expressivism

What’s fallacious about naturalism?

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 5 JDN 2460681

There is another line of attack against a scientific approach to morality, one which threatens all the more because it comes from fellow scientists. Even though they generally agree that morality is real and important, many scientists have suggested that morality is completely inaccessible to science. There are a few different ways that this claim can be articulated; the most common are Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA), David Hume’s “is-ought problem”, and G.E. Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy”. As I will show, none of these pose serious threats to a scientific understanding of morality.

NOMA

Stephen Jay Gould, though a scientist, an agnostic, and a morally upright person, did not think that morality could be justified in scientific or naturalistic terms. He seemed convinced that moral truth could only be understood through religion, and indeed seemed to use the words “religion” and “morality” almost interchangeably:

The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).

If we take Gould to be using a very circumscribed definition of “science” to just mean the so-called “natural sciences” like physics and chemistry, then the claim is trivial. Of course we cannot resolve moral questions about stem cell research entirely in terms of quantum physics or even entirely in terms of cellular biology; no one ever supposed that we could. Yes, it’s obvious that we need to understand the way people think and the way they interact in social structures. But that’s precisely what the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, and political science are designed to do. It would be like saying that quantum physics cannot by itself explain the evolution of life on Earth. This is surely true, but it’s hardly relevant.

Conversely, if we define science broadly to include all rational and empirical methods: physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, sociology, astronomy, logic, mathematics, philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, economics, political science, and so on, then Gould’s claim would mean that there is no rational reason for thinking that rape and genocide are immoral.

And even if we suppose there is something wrong with using science to study morality, the alternative Gould offers us—religion—is far worse. As I’ve already shown in previous posts, religion is a very poor source of moral understanding. If morality is defined by religious tradition, then it is arbitrary and capricious, and real moral truth disintegrates.

Fortunately, we have no reason to think so. The entire history of ethical philosophy speaks against such notions, and had Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill alive been alive to read them, they would have scoffed at Gould’s claims. I suspect Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge would scoff similarly today. Religion doesn’t offer any deep insights into morality, and reason often does; NOMA is simply wrong.

What’s the problem with “ought” and “is”?

The next common objection to a scientific approach to morality is the remark, after David Hume, that “one cannot derive an ought from an is”; due to a conflation with a loosely-related argument that G.E. Moore made later, the attempt to derive moral statements from empirical facts has become called the “naturalistic fallacy” (this is clearly not what Moore intended; I will address Moore’s actual point in a later post). But in truth, I do not really see where the fallacy is meant to lie; there is little difference in principle between deriving “ought” from “is” than there is from deriving anything from anything else.

First, let’s put aside direct inferences from “X is true” to “X ought to be true”; these are obviously fallacious. If that’s all Hume was saying, then he is of course correct; but this does little to undermine any serious scientific theory of morality. You can’t infer from “there are genocides” to “there ought to be genocides”; nor can you infer from “there ought to be happy people” to “there are happy people”; but nor would I or any other scientist seek to do so. This is a strawman of naturalistic morality.

It’s true that some people do attempt to draw similar inferences, usually stated in a slightly different form—but these are not moral scientists, they are invariably laypeople with little understanding of the subject. Arguments based on the claim that “homosexuality is unnatural” (therefore wrong) or “violence is natural” (therefore right) are guilty of this sort of fallacy, but I’ve never heard any credible philosopher or scientist support such arguments. (And by the way, homosexuality is nearly as common among animals as violence.)

A subtler way of reasoning from “is” to “ought” that is still problematic is the common practice of surveying people about their moral attitudes and experimentally testing their moral behaviors, sometimes called experimental philosophy. I do think this kind of research is useful and relevant, but it doesn’t get us as far as some people seem to think. Even if we were to prove that 100% of humans who have ever lived believe that cannibalism is wrong, it does not follow that cannibalism is in fact wrong. It is indeed evidence that there is something wrong with cannibalism—perhaps it is maladaptive to the point of being evolutionarily unstable, or it is so obviously wrong that even the most morally-blind individuals can detect its wrongness. But this extra step of explanation is necessary; it simply doesn’t follow from the fact that “everyone believes X is wrong” that in fact “X is wrong”. (Before 1900 just about everyone quite reasonably believed that the passage of time is the same everywhere regardless of location, speed or gravity; Einstein proved everyone wrong.) Moral realism demands that we admit people can be mistaken about their moral beliefs, just as they can be mistaken about other beliefs.

