It’s a contingent fact that we care
I mentioned a passage from the Odyssey in my latest comment on Fact 1.5, as illustrating my claim that “It’s not natural to treat strangers or foreigners well, it’s not natural to think that everyone should have equal treatment, it’s not natural to think that women matter just as much as men do.” Having mentioned it I wanted to read it again, and having read it again, I wanted to post it.
It’s in Book Nine, which is where we at last get to hear about Odysseus’s journey from the beginning, when he is staying with the Phaiakians and Alkinöos asks him (in the last lines of Book Eight) to tell his story. After some polite throat-clearing he gets on with it:
I was carried by the wind from Troy
to Ismarus, land of the Kikonians.
I destroyed the city there, killed the men,
seized their wives, and captured lots of treasure,
which we divided up. I took great pains
to see that all men got an equal share.
Then I gave orders we should leave on foot—
and with all speed. But the men were fools.
They didn’t listen. They drank too much wine…
And ate too much meat and gave the neighboring Kikonians time to collect and attack. But you see how the story is told. The first and only glimpse of moral concern (or perhaps it’s prudential, or more likely it’s both) is Odysseus’s concern to make sure all his men got their fare share of the treasure and the women that they had all grabbed. The Kikonians might as well be animated figures in a computer game. This isn’t a factual issue. It’s not that Odysseus and his crew think the Kikonians are robots or zombies – it’s that they don’t care. They should care, but they don’t. Facts are part of getting them to care, but they’re not enough. Facts are necessary but not sufficient.
(For the record, I’m not assuming that Sam Harris thinks facts are sufficient. I was just disputing the list, not his views as a whole, which I haven’t yet read. On the other hand, I don’t agree with his claim that science can answer moral questions; I think science can help answer moral questions, can contribute to moral questions, but not that it can answer them, just like that, boom. Just a difference in emphasis, basically.)
I’ll add something I said on a new post of Russell’s, in reply to his ‘In other words, ethics is ultimately based on the affective attitudes of human subjects, not on the fabric of a reality external to these!’
In other words it all turns on the fact that we care, and it’s a contingent fact that we care. We might not care, and if we didn’t, morality wouldn’t even exist.
There’s a horrible passage in one of Jane Goodall’s early (and for a general readership) books on the Gombe chimps, about one elderly male chimp who was left with a paralyzed arm after a polio outbreak. One day a group of chimps were in a tree grooming each other and the damaged chimp slowly and with huge effort climbed the tree and with an exhausted sigh settled down to be groomed – whereupon all the other chimps left.
We could be like that – and we are a little like that, but not entirely. Or chimps could be less like that – and in other contexts they are less like that. The contingent fact is that chimps have some empathy and we have more, and over our history we have learned to refine and develop and expand it. That’s where morality is. It requires caring, and empathy, and those aren’t automatic.
I have not paid as much close attention to the discussion (Sam H, Ophelia, Russell B) as I have wanted to, but here goes. . . .
I like Owen Flanagan’s reference to ethics as a kind “human ecology,” but this doesn’t mean that ethics is merely an applied science. Values are not facts; they are inventions or discoveries of each human culture, and although most cultures don’t like to admit it, values are therefore contingent, provisional, and subject to being refined, revised, discarded, or replaced.
I suppose that empiricism and science can provide a culture with information that could help formulate or express (or illustrate or teach) the culture’s values, but deciding WHAT those values are is an emotional or relational process, not a scientific one.
The most extravagant claim I am willing to make about science and values or ethics is that empiricism and science can help us determine which ethical rules, in practice, are most effective at promoting or achieving a given value: What really works and what does not. But neither science nor empiricism in general tells us why we should regard some particular state, situation, or set of conditions as “good” and therefore as a value.
Nicely put! Your view of ethics is very much similar to my own.
One thing I like about putting it this way is that you don’t have to enter into really arcane metaethical disputes, which aren’t especially apt to be compelling to the 99.99% of people who are not especially interested in such things.
It reminds me of a bit in Writings on an Ethical Life, where Singer says that anyone who doesn’t care about suffering can just stop reading.
And indeed the latter bit reminds me of Singer’s view that human nature can be sharpened and blunted in certain respects, rather than being non-existent OR unchanging. (Out of interest, do you like Prof. Singer’s work?)
Think about someone who doesn’t care about anyone else. The most horrible people you can think about, who when asked ‘what do you think about the suffering of X? Why not do more about the infringement of the freedom of Y?’ just say ‘I don’t care’. Well that pretty much puts them out the argument. And then Sam Harris can come along and go ‘Ah, but look at my FACTS about OUGHT’. And they will go ‘I don’t care’.
Real ethics is about caring. It’s about caring that some women enjoy democratic freedoms whereas others are treated like property. It’s about caring that billions of factory farmed animals are currently in pointless suffering without providing any great net benefit to humans. The people who don’t care about these things are simply unreachable. It’s a hard fact to accept, but no amount of trying to find really great philosophical arguments for moral realism is going to change that.
At least, that’s what I think at the moment.
Oh, certainly it’s a contingent fact that we care! I think I agree with you more than not. I am a Humean, basically. I’d argue, though, that it’s built-in to us to care most of the time and that it often takes immense conditioning (through, for example, religious taboos) to get us to stop.
On a side note it’s worth noting that ancient Greek societies were quite weird, anthropologically. They are seen as more normal (for ancient societies) than they actually were because of their literary/cultural significance.
