that, we’d have to be very conscious of the fact that language is constructed. So maybe if we find that theory of morality that most captures what we mean in moral discourse, then that’s gonna be interesting, but maybe that’s not gonna be your goal. Maybe your goal isn’t to do with whatever it is… like let’s say we go with the definition that morality is whatever creates the most well-being in conscious creatures – maybe you have other goals and you don’t have a personal, internal reason for action to promote the greatest well-being for conscious creatures.
That’s fine, I accept that, because I’m trying to dissolve this mystery and this force behind the word “morality” and just recognize it for the word-tool that it is…
The theory of morality that I actually deploy and didn’t even mention tonight says that, for example, it is true that we have reasons for action to promote or condemn certain types of action because if I condemn lying that’s gonna help me fulfill my desires in a lot of cases, because aren’t gonna lie to me and thwart my desires. So it might be the case that you have reasons for action to condemn lying that you don’t even know about, and so that’s why this might still be a better approach than going with your intuitions because… for example let’s say your intuitions say that there are a lot of cases in which lying is going to help you get what you want, and then we do the research and find out that lying is really destructive to happiness or something – it probably isn’t it, but let’s say it is. That would be a case in which I would say for your own benefit you would want to go with the science instead of your intuitions.
QUESTION: To some extent I feel like what you’re getting at is what we already do in law. For example, our legal system is based around an agreement about what we should be doing and what we shouldn’t be doing, but when I see something as illegal, I don’t necessarily see it as wrong. Okay, our society says it’s wrong, but that doesn’t mean it really is wrong. So it might be illegal, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong or right. In a similar case, in general most people think this is right… but that doesn’t mean it’s right. So to take my fickle, inner subjective opinion and say that somehow everybody’s fickle opinion is better than my fickle opinion, just seems like [the same problem].
LUKE: It sounds like you were talking about how we would take a survey of the world and figure out what people think is right and wrong and then that would determine what we would define as morally right and wrong. That would be a kind of planetary subjectivism, where morality is grounded in terms of what most people on the planet value. What I was talking about was a very different issue, where I was talking about the semantic issue of what we decide to define as morality, how we decide to use that word-tool. The most practical way to use a word-tool is to use it in a way that meets two conditions. The first condition is that it successfully refers to things that actually exist. It’s really unproductive to use words to talk about things that don’t exist. And then the second one is that we generally want to capture what most of us are talking about when we use that word. That’s why if I come up here and give a talk on general relativity and then I suddenly say I gave a talk on morality, that’s just not useful.
I’m not saying we should take a survey of what most people think is right and wrong, and that would determine what’s right and wrong. I’m saying something different. The survey part was just to resolve the semantic issue of what most people mean by moral terms, but there’s still the matter of: Does the theory that has an account of those moral assumptions of moral discourse successfully refer to things in the real world.
QUESTION: You talk alot about evolution. I want to believe, and I like the idea that we can discover moral facts, and I wanna believe that there’s… a population of moral truths that is universal, but I realized this year – I was talking to Eugenie Scott – and I’ve started to become what evolution in a biological context means. It means that there’s multiple answers, and it depends what environment you’re in. So as time progresses, and environmental circumstances change, it changes the moral landscape accordingly, and the moral landscape has to adjust accordingly.
So by doing these kinds of studies, I guess my question… do you think it’s dangerous to presuppose that there’s something or is it better to be aware that there is a constant change?
LUKE: This kinda goes back to one of the earlier questions from the previous gentleman, I didn’t answer the question then. The question of: If we do this survey thing… aren’t we just committing ourselves to this snapshot in time. Is that it?
QUESTION: I just fear that scientists… we’re perceived in this one way, coming to tell you what’s right, there’s such a pushback to that kind of moral top-down direction that I think is dangerous.
LUKE: That’s a very different question, then. I think most people are comfortable with top-down morality because most people are theists. Doing it scientifically is a very ‘from the ground up’ way to do morality because you’ve got thousands of different people and you can test their claims against the world and you could have your white coat on but you could be wrong and I could show you to be wrong because I could run the experiment and do the measurement. So this would be a really collaborative effort to find moral facts and it would be something that, like the rest of science, is totally amenable to correction by better data or new experiments and so, to me, it would be the opposite of a top-down morality. It would be like science is, where it’s endlessly correctable, and accountable to the evidence instead of accountable to untestable assertions about divine commands or untestable assertions about brute moral facts that exist in a Platonic heaven.
QUESTION: Intrinsic in this system would be a kind of agreement to accept whatever comes out of your survey, as opposed to just being aware that different moralities work in different circumstances at different times.
LUKE: Again the survey is not about figuring out what is right and wrong, it’s just about the question of what we generally mean by moral terms. So as long as we’re clear that that’s what we’re talking about, that when I talk about “morally good” I’m using this specific set of definitions, like scientists are, then I think we resolve the problem. Because the problem usually is that we aren’t clear about what we’re talking about and we’re talking past each other like Kristen and I were when we were disagreeing about great art but we hadn’t provided a definition for ‘great art.’