But these are not the only way to infer from “is” to “ought”, and there are many ways to make such inferences that are in fact perfectly valid. For instance, I know at least two ways to validly prove moral claims from nonmoral claims. The first is by conjunctive addition: “2+2=4, therefore 2+2=4 or genocide is wrong”. The second is by contradictory explosion: “2+2=5, therefore genocide is wrong”. Both of these arguments are logically valid. Obviously they are also quite trivial; “genocide is wrong” could be replaced by any other conceivable proposition (even a contradiction!), leaving an equally valid argument. Still, we have validly derived a moral statement from nonmoral statements, while obeying the laws of logic.

Moreover, it is clearly rational to infer a certain kind of “ought” from statements that entirely involve facts. For instance, it is rational to reason, “If you are cold, you ought to close the window”. This is an instrumental “ought” (it says what it is useful to do, given the goals that you have), not a moral “ought” (which would say what goals you should have in the first place). Hence, this is not really inferring moral claims from non-moral claims, since the “ought” isn’t really a moral “ought” at all; if the ends are immoral the means will be immoral too. (It would be equally rational in this instrumental sense to say, “If you want to destroy the world, you ought to get control of the nuclear launch codes”.) In fact this kind of instrumental rationality—doing what accomplishes our goals—actually gets us quite far in defining moral norms for real human beings; but clearly it does not get us far enough.

Finally, and most importantly, epistemic normativity, which any rational being must accept, is itself an inference from “is” to “ought”; it involves inferences like “Is it raining, therefore you ought to believe it is raining.”

With these considerations in mind, we must carefully rephrase Hume’s remark, to something like this:

One cannot nontrivially with logical certainty derive moral statements from entirely nonmoral statements.

This is indeed correct; but here the word “moral” carries no weight and could be replaced by almost anything. One cannot nontrivially with logical certainty derive physical statements from entirely nonphysical statements, nor nontrivially with logical certainty derive statements about fish from statements that are entirely not about fish. For all X, one cannot nontrivially with logical certainty derive statements about X from statements entirely unrelated to X. This is an extremely general truth. We could very well make it a logical axiom. In fact, if we do so, we pretty much get relevance logic, which takes the idea of “nontrivial” proofs to the extreme of actually considering trivial proofs invalid. Most logicians don’t go so far—they say that “2+2=5, therefore genocide is wrong” is technically a valid argument—but everyone agrees that such arguments are pointless and silly. In any case the word “moral” carries no weight here; it is no harder to derive an “ought” from an “is” than it is to derive a “fish” from a “molecule”.

Moreover, the claim that nonmoral propositions can never validly influence moral propositions is clearly false; the argument “Killing is wrong, shooting someone will kill them, therefore shooting someone is wrong” is entirely valid, and the moral proposition “shooting someone is wrong” is derived in large part from the nonmoral proposition “shooting someone will kill them”. In fact, the entire Frege-Geach argument against expressivism hinges upon the fact that we all realize that moral propositions function logically the same way as nonmoral propositions, and can interact with nonmoral propositions in all the usual ways. Even expressivists usually do not deny this; they simply try to come up with ways of rescuing expressivism despite this observation.

There are also ways of validly deriving moral propositions from entirely nonmoral propositions, in an approximate or probabilistic fashion. “Genocide causes a great deal of suffering and death, and almost everyone who has ever lived has agreed that suffering and death are bad and that genocide is wrong, therefore genocide is probably wrong” is a reasonably sound probabilistic argument that infers a moral conclusion based on entirely nonmoral premises, though it lacks the certainty of a logical proof.

We could furthermore take as axiom some definition of moral concepts in terms of nonmoral concepts, and then derive consequences of this definition with logical certainty. “A morally right action maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain. Genocide fails to maximize pleasure or minimize pain. Therefore genocide is not morally right.” Obviously one is free to challenge the definition, but that’s true of many different types of philosophical arguments, not a specific problem in arguments about morality.

So what exactly was Hume trying to say? I’m really not sure. Maybe he has in mind the sort of naive arguments that infer from “unnatural” to “wrong”; if so, he’s surely correct, but the argument does little to undermine any serious naturalistic theories of morality.

Expressivism

PNRJ cognitive science, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 29 JDN 2460583

The theory of expressivism, often posited as an alternative to moral realism, is based on the observation by Hume that factual knowledge is not intrinsically motivating. I can believe that a food is nutritious and that I need nutrition to survive, but without some emotional experience to motivate me—hunger—I will nonetheless remain unmotivated to eat the nutritious food. Because morality is meant to be intrinsically motivating, says Hume, it must not involve statements of fact.