It is a contingent fact that the earth is 93 million miles from the sun. It could have been 12 million miles or 865 billion miles. At either of these distances there probably wouldn’t be life, but it’s still objectively true that the earth is 93 million miles from the sun and that there is life on earth, and it seems to be in objective in an important way.
Whats transcendent is the meaning of life (in the sense of a biological definition). What counts as “life” would go on counting as life even if it happened that life didn’t exist anywhere in the universe. And that the fact that a certain configuration of physical matter combined a certain way will self-replicate and evolve remains a truth even if it doesn’t happen anywhere.
What counts as moral would go on counting as moral even if people didn’t that capacity for pain, pleasure, and empathy. It happens that people do, and rocks don’t, so what happens to people is morally consequential.
The presence of morality may be contingent, but the meaning of morality, as a possible configuration of biological stuff, isn’t. So morality exists objectively in the same sense that people exist objectively.
The last sentence in my above comment reads as if it somehow followed from the sentence preceding it. I didn’t mean to do that.
I meant only that morality does objectively exist, and even though this objectivity is in some sense contingent (people may not have existed, may not have been moral creatures), it is still has a transcendent character. Because it is a true description of a possibility (a possibility which just so happens to be realized in human beings that objectively exist), true in the same way a circle “is true” but a square circle isn’t.
jesus fucking christ. there is a transcendent force in the universe that requires me to mistype at least one sentence in every comment I make.
Ah! Well done, Josef! Now, we will only need you to define “morality”…
I’ve just read The End of Faith for the third time. I do wish his editor had jumped on him about a few things – for example, the inconclusive discussion of torture, which is supposed to illustrate his approach to morality, has just caused confusion. But it’s still a triffic read.
The thing is, much of what Harris is saying in that book and in the TED talk is on the right track. I do disagree with him about some specific things. In particular, I don’t feel the need to rid the world of religion, and I think we’re stuffed if that’s required to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
I’d settle for getting the world much like present-day Scandinavia, with a lot of people who are moderately religious, a lot of people who are only nominally religious, not all that many people who actually call themselves “atheists” (they only a minority believe in a literal deity), very, very few people who are fanatically religious, and a good social safety net for all. That would be fine. A world of countries much like present-day Denmark or Sweden probably won’t blow itself up. Of course, even getting to that point will be very difficult.
Be that as it may, he’s saying a lot of important things that need to be aired.
I just don’t know why he thought it so important in the TED speech, and apparently in the new book, to get into intractable issues of metaethics and try to bridge the “is/ought” gap in a new way (we already knew that there are these various non-transcendent ways based on our actual desires and so on). This was always likely to fail, so why stake a lot on it? Sean Carroll may exaggerate about the futility of the exercise, but not by much.
I think it’s possible that humans have an innate capacity for morality in the same way humans have an innate capacity for speech.
In other words if you have a bunch of people together long enough they will develop a moral framework that is shared between them but that this framework is no more the objectively ‘truthful’ manifestation of morality than English or French is the ‘true’ manifestation of language.
Maybe there’s some deep grammar to morality and that’s what Harris is looking for.
Arnaud, I detect 50% compliment and 50% snark. So my answer is 50% thanks and 50% an angry squint. FWIW I think my above comments are the clearest statement I’ve yet made on my position, such as it is.
But to answer you, this whole conversation is a critique of a certain definition of morality that has been put on the table. That definition being, “the change in the state of consciousness of sentient creatures”, which for humans most likely means brain states.
Ophelias objection, so far as I understand it, is that while all this stuff is factual and perhaps even objective, it is contingently so (there could have been no morality, and with some people there is no morality). So it doesn’t really have the transcendent character that a real “objective” definition of morality ought to have.
The above is me asserting that it does have such a transcendent character, so it’s a good definition after all.
I know it’s already started to get buried, but I would greatly enjoy criticism of my comment, especially from Ophelia and/or Russell.
What worries me about metaethics is that Harris seems to have rejected religion only to start looking for something to fill a god-shaped gap, as if that gap needed filling. It’s almost as if he has taken theist arguments on board that without god we are immoral, and been forced to look for another higher authority, this time rooted in a model of shared psychology (much as Marxists sought to replace god with a teleological model of revolutions in economic relationships).
I’m just not sure that psychology can identify universal features of morality when morality seems far more a socially constructed artifact (like a particular language, or culture) than a universal instinct like the biological imperative to nurture one’s own children.
Josef, you seem to be saying that we have a concept of the observable social phenomenon of morality; that it would be possible for an intelligent being to have that concept even if the phenomenon did not exist anywhere in the universe (i.e. the concept was not instantiated in the actual world); and therefore the concept is objective in the sense that some things will count as instantiations of the phenomenon and some won’t. The concept is always available to be applied to see whether the phenomena instantiate it.
I agree. We could define “morality as social phenomenon” in whatever reasonable and not-too-vague way you like, and it is then objective in your sense. But that’s not what’s at stake in the metaethical debate about whether morality is “objective”, and surely it isn’t what Sam Harris was arguing for. It would be disappointing if morality turned out to be objective only in that sense.
By the definition of objective that you appear to be using, the concept of a unicorn is also objective – i.e. it is logically possible for the phenomenon to exist/the concept to be instantiated. The concept “unicorn” is timelessly available to be applied to see whether the phenomena instantiate it.
