There are no moral qualities over and above the ones we can measure, either a) in the consequences of an act, or b) in the behavioural profiles or personality traits in people that reliably lead to certain acts
This is the nub of the issue (and in my view the crucial flaw in Harris’ thesis.
You are measuring various physical (or, more broadly, ‘natural’ properties), but you require an entirely separate philosophical (and largely non-empirical) argument to establish that those properties are moral properties. Whether or not that argument works will be a largely non-empirical question.
The argument you, in fact, give seems to rely on a thought experiment where people imagine a low well-being world and introspectively access their thoughts about it. That’s very much non-empirical, non-scientific and not uncontroversial.
Both these comments are zeroing in on the same issue which is at the core of the essay. The thesis above is deflationary about morality and ethics—the central point is that there is no separate realm of moral significance or quality, added on top of and divorced from material facts.
The chain is that 1) the only thing that possesses, in and of itself, a tint in value whilst still being an entirely material quantity is conscious experience. This move assumes materialism/physicalism, which is mostly uncontroversial now among scientists and philosophers alike.
2) We know the kinds of conscious experiences that are bad. Dying famished and hungry is not merely subjective. It is a subjective state, but one that is universally and always negative. This is not a moral assignment—it is an observable, material fact about the world and about psychological states.
3) The material conditions that lead to changes in conscious experiences are amenable to objective inquiry. The same external stimuli may move different people in different conscious directions, but we can study that relationship objectively. “Dying is bad” is not always a true claim in medical science—it depends on the material context. If you can’t save people from the WPW, killing them could be a good thing. This is the principle that euthanasia leans on. Sometimes dying is better, in light of the facts about the further possibility for positive conscious experiences. That doesn’t make medical science subjective.
4) The only “non-empirical” assumption you have to make is that what we mean by bad or wrong is movement of consciousness towards, or setting up systems that reliably contain people within, a negative state-space of consciousness.
5) This is how all other physical sciences operate.
We don’t try to give additional argument to demonstrate that those properties are moral properties, we argue that moral properties are a subset of natural properties. In the same sense that ‘health’ is a subset of biological properties, or ‘good plumbing’ is a subset of various structural/engineering & hydrodynamic properties. Everything we value makes reference to material facts and their utility towards a goal set which must be assumed. But only in the case of morality does anyone ever demand a secondary and unreachable standard of objectivity.
Our thesis is therefore a realist, but deflationary (or ‘naturalised’) position on morality.
Hi Robert, I’m familiar with moral naturalism, it’s a well known philosophical position.
But I still think you’ve simply not given the philosophical argument necessary to establish moral naturalism, you’ve merely asserted it.
1) the only thing that possesses, in and of itself, a tint in value whilst still being an entirely material quantity is conscious experience.
This assumption (the first line of your argument) contains the very conclusion you’re arguing for. What even is “value”? This is the question you need to answer, so you can’t just assume it at the start.
You say “This move assumes materialism/physicalism, which is mostly uncontroversial now among scientists and philosophers alike.” But physicalism isn’t the issue here: the issue is explicating what value is in naturalistic terms.
2) We know the kinds of conscious experiences that are bad. Dying famished and hungry is not merely subjective. It is a subjective state, but one that is universally and always negative. This is not a moral assignment—it is an observable, material fact about the world and about psychological states.
Again, this is a position statement not an argument or a step in an argument. The core question here, as above, is what does “bad” even mean? I’m not sure, but it reads like you are saying “bad” = (subjectively bad to a person; negatively valenced) in the first sentence, referring to a thing being objectively, universally and always morally “negative” in the second. And referring to some uncontroversial material property (don’t know which one) in the third. The whole question that needs to be answered is what “bad”/negative value means. And an argument is needed to show what the connection is between subjectively bad experience, objective value and such and such material properties.
4) The only “non-empirical” assumption you have to make is that what we mean by bad or wrong is movement of consciousness towards, or setting up systems that reliably contain people within, a negative state-space of consciousness.
This is the very thing you need an argument to establish! You say “the only… assumption you have to make” is, and then describe the conclusion you need to argue for. What’s to stop me assuming that “bad” refers to some totally different natural property?
5) We don’t try to give additional argument to demonstrate that those properties are moral properties, we argue that moral properties are a subset of natural
properties.
I’m not sure how to interpret this sentence, so I’ll just address the latter claim.
You say “we argue that moral properties are a subset of natural properties”- but I don’t see an argument for this claim. Maybe you’re just starting from the presumption that naturalism is plausible, so moral properties must be a subset of natural properties? But it doesn’t follow that there are any moral properties or that moral properties are this rather than that or that they can be reductively defined.
Everything we value makes reference to material facts and their utility towards a goal set which must be assumed. But only in the case of morality does anyone ever demand a secondary and unreachable standard of objectivity.
Right, but, in fact, people seem to have a lot of different goals. It doesn’t follow that there is a single, over-arching “moral” goal-set, rather than just a plethora of unrelated goals. It doesn’t even follow that there is a single goal for any given domain. For example, many interests and considerations (differing from person to person) influence our plumbing preferences: it doesn’t follow there are plumbing properties in any fundamental sense.
This is potentially pretty damning to your thesis. People may simply have lots of different goals, rather than there being a single, universally accepted moral goal. If so there’ll simply be nothing specifically “moral” or there’ll be moral/value relativism.