QUESTION: What’s your opinion about the problem that if you do morality as a science, you won’t be taken seriously as a science?
LUKE: Yes, there’s a huge resistance in the scientific community to making any normative claims, especially moral claims. Science is very successful BECAUSE it doesn’t engage in philosophy, and it sticks to facts about what IS in the world, and not about more fuzzy questions about what OUGHT to be the case. And so scientists are very understandably very resistant to this idea. But I think if it’s explained to them that what we’re doing is really just first settling the semantic issue, getting this conflict of definitions out of the way and just picking a definition and saying this is what we’re talking about, then I think scientists will be quite happy to measure and test what it is that promotes the well-being of conscious creatures or whatever we’re going with.
I think we just need to make the semantic issues very clear first. And then I think scientists will recognize that this does fall under the IS category, that this is a question that falls under their domain. It is a question about quarks and electrons that manifest themselves in terms of brain states or whatever we’re trying to measure.
This actually goes back to another question that I didn’t answer from a previous questioner about the is-ought gap. This comes from David Hume, a very famous passage about how in every previous vulgar system of morality I’m always encountering a moral argument that says something is wrong because it’s commanded by God and then suddenly there’s this gap where we’re not talking about IS statements anymore but we’re talking about OUGHT statements, and nobody’s explained to me or justified what this gap is.
Now most people have read Hume to be saying that you can’t demonstrate the truth of an ought claim by talking about is claims. But they probably haven’t read the next chapter of Hume where Hume justified a bunch of ought claims in terms of is claims.
Think about it this way: Either ought claims are part of the world of is, or they’re part of the world of is-not. If you’re making ought claims and they’re not part of the world of IS, I have to say I don’t care about that. The other question is, if ought claims are not part of the world of is, how do they have an influence on matter that we would care about? So I think ought claims are part of the world of is.
A really simple way to say this is that one very uncontroversial type of ought is the hypothetical imperative where you say, if you want to get from Fort Collins to Denver you ought to go south. This is a very simple type of ought claim to justify. It’s just a desire and a prediction. You recognize the desire to go from Fort Collins to Denver and you make a prediction that if you go south, you’ll end up fulfilling that desire.
So this is an ought that is fully explained in terms of IS statements. An is statement about a desire that exists in someone’s brain, and an is statement about the geographic locations of Denver and Fort Collins. I think it’s gonna turn out to be the case that all the oughts we can justify have to come from the world of is, or else they have no impact on the world of matter that we live in, and they’re just part of the world of is-not, and then I don’t care about them.
QUESTION: …What if, when you go and do the scientific study about what we mean when we use moral terms… [we find that] we DO mean something religious [by these terms]? …Perhaps its the case that when you do the semantic study, the end result will be that religion is the correct answer based on the common agreement of terms rather than science, and I would think that would actually be more likely considering the majority of people in the world are going to appeal to some sort of religious institution in order to get their morality. How would we reconcile that with having science try to give us the answer?
LUKE: It’s an excellent question. I think it’s very plausible that one of the most common assumptions of moral discourse when we take that survey would be that morality has a transcendent source. I think that’s very plausible.
We’ve encountered lots of these situations before. A really popular one in the literature is about the word “atom.” The word atom from the very beginning in Ancient Greece… the word means, literally, “uncuttable.” It means indivisible. It’s something you can’t cut down any further. It’s the smallest constituent of nature, you can’t divide it further.
We discovered around 1900 that you can cut atoms. But we kept calling them atoms. Why did we do that? Well, this very central assumption of what an atom is turned out to be false. But we didn’t suddenly say, well, atomic theory is false. Because this word atom still successfully referred to all these other things that were part of the assumptions of atom discourse, for example that it was particular and discrete units that are used to build up the substances that we observe in life, that these atoms can combine because of their physical properties in different ways and can’t combine in other ways… there are all these kinds of things that were part of the atom discourse, and so we decided to hang on to the atom discourse, even though the really central assumption that it was uncuttable… turned out to be false.
I think we can do the same thing with morality if we think that’s gonna be useful to discourse. We can say well, it turns out that moral facts aren’t transcendent because let’s say naturalism is true and nothing is transcendent in that way. It would still be the case that we can make sense of talking about obligation, permission, praise and blame, actions that are above and beyond the call of duty, normative reasons, all these other assumptions of moral discourse, even if this one really central one of transcendent turned out to be false.
That’s one way forward.
QUESTION: I’m less optimistic about the possibility of ridding ourselves of these intuitions that are so problematically mutually exclusive. I thought it was ironic for example, to discard intuitions by appealing to our intuitions, for example that it would be inappropriate to appeal to the smell of bread or a warm cup of coffee. All of us immediately, intuitively, know that that’s not a legitimate consideration in moral judgment. That’s an intuition that we have. And I suspect that as we begin this journey using science to discover moral facts, that again it’s going to require all along the way a definition of terms, even if we stipulate them based upon what the majority of people believe – that we just won’t be able to disentangle ourselves from the necessity of precise thinking, rational reflection. It sounds like a kind of naive scientism. So my question is: How do you see that relationship between moral epistemology, philosophy, and science. Do you really think there is some kind of philosophy-free, value-neutral science, that could be free of intuitions.