The concept of “sin” is also objective – the concept is of behaviour that is against the will of a god. Well, it’s logically possible that a god could exist and that some actions are against its will. This remains so whether any gods actually exist or not. You could say that the concept of “sin” transcends any contingent facts, as it is always logically possible for there to be beings with that concept and for their concept to be instantiated in the actual world.
All the same, no acts are actually sins because there are no actual gods. Some things in the real world do count as morality by a sociological definition, though. No doubt about that. But again, it’s not what the metaethical argument is about.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood your point?
damn, I lost my comment. Starting over.
Russell,
You understood me quite well. I do not think comment survives your objection (though I may waver on this point), but it was designed to survive the objection put foward by Ophelia. She says:
We could be like that – and we are a little like that, but not entirely. Or chimps could be less like that – and in other contexts they are less like that. The contingent fact is that chimps have some empathy and we have more
emphasizing contingency..
and over our history we have learned to refine and develop and expand it. That’s where morality is. It requires caring, and empathy, and those aren’t automatic.
But concept of caring is automatic. On my reading, Ophelia says the contingency of our existence as moral creatures, and the contingency of our understanding, and the contingency of our acceptance of a moral system is enough to show that “the facts” alone don’t prop up any sort of ever-present morality, even Sam Harris’s. If Ophelia believes the insufficiency of facts is enough to make Harris wrong in some sense about morality, I think the sufficiency of these facts is enough to make Harris right in some sense about morality. And I think I showed these facts were sufficient, at least enough to preserve the conception of morality she was attacking.
This very second, I can only give a few tentative replies to your objection against me.
1. I am still not convinced that laypeople mean the same thing by “objective” as philosophers of meta-ethics. I know you have argued against this, and I can’t give a knockout case right now. But I offer as conjectural evidence the tidal wave of respondents who think Harris’s theory entails fascism (blogger Chris Schoen is among them). People have variously said this is imperialist, elitist, that it requires murdering billions of people and putting the rest on heroin drips. Harris has also told us anecdotally of the academic professionals who, for instance, don’t think that violence against women who refuse to wear burqas harms their well-being in any objective sense.
I don’t get the sense that all these people are just hung up on the difference between objectivity vs capital-O Objectivity.
And at the risk of being unsubtle, I think Australian philosophy is just a bit more grounded in reality than some of the schools that can be found elsewhere in the world and this might contribute a bit to the differing sense of what laypeople “really” mean by objective.
2. Suppose a gifted meta-ethicist (Robert Joyce?) discovers The Definitive Definition of Objective Morality. Does this even survive your objection? If Joyce explained it to a Taliban fighter, couldn’t the Taliban fighter reply “Well sure, by that definition, you are right, but what I mean is..” ?
Ben jammin’ Nelson:
I’m not trying to ignore you, but I’m putting off a real response until tomorrow.
I am out of my depth here.
Can someone clarify how we are using “concept of” here? I have lots of concepts of things that may or may not exist outside my subjective conceiving of them.
How can a “concept of” be “objective” in any sense?
Getting back to OB’s quote from the Odyssey, I would suggest that history is replete with the old pattern: kill the men; women and children for concubines and slaves. The Old Testament is chockers with it.
There is I venture to say not a single race which can claim 100% victimhood and 0% perpetration. Black slavery in the US involved African slave catchers as its first stage plus Arab middlemen and then Europeans at the retail market end. This sort of thing is still going on today in Africa.
No single man in history is in more ancestries than Ghengis Khan, but lesser Mongols spread their genes far and wide on the Eurasian Continent by rape associated with murder and pillage. And so on, and so on; and all this is before we even begin to discuss the fate of the Amerindians and the Australian Aborigines.
I doubt is many of us can point to a personal ancestry that is not spotted like the hide of a hyena with this sort of thing. I certainly can’t, from what I know of the Vikings and their raids on Scotland between AD 793 and 1263. (I have a distinctly) Scandinavian complexion.
Again, neo-Darwinian hypotheses would not be hard to find. Cooperation and competition (the extremest form of the latter being plunder and rape) are both in the general human behavioural and historical repertoire. But there would not be 6 billion of us on Earth today if they had not both worked in tandem, and had not the worst of human competitive instincts been to date prevailed over by the best cooperative ones.
Josef, I’d be interested to know what you think lay people mean by “objective”. Often it seems to have something to do with the commands or purposes of God. That doesn’t work, I suggest, but it’s the usual alleged source of supposed objectivity for morality from people who are not deeply involved in philosophy.
I’d actually like to see a lot more empirical research done on this. Meanwhile, people’s sense of what the folk think about how morality comes to be objectively binding and what this might really mean … well, that’s all useful information.
‘In other words, ethics is ultimately based on the affective attitudes of human subjects, not on the fabric of a reality external to these!’
There! Thanks, Russell and Ophelia. That’s exactly the problem with this whole notion of an objective morality and I’d never have been able to work my way to it myself.
If there were an objective morality a psychopath should be able to reason it out or have it taught to them, but they can’t comprehend morality precisely because they lack the ability to empathize.
But Sean, by analogy, people who are born blind can’t see colors, and can’t comprehend it. Does that mean that colors aren’t objective properties of things?
“But concept of caring is automatic.”
No it isn’t, any more than the concept of other minds is automatic – and possibly less so. Humans with certain brain defects don’t develop one or the other or both.
Jacob, yes, I do like Singer’s work, though I haven’t read a huge amount of it.
“What counts as “life” would go on counting as life even if it happened that life didn’t exist anywhere in the universe.”
I don’t understand that.