I really don’t think I can reply without rewriting the essay again. I feel like I’ve addressed those concerns already (or at least attempted to do so) in the body of the essay, and you’ve found them unsatisfactory, so we’d just be talking passed each other.
materialism/physicalism [...] is mostly uncontroversial now among [...] philosophers
That’s not really true. For example, in the PhilPapers survey, only 56.5% accepted physicalism in philosophy of mind (though 16.4% chose ‘Other’). There’s no knock-down argument for physicalism.
the only thing that possesses, in and of itself, a tint in value whilst still being an entirely material quantity is conscious experience. This move assumes materialism/physicalism, which is mostly uncontroversial now among scientists and philosophers alike.
What’re the arguments that scientists or philosophers use for it?
This is the nub of the issue (and in my view the crucial flaw in Harris’ thesis. You are measuring various physical (or, more broadly, ‘natural’ properties), but you require an entirely separate philosophical (and largely non-empirical) argument to establish that those properties are moral properties. Whether or not that argument works will be a largely non-empirical question.
The argument you, in fact, give seems to rely on a thought experiment where people imagine a low well-being world and introspectively access their thoughts about it. That’s very much non-empirical, non-scientific and not uncontroversial.
Both these comments are zeroing in on the same issue which is at the core of the essay. The thesis above is deflationary about morality and ethics—the central point is that there is no separate realm of moral significance or quality, added on top of and divorced from material facts.
The chain is that 1) the only thing that possesses, in and of itself, a tint in value whilst still being an entirely material quantity is conscious experience. This move assumes materialism/physicalism, which is mostly uncontroversial now among scientists and philosophers alike.
2) We know the kinds of conscious experiences that are bad. Dying famished and hungry is not merely subjective. It is a subjective state, but one that is universally and always negative. This is not a moral assignment—it is an observable, material fact about the world and about psychological states.
3) The material conditions that lead to changes in conscious experiences are amenable to objective inquiry. The same external stimuli may move different people in different conscious directions, but we can study that relationship objectively. “Dying is bad” is not always a true claim in medical science—it depends on the material context. If you can’t save people from the WPW, killing them could be a good thing. This is the principle that euthanasia leans on. Sometimes dying is better, in light of the facts about the further possibility for positive conscious experiences. That doesn’t make medical science subjective.
4) The only “non-empirical” assumption you have to make is that what we mean by bad or wrong is movement of consciousness towards, or setting up systems that reliably contain people within, a negative state-space of consciousness.
5) This is how all other physical sciences operate.
We don’t try to give additional argument to demonstrate that those properties are moral properties, we argue that moral properties are a subset of natural properties. In the same sense that ‘health’ is a subset of biological properties, or ‘good plumbing’ is a subset of various structural/engineering & hydrodynamic properties. Everything we value makes reference to material facts and their utility towards a goal set which must be assumed. But only in the case of morality does anyone ever demand a secondary and unreachable standard of objectivity.
Our thesis is therefore a realist, but deflationary (or ‘naturalised’) position on morality.
Hi Robert, I’m familiar with moral naturalism, it’s a well known philosophical position.
But I still think you’ve simply not given the philosophical argument necessary to establish moral naturalism, you’ve merely asserted it.
This assumption (the first line of your argument) contains the very conclusion you’re arguing for. What even is “value”? This is the question you need to answer, so you can’t just assume it at the start.
You say “This move assumes materialism/physicalism, which is mostly uncontroversial now among scientists and philosophers alike.” But physicalism isn’t the issue here: the issue is explicating what value is in naturalistic terms.
As an aside, there’s an important difference between naturalism/physicalism and reductive physicalism. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#RedNonRedPhy) Naturalism is less controversial than reductive physicalism.
Again, this is a position statement not an argument or a step in an argument. The core question here, as above, is what does “bad” even mean? I’m not sure, but it reads like you are saying “bad” = (subjectively bad to a person; negatively valenced) in the first sentence, referring to a thing being objectively, universally and always morally “negative” in the second. And referring to some uncontroversial material property (don’t know which one) in the third. The whole question that needs to be answered is what “bad”/negative value means. And an argument is needed to show what the connection is between subjectively bad experience, objective value and such and such material properties.
This is the very thing you need an argument to establish! You say “the only… assumption you have to make” is, and then describe the conclusion you need to argue for. What’s to stop me assuming that “bad” refers to some totally different natural property?
I’m not sure how to interpret this sentence, so I’ll just address the latter claim. You say “we argue that moral properties are a subset of natural properties”- but I don’t see an argument for this claim. Maybe you’re just starting from the presumption that naturalism is plausible, so moral properties must be a subset of natural properties? But it doesn’t follow that there are any moral properties or that moral properties are this rather than that or that they can be reductively defined.
Right, but, in fact, people seem to have a lot of different goals. It doesn’t follow that there is a single, over-arching “moral” goal-set, rather than just a plethora of unrelated goals. It doesn’t even follow that there is a single goal for any given domain. For example, many interests and considerations (differing from person to person) influence our plumbing preferences: it doesn’t follow there are plumbing properties in any fundamental sense.
This is potentially pretty damning to your thesis. People may simply have lots of different goals, rather than there being a single, universally accepted moral goal. If so there’ll simply be nothing specifically “moral” or there’ll be moral/value relativism.
Hi David,
I really don’t think I can reply without rewriting the essay again. I feel like I’ve addressed those concerns already (or at least attempted to do so) in the body of the essay, and you’ve found them unsatisfactory, so we’d just be talking passed each other.
Your replies are much appreciated though.
OK, I’ll address some of the points made separately in the body of the text in a new comment.
That’s not really true. For example, in the PhilPapers survey, only 56.5% accepted physicalism in philosophy of mind (though 16.4% chose ‘Other’). There’s no knock-down argument for physicalism.
What’re the arguments that scientists or philosophers use for it?