LUKE: That’s a very good topic. When I get around to doing a Ph.D. program, that’s what I’d like to write my entire dissertation on, right there.
There’s no way to make this entirely scientific because at the very least we have the semantic issues. And those are more philosophical issues. So we have to resolve those types of issues and then we can do the science, which of course was what I talked about in my speech.
So how do we have an intuitions-free science of morality? We do it the exact same way that we have a relatively intuitions-free science about relativity theory. It also depends how you’re using your intuitions. There are certain cases in which it’s going to be legitimate to appeal to intuition when you’re deciding how to define a term, but then there are going to be other cases where it’s not, and I think the differentiation there comes from whether or not it’s an essentially contested topic, which is a model of language that Gallie introduced in 1954.
I think that’s a really good question and I think considerations like that are the ones that I worry about personally in doing this project, more than an of the others.
QUESTION: Would you agree that their may be some room to expand on what may be looking like a false dichotomy between a scientist and a philosopher? …Maybe morality is more like ecology, which is a very fuzzy science…
LUKE: Explicitly in this talk, morality would have to be a project that philosophers and scientists would have to work on… I think I’m actually probably continuing or pushing forward the distinction between philosophers and scientists because science is a particular set of methods that work a lot better than philosophical methods. I think philosophy is at it’s best when it’s almost science, as close as possible. And that’s actually the dominant view in philosophy right now, that’s called naturalism.
You said maybe this looks like ecology. There’s actually a philosopher who is one that sees morality as a science who describe morality as the science of human ecology. His name is Owen Flannagan.
QUESTION: What you’re saying is that science turns into a new religion of sorts because if science has all the answers, then anything that’s scientifically proven as beneficial becomes morally permissible, then we can look to science to hold all the answers, just like many religions look to God to hold all the answers, when I don’t think you’ve acknowledged the limitations of science. I’ll be the first to pay homage to science and say of all the great things that it has done for humanity, but at the same time, think about some of the flaws in scientific viewpoints, and things change. For a while there we didn’t believe the earth was round, we believed the sun revolved the earth, crazy things like that were conventional science… that later were proved to be exactly wrong…
Science to me doesn’t give me any ways to live practically differently.
LUKE: The first was about science making mistakes and reversing itself. That happens – in some sciences it happens more than in others. Right now it’s happening a lot in dietary science. The problem is that the other methods are even worse. So philosophy is even worse. And theology and astrology… is way worse. Science is socially constructed. It is a human activity. It just turns out to be the one that works the best.
So I’m not saying we should trust all the deliverances of science as gospel…
You also talked about science becoming a religion in that it’s answering all these questions that religion used to answer. In particular, morality has been a central answer that religions have given and not science in the past. So this is another threat from science in that way. I think you’re correct that science can’t answer all questions, but I think what I’m trying to do, just because it’s the most successful method, is try to figure out ways to hand off the questions to science as much as possible…
When you talked about, “Should I have scientists do experiments to tell me what I ought to do?” Again, remember though that we have to define what we mean by ‘ought’ in terms of things that exist in the real world. And then those claims are amenable to science.
You also asked how could morality as a science be useful to me? Let’s say for the heck of it that you were going to stick to your moral intuitions about what’s right and wrong, and you thought that pain was really morally bad. Science could show you that if you’re gonna be consistent with that view, with that value that you hold personally, then you shouldn’t be eating factory farmed meat. That could be the case. And by the way I’m using this example but I’m not even a vegetarian, so if I’m condemning anybody I’m condemning myself.
Science can figure out the things that correspond to the values that you already hold, and it might be useful to you in that way.
I know that it has done that for me in the past where I had wrong information about a particular topic, and when I had the correct scientific information, I actually changed my views about how I should be responding to that situation.
QUESTION: Do you think if we were able to view science as the way to prescribe moral truths to people, would that actually end up making a difference in any real-world problems?
LUKE: Obviously, there’s so much horror in the world that it’s easy to be a pessimist. This is the 21st century and we still have women living lives of incredible oppression in Muslim countries around the world, and even in 1st-world countries in some cases. So it can be easy to be a pessimist. I’m an optimist, maybe it’s just a decision, but… I think about, for example, slavery. Slavery was accepted in most cultures around the world for thousands of years and then suddenly, in the space of a few generations, most of the world rejected slavery as morally permissible.
What happened there? Part of it was that we encountered the views of others. I think part of it was a lot of moral praise and condemnation. I think part of it was scientific research on how it’s not correct that people of African descent are significantly anatomically… very difficult from, say, whites.
If you take the long view of not the last 5 years but the last 300 years, I think there’s a lot to be optimistic about.