“And that the fact that a certain configuration of physical matter combined a certain way will self-replicate and evolve remains a truth even if it doesn’t happen anywhere.”
I understand that even less.
“Getting back to OB’s quote from the Odyssey, I would suggest that history is replete with the old pattern: kill the men; women and children for concubines and slaves. The Old Testament is chockers with it.”
Quite. I was thinking the same thing.
The meaning of “empathy” might need to be cleared up there. Some people define “empathy” the way that other people define “sympathy”. I define empathy as “understanding” and sympathy as “empathy plus shared feeling”, but you never know who you’ll run into and how they define these things.
The question might be best phrased in terms of instinctive sympathy, because that is seemingly at the root of the question of morality. Even persons with autism, who are not uncommonly labelled as “mindblind”, may still retain an instinctive sense of sympathy. Perhaps in that relevant sense, there is no choice involved.
Hmm. I think empathy implies shared feeling. I think I understand it to mean “understanding the feelings of someone else”…which sort of requires sharing the feelings. It’s not really possible to understand feelings without feeling them. I’m getting dizzy trying to think about that…but it seems to be true. Just kind of registering a “fact” that someone is feeling an unpleasant X isn’t empathy and isn’t really understanding what the someone is feeling.
This is probably why empathy is linked to imagination, and why many people think stories are crucial for empathy. Thick understanding is what’s needed; the thin kind is no use.
During the nineties, philosophers of mind worked themselves into a tizzy over figuring out how we empathise. The debate split into what they called “simulation theory” versus “theory theory”: simulation meaning “imagining what the other person is feeling”, putting yourself in their shoes, etc., which is probably your sense of “thick” empathy. While “theory theory” is a Robocop style of behavioral expectations, theories of human behavior, etiquette, and the like, which is probably like your sense of “thin” empathy. (Philosophers of mind working today are sheepish about this false dichotomy and try to carve out a hybrid between the two.)
Autists (or, at least, a subset of autists) are interesting in this context because they evidently haven’t got the thick sense of empathy. They (evidently, or at least according to these researchers) can’t simulate other minds, or “put themselves in another person’s shoes”. So (at least initially) they fail various experiments, like the “false belief” task where they’re asked to figure out what other people are thinking. They’re terrible at deception — both detecting it, and performing it. But they can get along in the world, compensating by learning new rules, like rules of folk psychology, morality, and propriety (the thin sense of empathy). It just takes longer and doesn’t come quite as naturally to them as it does to most people.
Autists seem to be a perfect case where morality demands convention. Because of the degree they depend on explicit instruction, it should suggest that conventional theories and learned behaviors are more involved in moral cognition than anything else. But that can’t be entirely right. After all, even the autists that are the subject of the above reports have an instinctive sense of sympathy. When someone else is hurt, they become physiologically aroused.
The real odd man out is the psychopath, which Sean mentioned. Psychopaths don’t have an instinctive sense of sympathy — but, bizarrely, some of them are evidently able to empathise in ways that the autist finds challenging. As my link above says (Uta Frith): “Children with psychopathic tendencies, who were educated at special schools because of severe behavioral problems, were not only very good at mental state attribution, but even superior to children of the same mental age.” That’s precisely what makes them so frightening — they empathize, and can deceive, but don’t care. No arousal.
They are the perfect case to show that morality requires a natural faculty — or they would be, if it weren’t unclear from the above quote from Frith what form of empathy they’re working with.
It’s pretty unlikely that psychopaths lack a non-physical sensory organ with which the rest of us perceive a spooky property of objective “rightness” or “wrongness”.
We know what they lack – basically, empathy (or human sympathy if we use Ben’s distinction above and follow Hume’s terminology).
The psychopath can know exactly what kind of suffering he is causing and can even know that it’s wrong to cause it – wrong relative to an institutional standard that he’s been taught about. There is nothing in the situation that we know that the psychopath can’t know. There are no things in the world that we are sensing that he isn’t. But the suffering of other people has a subjective salience for us that it doesn’t have for the psychopath. That’s what we have that the psychopath lacks: a neurological structure that makes us care about such things, rather than just knowing about them intellectually.
Now, psychopaths may miss out on some of the kinds of pleasures and satisfactions available to us, so there may be self-interested reasons to be glad we are not psychopaths. Perhaps that’s a truth that’s cognitively closed to psychopaths, but I’m not even sure about that. A psychopath could know intellectually that other people gain satisfactions from genuine loving relations based on feelings of sympathy and love, etc., though it’s hard to see how this truth could be salient for a psychopath who has never actually experienced those feelings. Knowing what having those feelings is like may be cogitively closed to them.
In any event, it’s a truth about what sorts of things are (contingently) satisfying to human beings, not a truth about subjectivity-independent facts about the world that are somehow objectively prescriptive for all rational beings.
In the blind person case, she can’t see objects, but she can feel them, taste them, hear them, smell them. Those same objects can be detected and measured with scientific instruments, and so on. They interact with each other independently of our subjectivity … and we can intervene to observe or measure the interactions. Moorean non-natural properties never have an explanatory role in the interactions of things out there in the world.
We have many ways other than by sight to know about light-reflecting objects, and the blind person has all these ways as well. The objects that she can’t see are not spooky to her; she just lacks the ability to detect light that bounces of them or is emitted by them, so she’s hindered, compared to us, in detecting them. She may be cognitively closed to knowing what seeing things is like, but she is not cognitively closed to knowing about the existence of these things. She has plenty of other ways to know of them.
