why a moral science produces good and not (only) truth

In an email response to my post about his book, Walter Fritz asks the following (which he kindly allowed my to quote):

You say a science on ethics should produce good deeds. Why is that so? For instance I read interesting books on astronomy, but have never looked through a large telescope. Why is ethics an exception?

here is the tentative answer i had to offer:

I have been wondering myself why a science of ethics should differ from other types of science and am convinced it should without quite having good arguments yet to support this position; but i’ll try nonetheless.

All other types of science are indeed structured so as to produce knowledge. This is their final end. Applying that knowledge is secondary and optional to the pursuit of those sciences. Ethics has usually also been considered a standard form of enquiry that has the purpose of producing knowledge about what is good or bad. That is the point of aristotelian, kantian or utilitarian ethical theories. This type of ethics is trying to come up with true theories that tell us what the good is.

The good is not on my view a “feature” of the world that can be described with a theory: it is ineradicably relative to our situation in the world. Thus, not only will traditional ethics continue to produce divergent theories about the good, but these theories will never converge towards a truer formulation (as say newtonian physics was clearly improved by relativity). There is therefore no way to build on previous ethical theories. There can be no progress in our knowledge.

The reason is that ethics is the most recursive form of knowledge: it is not knowledge applied to non-human stuff, nor even to human society or human brains; it is knowledge applied to ourselves. Thus we can only know if something is good by trying it out. Astronomical theories can be verified with telescopes; economic theories with census data and psychological theories with fMRI scans of some else’s brain. But ethical theories can only be verified by trying them out on ourselves (as individual researchers or as society) and seeing if they work.

A moral science might well produce theories of the good, but it must at the same time implement those theories in order to verify them. A moral science is forced to produce good deeds in order to make progress. This is, i believe, the special character of moral science as opposed to all other heretofore known sciences.

Murakami on bad scientists

In his book Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,  japanese novelist Haruki Murakami playfully depicts a likable but crazy scientist whose latest set of experiments involved messing with 26 young men’s brains, 25 of which unexpectedly died. In a conversation with the survivor, the likable, crazy scientist has this to say:

“Well, a scientist isn’t one for controlling his curiosity. Of course, I deplore how those scientists cooperated with the Nazis conductin’ vivisection in the concentration camps. That was wrong. At the same time, I find myself thinkin’, if you’re goin’ t’do live experiments, you might as well do something a little spiffier and more productive. Given the opportunity, scientists all feel the same way at the bottom of their heart.”

Now i have no intention of going into a “banality of evil” post. I am much more interested in the scientific virtue of curiosity. A long time ago, curiosity (but not studiousness) was a vice that described those whose desire for knowledge caused them sin:

the knowledge of truth, strictly speaking, is good, but it may be evil accidentally, by reason of some result, either because one takes pride in knowing the truth, according to 1 Corinthians 8:1, “Knowledge puffeth up,” or because one uses the knowledge of truth in order to sin. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIaIIae Q167)

Today, curiosity has become an important virtue, more because the meaning of the word has changed than because we understand it better than Aquinas did back in the day (1260s or so). The problem is that scientific curiosity – according to Murakami at least – is the more fundamental drive, whereas morality only kicks in afterwards. Science does not fundamentally search for the good, but only the true; and in our day and age truth (about how to build atom bombs, e.g.) can be very much evil. Science does not have an intrinsic means of steering away from investigating potentially evil truths, but must rely on an extrinsic moral principle variously understood by individual scientists.

The manifold messes we humans have occasioned by now on this planet call for a revision of how we do science. We need to somehow bring ethical reflection into scientific endeavors, so that scientists will only want to study what is good and will refuse to help others produce (environmentally or otherwise) dangerous objects. As to the how, i am regrettably not so sure.

Arthur M. Jackson’s Science of Ethics

Arthur M. Jackson has put a whole book online about a “Science of Ethics“. His ideas seem promising, and i will in the days to come blog my perusal of his book (he advertises 300.000 words!).

The preface and introduction give an overview of this science of ethics, explaining that it is a form of knowledge, based on an understanding of the meaning of life. The goal is to become “enlightened persons” living in “enlightened communities“. The stated goal seems general enough, though i am wary of basing the science on the concept of “meaning of life”, because even if the author rightly refuses to define the content of this meaning, the very idea that the meaning of life is paramount is most certainly subject to change.

The first chapter sets the idea of a science of ethics as the culmination of human social evolution. A number of natural but undesirable “propensities” are outlined that need to be overcome:

A science of ethics must help individuals become more aware of their self-defeating inclinations that stand in the way of achieving what is in their long term best interests. This knowledge needs to be available so they can more effectively deal with these tendencies. Understanding that these propensities exist is not taken as justification for succumbing to them, just the opposite. Knowing about them helps us to become aware of such behavior and do what it takes to interrupt or redirect it. Because such patterns develop in puberty, or even before and are found in all adult human beings to varying degrees thereafter, they are something we all have to learn how to deal with, if we are to become enlightened persons. And, we must do this in new ways never widely applied in any society or group before.

Sadly large amounts of “positive ethics” (by which i mean a prescriptive, dogmatic morality) appear here as the desirable alternatives to the undesirable propensities: “Monogamy, or at least serial monogamy”, “All of humanity is us”, or “We each have our private space, but the earth belongs to everyone”. Even if it is emphasized that such ideas will themselves have to evolve, it is a shame that they are included in the idea of the science. Science is a method and all content should be avoided when describing its principles.

The first chapter then closes with the idea that western thinkers have usually opposed the individual and society, but that the goal of humanity is to rise above its natural propensities by using the “symbolic thinking” made possible by language so as to bring harmony between the individual and society.

