Can Science Tell Us Right From Wrong?

Diz Simon Blackburn:
I also agree that our values can be tempered by science. I think, for example, that the further understanding, for example, of the similarities between the male brain and the female brain march alongside other cultural causes to assist in the equality of women and I hope it very much does so. I think that measurements of identity of intelligence, identity of skill, identity of other cognitive functions will be scientific measurements. They could also insist in breaking down racial barriers and in breaking down gender barriers. So, of course, science can inform our values and should inform our values, and I think we all put our hands up to that.

As to whether you need nothing but science, which I think was the first message we heard, I think I'm afraid I don't agree with Sam (Harris) about that. And neither do the other three speakers we've heard so far. And the reason, I think it's an important reason, it's philosophical, I'll just spend a couple of minutes saying why I think it so.

Virtually all philosophies of mind recognize two different kinds of mental state. There are mental states whose business is to reflect the world as it is, to represent the world to, in other words, inform you about the environment in which you are to act. Those go by the name of beliefs. For if a belief is sufficiently certain and sufficiently well tested you might call it knowledge. So there are beliefs about the world, knowledge about the world, and their business is to reflect the world as it is.

But then there are mental states like desires or intentions, or concerns. Now they have a slightly different, the usual metaphor that philosophers use is 'direction of fit'. They're the things that you care about. And their function is to motivate you to get the world to conform to the content of the desire. If you desire to go to the fridge and get a beer, your business is to, you're set, you're poised, you're disposed to change the world so that first of all you will become nearer to the fridge than you were and secondly that you get a beer. That's changing the world. And the function of the desire is to change the world to conform to whatever is the content of the desire.

Now, many, many moral philosophers, myself included, put values on the 'desire' side of those mental states. The job of values is to orientate you towards the world, to orientate the way you behave, to, as it were, to reflect what you care about, what you desire. It's not just what you desire, it's what you're concerned about in much more important ways. A value is like a desire that you are prepared to make public, that you want coordination on, that you're prepared to insist upon from other people. At it's limit it will define things that you think you must do, not just things you want to do and things that other people must do in relationship to you. So, those are values.

So it's going to be inevitable that there's a gap between fact and value because your two mental states, the ones that represent the way of the world and the ones that motivate you to act in the world as you understand it to be, have this different function.

So, it's one thing to know the world and what the world is like, and it's another thing to care about it in any particular way.

Now Sam [Harris] said that you could just chuck away all the writings of moral philosophers because science had discovered that ethics is about promoting welfare and avoiding suffering. Well, I don't know which science discovered that. It was certainly a major theme of Aristotle, it was a major theme of the Buddha, it's a major theme of Christianity, it's a major theme of any moral philosopher that's ever lived.

Where the moral philosophers find the going difficulty is in having an adequate conception of human flourishing, so let me give you a couple of examples. Some people think that flourishing is just a matter of contented, happy kind of dreamlike mental states. A bit like after you take a spliff or two or you got that beer out of the fridge. This was the target of, for example, 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley. He created, he wrote about a world of, sort of, zombies. Happy zombies kept in a kind of dreamlike contented state by a combination of drugs and lies. Another way you can be happy, you can flourish, is by living in a fool's paradise. By turning your face away from the things that might make you unhappy or just be an ignorant of them. So you can take two people in identical apparent mental states. Each of them believes they're living the American dream but one of them is in a complete illusion. He believes that his wife loves him and that his children love him and that the job is going well and that his colleagues respect him, and none of that is true. He's living in a fool's paradise, and according to Aristotle and many moral philosophers following him, that man is not flourishing because he is living under an illusion. However happy he may say he is, however happy he might appear to be by some neurological measure, since it's not a life of achievement and of real truth and attainment to a way of being in the actual world, he's living in a fool's paradise.

Again, other people have had conceptions of flourishing which included suppressing desires rather than satisfying them. The Buddha did this. Stoicism does this. The idea is that you can easily become a kind of utility gobbler, a utility monster. You want to gobble up experiences, you want to gobble up goods. You want to buy bigger houses, you want to satisfy more and more desires, and that that isn't a flourishing way of life, even if you managed to satisfy them. The real life consists in self mastery and wisdom and understanding that a desire satisfaction doesn't necessarily bring the most flourishing kind of life.

Now all those are moral ideas which throw around the conception of well-being and problematize it. Sam [Harris] thinks we can do without all that. That you can go to a scientist and say, was Buddha right about flourishing? I don't think you can. I think you have to work out for yourself what you care about in your life and the way you care to live it. And, actually, the same comes when it is a question of the utility of others. Peter  [Singer] talks about the expanding circles of reason by itself. Means that you, as it were expand from being concerned just for yourself and for your family, to be concerned for more and  more and more sentient things until, eventually, you become a servant of the world. Giving away all your money to other people and so forth.

I don't think reason tells you such thing. I think it's an excellent thing if you expand your sentiments and I very much hope, as it were, that we all do become more charitable. But I don't think that you are under any obligation to become a servant of the world. And one of the hardest things in ethics is to decide in how to prioritize your own well-being the well-being of your family, the well-being of those to whom you owe debts of gratitude, your loyalty to particular groups amongst whom you live, versus a more impersonal duty to those who lie outside that immediate circle. I think prioritizing one over the other is a very hard decision many of us have to make. All of us have to make. Every time you take your children on holiday, you could be saving three children in Africa, their death or their eyesight or whatever. And yet people do go on taking their children on holiday. And I'm glad they do. I think that they have to.

So, prioritizing these things is very hard, it's very difficult, it's not solved just by saying, oh it would be awful if everybody was be miserable and it would be wonderful if everyone was happy. You can't live simply with that as a guide. It's no guide at all. So I'm afraid ethics is and remains a very difficult subject, and it's a complete illusion to suppose that science will give us all the answers.