What she does lack that’s faintly analogous to a psychopath’s situation is the ability for certain phenomena to be emotionally salient to her. Obviously if she can’t see things then she can’t be emotionally overwhelmed by, say, Jackson Pollack’s Blue Poles or the visual beauty of a sunset over the western ocean.
But again, we’re merely talking about the subjective salience of ordinary things. Moorean non-natural entities and properties, detectable by a (non-physical) sense of “rational intuition” or whatever, never need enter this discussion at all. None of the phenomena need to be explained with such a recherche ontology.
Though ultimately I’m (slightly) more on the Russell side of things than the Jenavir/Josef side, I think it’s a rather tough call because there are compelling schematic analogies going on here.
I’m not sure we can take too much from triangulating between the five external senses. Two of the five senses — the olfactory ones — barely deserve mention because they don’t tell us anything about extension or distance of the outer objective world. At the most, we must infer the extension of things by inter-relating the tactile, visual, and auditory perceptions. But there’s a potent argument to be made that even visual and auditory sensations are theoretically dispensable in this sense — only the tactile is strictly necessary. (So potent that even Berkeley bought into it, for a period of time.)
A similar triangulation happens in feeling out the space of moral reasons. In order for us to make any sense of morality, we need to have the instinctual sympathy (which psychopaths lack), the mindreading capacity (which autists lack), and a rule-making capacity. These are our candidate moral senses. Though, it is tempting to argue, instinctual sympathy is the strictly necessary one, while mindreading and rule-making are theoretically dispensable.
The question, I think, isn’t “is sympathy more than just subjective?”, but “is it objective?”. Moral realists deny that the objective and subjective are mutually exclusive, minds being nothing more than active brains. So insisting on drawing attention to the innerness of moral facts doesn’t make enough sense of what I think is a fairly reasonable claim on their part.
If we want to stay anti-realists about morality, I would argue that a better way of framing the debate was how Ophelia did in an earlier post, namely, “Is sympathy independent of our choices and commitments?” It’s not a question of whether or not morality is different from the world, it’s a question of whether or not it’s contingent upon the stuff we do on purpose: i.e., mindreading and rule-making.
“it is tempting to argue, instinctual sympathy is the strictly necessary one,”
Very tempting – it’s what I’ve been arguing all along. First of all we have to care; if we don’t, nothing else has any purchase.
I saw an interesting portrayal of a psychopath recently on “House.” They realized she was a psychopath while doing an MRI for something else – there was non-arousal where there should have been arousal.
The set of three is very useful. “In order for us to make any sense of morality, we need to have the instinctual sympathy (which psychopaths lack), the mindreading capacity (which autists lack), and a rule-making capacity.” Very clarifying.
One interesting contribution to the discussion for a general audience (like me) is The Scientist in the Cradle by Alison Gopnik and others – about infant cognitive development. They say instinctual sympathy develops very early, way before theory of mind. It’s there at about year one, if I remember accurately.
I take it your initial point was more about rule-following and mind-reading than about instinctual sympathy. But there is a sense in which instinctual sympathy is automatic. Since instinctual sympathy is a necessary condition for morality, it would seem to be important to put at the center of our view about the natural or artificial nature of morality.
Taken on its own, instinctual sympathy leans in the direction of the natural. On the other hand, if it were to turn out that either mind-reading or rule-making were also necessary conditions for morality, then it would seem that nature and nurture play equal parts. And if mind-reading and rule-making were both necessary conditions, then we’d be leaning more towards artifice.
The cost of the latter reading is that we would have to say that autists are not, or cannot be, moral agents, because they lack the mindreading ability. And to be sure, some people are happy in making that claim. But part of me wants to say that there’s a sense in which the stereotypical autist can be a better moral agent than we are, because by necessity they demand that people be utterly explicit about the laws they’re supposed to follow — no odious unwritten laws, no secret suffering.
I guess I’m fairly easily confused, but, though I think I see the point about the fact that acting morally depends upon caring, or empathising, or sympathising, or in some sense being compassionate (mitfühlend), I don’t see morality itself as depending on this. The fact that a psychopath, while knowing quite well that what he is doing is harming people, can act without feeling, does not make his acts less immoral.
In fact, the disjunct that Hume saw between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ was not so much a denial that some things are simply right or wrong, but that you can’t prove it simply by going from facts (if they are facts) of one sort, such as God says so, to facts of another, such as therefore you should do so.
Now, I haven’t read Hume very much lately, but it seems to me that Hume was, in some ways, very like Sam Harris. He just thought some things were, in some sense, just wrong, because they caused more pain than pleasure, never forgetting, as the utilitarians were wont to, that pleasures and pains were things that persons experienced, and that you just couldn’t sum them without taking persons into account.
But I can agree with Ophelia about Ulysses, and still want to say that thinking in terms of everyone getting a fair share of booty, including women, was wrong, morally wrong, whatever the freebooter mentality of the time might think, and however much sympathy they did or did not have for their victims. And I disagree intensely with Benjamin, who thinks that ‘autists’ can be more moral, because they’re following rules, and most of us depend on empathy, because rules divorced from empathy tend to be very cruel. Just ask the little girl in Brazil. The rules are derivative, through empathy and care, from the pains and pleasures that actions cause. Moral rules, it seems to me, are always rules of thumb, and depend almost entirely on the kinds of effects they produce in terms of pleasures and pains, or, more generally, human flourishing, and, as our sympathies expand, the flourishing of life itself.