All in all, the first bit of the book offers an interesting idea, that of a science of ethics, but does not deliver on explaining how that science will work. Moreover, no clear line is drawn between scientific method and the knowledge that is to be produced via that method. But perhaps chapter 2 will provide some answers…

scientists and faith

Alonzo Fyfe wonders about scientists waxing eloquent (pro and con) about faith:

It would be quite interesting, I think, if the scientific-minded people in this dispute were to actually call forth their expertise to look for the evidence for and against their various positions and examine that evidence critically, just as they would do so for a paper written in their chosen professions.

Very true. But what if those scientists didn’t only try to justify their positions for or against faith, but actually investigated the matter at hand? They might find out that faith is not quite what meets the eye: and figure out how to “fix” faith-related problems, or discover that it isn’t faith after all that is causing the problems, but some co-occurrent “something”. If only the scientists would stop preaching about religion and start studying it!

christian experimental ethics

Google pointed me to an article written by one Robert E. Fitch back in 1940 (!) discussing the possibility of a christian experimental morality. He does not go into details about the nature or methods of such a morality, but does try to reassure traditional moralists that “old” moralities are not to be jettisoned, but rather incorporated. I quote from page 332 of The Journal of Religion, Vol. 20, No. 4.:

Furthermore, an experimental morality recognizes that many
of its presumably “new” principles are, in good part, the prod-
uct of tradition. No moral tradition-least of all the Christian
moral tradition-represents a pure flow of logically coherent
pattern; it is manifold, complex, containing plural streams of
tendency, some of which may even conflict with one another.
New” principles, then, may emerge by our recognizing and ex-
tending the operation of present tendencies, which already have
a tradition behind them but to which, heretofore, we have not
consciously directed our attention; or they may emerge by the
creative synthesis of elements from previous traditions that ap-
parently were mutually incompatible; or, more directly, they
may be simply a revival of a remote and forgotten tradition
which, in the course of time, has been superseded by a later
“tradition.”

on the next page he goes on to explain that such an experimental morality must indeed see all moral rules as relative, but that doesn’t mean that those rules lose of their importance:

But, it will be objected, does not an experimental ethics insist
on the relativity of all principles, and does it not suggest that
any tradition-no matter how great its scope-must in time be
outgrown? Here let us answer unequivocally that, in strict the-
ory, an experimental ethics recognizes no eternal or immutable
moral law or moral tradition. But the practical bearings of this
statement are not what at first they appear to be. Naturally, if
we adopt a rationalistic philosophy of history as the unfolding
or making explicit of what is implicit at the beginning, then
later moral insight must exceed both in richness and in precision
the cruder beginnings. But if we think of history, not as a dra-
ma of mechanical recurrence and unfolding, but as a process
which has its unique and not-to-be-repeated emergents, then
the human race never outgrows any significant moral insight of
the past. In the second place, the relativity of our moral prin-
ciples is itself relative, in part, to our moral imagination;

experimental ethics and self-experimentation

Via Marginal Revolutions, i again found Seth Roberts’s blog on self-experimentation (i had previously been subscribed but, not having any weight problems, i found most posts rather irrelevant). Now self-experimentation is nothing new (wikipedia) and i do not intend to go into its particulars. As the name suggests, it is the act of performing scientific experiments upon oneself in order to gain information.

It should be clear that experimental ethics is thus a type of self-experimentation. However, within moral science, these self-experiments take on a novel twist in that their goal is not to gather knowledge (figure out how the brain works, e.g.) but the result produced by the experiment is itself the goal. Moral self-experimentation is not only a quicker way of obtaining data – it is a quicker way of using that data, of immediately implementing the acquired information by bypassing the distinction between newly acquired information and implementation of that information (the self-experimenting scientists might gain info about how the memory works, but that needn’t mean he actually improved his own memory in the process).

Moreover, the moral scientist cannot employ any other type of experimentation except self-experimentation! It is the special nature of a moral science (ethics) that you cannot experiment upon other people because every experiment must be intentionally carried out by people who will be changed in the process: thus even if a professor could ask a group of volunteers to test a moral hypothesis and then solicit their responses, the volunteers must knowingly implement the experiment and themselves assess its moral benefit – they are thus self-experimenting, though at another’s behest. To be clear: you can test a vaccine on yourself (self-experimentation) or on others (standard experimentation) and then objectively assess how it worked – did they get sick or not?; but you cannot objectively assess a moral experiment performed on another person because you must ask them Did it work? You are only recording the data concerning their self-experimentation, not experimenting yourself.

As an aside, Seth Roberts’s fame comes from his self-experimenting Shangri-La Diet, which is in fact a type of experimental ethics (and not biology) because you are experimenting upon yourself not in order to gain knowledge of something, but in order to improve your life.

eve and experimental ethics

My google search for “experimental ethics” which i referred to in a previous post turned up mostly references to the “ethics of scientific experimentation”. This is obviously not what i mean by the term, for it refers not to a science of ethics but an ethics of science.

Via Half Awake i did find a talk by Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann about the matter under question. Towards the end of the talk he refers to eve’s eating of the fruit of the tree of good and evil as the first act of “experimental ethics”. Hoffmann interprets Eve’s deed as exactly what any scientist would and should have done (curiosity is, after all, a modern virtue and an ancient vice). What Hoffmann refers to as experimental ethics is at the same time an ethics of experimentation (eve had to decide to “experiment” with the tree or not to) but also real moral science (eve did something in order to find out if it would produce a good or a bad result).