But if we just create or invent our values, as Mackie thought, and we need to keep that wedge between ‘ises’ and ‘oughts’, then we have no basis at all for speaking reasonably about right and wrong. Seems to me that Harris is largely right. Science has a lot to teach us about morality, because it at least looks critically at the question of what contributes to human flourishing, and doesn’t think in grand theological ways about what being human means, and therefore what must be right or wrong. We know that the Catholics don’t really know, despite their certainty, because they fuck up all the time. So do most people who have rather ‘deep’ theoretical ideas about what it means to be human. Best to start with the animal, and work up from there.
Nor do I wish to get caught up in the differences between nature and nurture, a distinction which is almost pointless when you come to cultural animals like human beings. That’s why the whole idea of natural law morality is, so far as I can tell, a non-starter if not a category mistake. What I’d like to see is more discussion about why ‘ises’ and ‘oughts’ are so different, and why facts can’t contribute to specifically moral understanding. You see, I don’t think that morality requires caring. I think that morality really is, at least in part, what it means to care. That’s why so many people simply get it wrong.
Instinctual sympathy has major limitations, obviously. That’s why everyone rushes to help earthquake victims and people trapped in minds and also agrees to actions that will harm other people at a distance in time or space or both.
Institutions like Goldenbridge create the conditions for their own sadism. Keep the children so deprived that they become unattractive, and then it’s easy to treat them like dirt, which makes them even more unattractive, and so on. The concentration camps were like that too – inmates rapidly became less-than-human looking, which made it easy to kill them.
But Eric (I hadn’t seen your post when I posted last) I’m not saying Odysseus and his gang weren’t wrong! Of course they were wrong. I’m saying that if morality were simply part of nature then it wouldn’t have taken humans so long to notice that that kind of thing was wrong.
Ánd I’ve already said that I think facts can contribute to specifically moral understanding. I think they can contribute to moral discussion, but that they’re not decisive. Necessary but not sufficient. Sam said science can answer moral questions; I think he should limit that to “science can help answer moral questions.”
I would agree with you that morality is what it means to care, except that caring can (and of course often does) go in the opposite direction. The pope cares about the welfare of the church instead of about the welfare of the church’s victims. So, again, morality requires both right feeling and right thinking. Sounds very 18th century.
Perhaps the crux of the discussion here is the definition of “objective”? Russell, for instance, you asked Josef how people define “objective.”
Now, I think most people define “subjective” as individual or idiosyncratic, whereas “objective” is not necessarily “mind-independent” but rather relates to mental qualities that are common or near-universal among humans.
For instance, whether chocolate tastes better than vanilla is “subjective,” but whether vanilla tastes better than motor-oil is “objective” because of the way human taste buds work. That’s why some people get described as “objectively pretty” even if they’re not necessarily to a particular individual’s taste. They meet the general human psychological standards for what is “beautiful” (like symmetry, if I recall correctly).
I should clarify, I’m referring to conversational use of the term “objective” and not technical use in the philosophical literature.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit. At least a part of morality is what it means to care about human wellbeing. In this sense what Odysseus/Ulysses did was wrong, because he didn’t care for human beings as such. Which is usually what happens when morality goes wrong. Like the pope. He cares, but not for human beings. He cares for the church, which he thinks (wrongly, as it happens) is essential for human well being.
And yes, I think being very 18th century is really what it’s all about, but we are talking about very factual things here. When we know that x conduces to human well being, then x is the moral thing to pursue. Hume’s problem with is and ought, as I understand it, had to do with natural law, and here all the problems of nature and nurture crop up with a vengeance, and people passed quite quickly from, “It’s a natural propensity to preserve one’s life” to “Suicide is contrary to natural law,” to “Suicide is morally wrong.” And here I admit the connnexions can’t be made.
And you probably can’t go from “X conduces to human welfare,” to “Doing X is a moral obligation,” but you can go from “X is harmful to human welfare,” or “X causes pain,” to “One ought not, unless there are overriding reasons to the contrary, do X to Y.” And the more we learn about what conduces to human welfare and harm, the closer and closer we get to knowing what it is right or wrong to do. Of course, one also has to try to instill the right feelings to go along with the right thinking, otherwise we’ll have a bunch of right thinking people without the feelings to lead them to do what they know is right.
And I never suggested that you wouldn’t say that what Odysseus did, or what he was most concerned about, was wrong, although it was partly right – it’s good to care about equality, you just have to make sure that you include everyone. But there’s something objective about it’s having been wrong all that while ago, and I think we can see and appreciate the facts that make it wrong. I simply don’t see why we don’t acknowledge that there is something factual here, something that we actually learn about the world as we go along, and our mental and moral horizons broaden, and that the fact/value distinction was probably taken up for all the wrong reasons. I’d have to go back through Hume again – it’s been forty years since I’ve read Hume in quantity – but I don’t think he wanted to divorce facts and values in the way suggested, and, while I haven’t read Harris’ book yet, and hopefully it will have a bit more detail than his talk, it seems to me that he might just be on the trail of the snark, but not the boojum variety.
But I do acknowledge that there is something factual here – but I also say that that’s not decisive, and Sam at least in that list seems to be saying facts can be (or perhaps already are) decisive.
Odysseus already knew the facts. He knew from Eurykleia, and from the other guy, I forget his name, the first one to recognize him. But being enslaved or doing the enslaving both just happened. That was fortune, Τΰχη. Necessity was cruel but not immoral (or moral).
But yes, my part of my point is that we actually learn about the world as we go along, and our mental and moral horizons broaden – as individuals and as a species, too. But what we learn doesn’t really boil down to (just) facts – even if you make facts things like “She says she wants to be treated as an equal because anything less than that is degrading.” That’s partly because of course lots of shes don’t even say that.
Who was the guy, the loyal shepherd, who was actually an aristo enslaved as a war victim? Help me out here, I’m not at home so I don’t have my books. He’s the first to recognize Odysseus, then Telemakhos, then Argos, then Eurykleia., then Penelope. He and Odysseus and Telemakhos plan what to do. What’s his name.
Oh yes, Eumaios. Not shepherd, swineherd. “O my Eumaios, my swineherd.”
Jen, “independent of choice or commitment” is what I’ve been working with because of the lousiness of the “independent of the mind” criterion. It seems to fit your point about universal standards of beauty which we don’t choose, at least to the extent that we’re talking about facial symmetry. Maybe motor oil too, though I haven’t tried it.
Eric, it’s hard for me to picture how it is you reject the nature/nurture divide in this context.
Granted, there are contexts where the divide is more appropriate than others. When it comes to long-term evolutionary processes, for instance, the divide between nature and nurture is difficult to articulate. But we’re talking about slightly more local affairs. And if one asks skeptically, “okay, what is the demarcation point between nature and nurture?”, then I would just say, “independent of choice or commitment, or dependent upon it, respectively”. And that seems to be fairly clear, cutting right to the practical heart of the problem.
Moreover, it introduces the idea that, while humans are cultural animals, some of our actions are more animal and some of them are more cultural. Saying “I reject this distinction when it comes to cultural animals like human beings” is just not enough — you need to say why. And it’s especially pressing, I think, since it seems that your view (assuming I understand it correctly) falls decisively on the side of artifice. Consistently enough, you fall down decisively against natural law theories as a “category mistake”, though that begs the question.
On the other hand, ironically, I’m in a far better position to reject the relevance of the nature/nurture distinction. All I need to do is claim that autists are moral agents (which, note, I haven’t done yet). If autists were moral agents, that would mean that the criteria for moral agency are equal parts nature and artifice, i.e., instinctual sympathy and rule-making. By rejecting this option, you’re seemingly in less of a position to reject the relevance of the nature/nurture divide than I am.
Oh dear, Benjamin! Did I say that I reject the nature-nurture distinction. Clearly there is a distinction to be made, but it isn’t very helpful, since it’s by no means certain where the line gets drawn, or even if it makes sense, in most cases, to try to draw it. Clearly, we seem to be able to narrow some things down to nature, in the sense that some characteristics of humans are genetically linked, but it’s by no means easy to show definitively which ones are. The big thing nowadays seems to be to single out ‘religion’ or ‘religiousness’ as an evolutionarily successful strategy, though it’s not at all clear whether it is evolutionary, or a cultural free rider on something else that has been naturally selected, perhaps a free rider on a free rider, etc. So, I don’t simply reject the distinction, but I’m not sure, in most cases, whether it is a very helpful distinction to make. If you don’t have the criteria for distinguishing between one and the other, how helpful can it be? Some of our actions might be more animal than cultural, but distinguishing one from the other is where the problem lies. Failing some way of doing that, I’m still not convinced that it’s a useful distinction to make. I would have said that religion is a cultural product, though animals may display ‘superstitious’ ritual behaviour in some experimental contexts, but there are lots of people who want to boil it all down to nature. How do you tell the difference?
As to moral facts, or the relationship between science and morality. I think the relation is much closer than many interpretations of Hume would allow, which really took philosophical ethics on a merry ride through the higher reaches of metaethics and somehow lost the thread of the story. So, I’m not sure how the is/ought distinction functions now, especially in the light of the human rights revolution, which, in one sense, depends upon some idea of the objectivity of morality in a fairly robust sense, and yet, on many interpretations, is simply hanging from a sky hook, or is just nonsense on stilts as Betham engagingly said.
I suppose I don’t altogether see the point of the saying that not all shes say that, about not being treated equally and finding that degrading. If you’ve been (objectively) degraded all your life, and find that just a aspect of Fortuna, and of little moral significance, that’s not because it’s not (morally significant, that is), but because such shes still have more to learn. They may never learn it, just as I probably will never learn to understand quantum theory, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something there to learn, and that that something isn’t decisive when you have.
But at this point I’m running out of theory, and the ground is becoming very quicksandy. But I think somewhere about here is what Owen Flanagan would call human ecology. As he says in his The Problem of the Soul: “… ethics is inquiry into the conditions that reliably lead to human flourishing.” (272) Of course, he follows that up by saying that this would not be a science as standardly understood. And that’s evident from the word ‘flourishing’, which is at least partly normative. Yet there is something descriptive there, perhaps more than prescriptive.
Some people want to jump out of the descriptive aspects altogether, by defining flourishing in terms of some kind of cultural/theological anthropology. But surely we’d be better of letting people find out freely what it means to flourish, and then build on that. Are we already importing normative liberal conclusions if we say that this experiment must be carried out in such a way that all other relevantly situated persons must have the freedom to flourish in their own ways too, so that one person’s flourishing cannot be won at the expense of others? Or is this just an aspect of what human flourishing means? And, like nature and nurture, is it so clear where the interface between is and ought is to be found?
Of course, these are just questions. I don’t have the answers. But if we begin with Moore’s idea that talking in terms of natural facts is categorically completely different from talking about values, won’t we end up saying as little as Moore did about ethics? You see how easily confused I am?!
I think I pre-empted your question above! For my purposes, “nature” is “independent of our choices and commitments”, and “nurture” is “dependent on them”.
I think Harris has to buy something like this formulation, too, or else he’s stuck calling all our social institutions “natural”, which is the exact opposite of what he wants to do.
I still don’t buy it about “something to learn” and “decisive,” Eric. That’s putting it too…factually.
Something to experience, perhaps. It is the case that women who have never known anything but subordination can get a little experience of competence etc and that can be decisive. And what they experience is partly factual (I can do this), but it’s not purely factual. It’s phenomenological, I suppose. You can do this would be factual and I can do this is factual and phenomenological, and the second is much more powerful.
Well, I’ll match your phenomenological and raise you a fact or two! But seriously, I suppose, if pressed, I’d have to say it’s not purely factual, in the straightforward way in which we use the word ‘factual’, if by that is meant something like Wittgenstein’s ‘Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist.’ But the factual (and its correspondingly phenomenological) component is often critical, if not decisive.
I’m just reading a devastating book entitled The Slave Ship. One of the most decisive moments in the abolitionist movement was the naval measurement and subsequent description (probably made publicly available by William Pitt, the PM), and the corresponding image of the slave ship Brooks. When the broadsheet showing a drawing of the ship with its ‘cargo’ ‘stowed’ in the lower decks – everyone has seen it; it’s the standard image that springs to mind – the end of the slave trade was already in sight, and abolition was not far behind. Besides this, it was the meticulous narrative history from ordinary seamen in Bristol and Liverpool, gathered by Thomas Clarkson (really creating, in the process, a new type of history) that turned the tide. Without the knowledge, the moral horrors of the trade and the condition of slavery would have taken much longer to recognise. Were these not decisive facts which changed the moral landscape? And could anyone, seeing the images and hearing the stories, not recognise that something of moral importance was being conveyed?
Ah, good example.
Yes, sometimes facts of that kind are decisive.
………In fact that’s why I piled up a stack of them in the first chapter of Does God Hate Women? I reported them as coldly as I could, in order to let the facts do the work.
But, you know – sometimes they are but other times they’re not. Ho hum, aren’t I boring. But much more subtle forms of subordination for instance – with them it’s hard to just point to some facts, or show a picture. You need argument. That’s one reason I’m uneasy with Sam’s “Here are the facts” approach – it’s partly because they really aren’t the same kind of thing as argument.
Notice your last sentence – “hearing the stories” – ah yes, and stories are different from facts. Stories can be about phenomenology; that’s often the point of them.
I’m being very boring. It’s just that Sam is (some of the time) claiming facts are sufficient, and all I’m claiming is that they often aren’t. Facts plus empathy; facts plus experience and extrapolation; facts plus theory of mind; facts plus what the 18th century called sensibility. That’s a very humdrum non-radical claim.
Humdrum? I’m not so sure. It’s a strange thing, you know – I tried to teach moral education from the point of view of the ethics, mainly meta-ethics of the sixties, in the first years of the seventies, all neat conceptual analysis of our basic moral concepts. I can scarcely remember it all now, but you know the sort of thing? You know, Sevenson, Hare, Ross and all the rest of the gang? Of course, in the background were people like Piaget, Kohlberg, Simon and so on. But the basic stuff we did was meta-ethical, and it was helpful but in a rather rarified way. In a sense it was a dead end, because we were missing the business end of morality. Not that we never did this, of course, but there was a sense – I had a sense – of language spinning its wheels.
Then along came MacIntyre in his new incarnation as a Roman Catholic, and basically said we had taken a wrong turning somewhere in the last three hundred years, and he wanted to put us back on track with, basically, natural law, which really raises all the iffiness of ises and oughts all over again. But he was surely right in one sense. Even if the rarified meta-ethics, Moore to Hare, say, was in a sense helpful because it did clarify some of the concepts, which needed a housecleaning, none of it really helped with the moral project.
So, yeah, I think Hume was right, so far as natural law was concerned. You can’t just move from ‘natural propensities’ to oughts and obligations. But, if you assume the human being with human sensibility – and without sensibility in that sense the moral project can’t even start – then the facts make all the difference, as Aristotle was, perhaps, the first to notice in a really robust way, although it would take centuries before it applie to just everyone, and that’s still in the balance in most places, popes and imams being at the centre of that particular teeter-totter. You may not actually go from is to ought, but you do go from something fairly is-like, combined with some very basic facts about what does or does not make for pleasure or happiness, to things that look suspiciously like obligations.
We start with stories, very powerful stories, in the case of Does God Hate Women?, which are also just facts about what has happened to women, terrible things, because we do respond with human sensitivity to those facts, and then, if that doesn’t lead to some kind of a moral conclusion then we’re just lacking something. You can’t look at a picture of the Brooks with human beings stacked below decks like cordwood and not be moved to some sort of outrage. And I think one of the main reasons that people didn’t at first, was simply that people thought in terms of absolute moral principles, religious principles, and they actually saw the movement of Africans from Africa to Christian North America, or Christian colonies in the West Indies, or to Christian Brazil as a civilising activity. They had all the oughts, but none of the ises. And that’s exactly what the stories at the beginning of Does God Hate Women? are doing, stacking up the facts against all the religious oughts. And that’s not humdrum at all.
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