Yet really all Hume has shown is that if indeed facts are not intrinsically motivating, and moral statements are intrinsically motivating, then moral statements are not merely statements of fact. But even statements of fact are rarely merely statements of fact! If I were to walk down the street stating facts at random (lemurs have rings on their tails, the Sun is over one million kilometers in diameter, bicycles have two wheels, people sit on chairs, time dilates as you approach the speed of light, LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US, Coca-Cola in the United States contains high fructose corn syrup, humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA), I would be seen as a very odd sort of person indeed. Even when I state a fact, I do so out of some motivation, frequently an emotional motivation. I’m often trying to explain, or to convince. Sometimes I am angry, and I want to express my anger and frustration. Other times I am sad and seeking consolation. I have many emotions, and I often use words to express them. Nonetheless, in the process I will make many statements of fact that are either true or false: “Humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA” I might use to argue in favor of common descent; “Time dilates as you approach the speed of light” I have used in to explain relativity theory; “LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US” I might use to argue in favor of some sort of gay rights policy. When I say “genocide is wrong!” I probably have some sort of emotional motivation for this—likely my outrage at an ongoing genocide. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure it’s true that genocide is wrong.

Expressivism says that moral statements don’t express propositions at all, they express attitudes, relations to ideas that are not of the same kind as belief and disbelief, truth and falsehood. Much as “Hello!” or “Darn it!” don’t really state facts or inquire about facts, expressivists like Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard would say that “Genocide is wrong” doesn’t say anything about the facts of genocide, it merely expresses my attitude of moral disapproval toward genocide.

Yet expressivists can’t abandon all normativity—otherwise even the claim “expressivism is true” has no moral force. Allan Gibbard, like most expressivists, supports epistemic normativity—the principle that we ought to believe what is true. But this seems to me already a moral principle, and one that is not merely an attitude that some people happen to have, but in fact a fundamental axiom that ought to apply to any rational beings in any possible universe. Even more, Gibbard agrees that some moral attitudes are more warranted than others, that “genocide is wrong” is more legitimate than “genocide is good”. But once we agree that there are objective normative truths and moral attitudes can be more or less justified, how is this any different from moral realism?

Indeed, in terms of cognitive science I’m not sure beliefs and emotions are so easily separable in the first place. In some sense I think statements of fact can be intrinsically motivating—or perhaps it is better to put it this way: If your brain is working properly, certain beliefs and emotions will necessarily coincide. If you believe that you are about to be attacked by a tiger, and you don’t experience the emotion of fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you are about to die of starvation, and you don’t experience the emotion of hunger, something is wrong. Conversely, if you believe that you are safe from all danger, and yet you experience fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you have eaten plenty of food, yet you still experience hunger, something is wrong. When your beliefs and emotions don’t align, either your beliefs or your emotions are defective. I would say that the same is true of moral beliefs. If you believe that genocide is wrong but you are not motivated to resist genocide, something is wrong; if you believe that feeding your children is obligatory but you are not motivated to feed your children, something is wrong.

It may well be that without emotion, facts would never motivate us; but emotions can warranted by facts. That is how we distinguish depression from sadness, mania from joy, phobia from fear. Indeed I am dubious of the entire philosophical project of noncognitivism, of which expressivism is the moral form. Noncognitivism is the idea that a given domain of mental processing is not cognitive—not based on thinking, reason, or belief. There is often a sense that noncognitive mental processing is “lower” than cognition, usually based on the idea that it is more phylogenetically conserved—that we think as men but feel as rats.

Yet in fact this is not how human emotions work at all. Poetry—mere words—often evokes the strongest of emotions. A text message of “I love you” or “I think we should see other people” can change the course of our lives. An ambulance in the driveway will pale the face of any parent. In 2001 the video footage of airplanes colliding with skyscrapers gave all of America nightmares for weeks. Yet stop and think about what text messages, ambulances, video footage, airplanes, and skyscrapers are—they are technologies so advanced, so irreducibly cognitive, that even the world’s technological superpower had none of them 200 years ago. (We didn’t have text messages forty years ago!) Even something as apparently dry as numbers can have profound emotional effects: In the statements “Your blood sugar is X mg/dL” to a diabetic, “You have Y years to live” to a cancer patient, or “Z people died” in a news report, the emotional effects are almost wholly dependent upon the value of the numbers X, Y, and Z—values of X = 100, Y = 50 and Z = 0 would be no cause for alarm (or perhaps even cause for celebration!), while values of X = 400, Y = 2, and Z = 10,000 would trigger immediate shock, terror and despair. The entire discipline of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy depends upon the fact that talking to people about their thoughts and beliefs can have profound effects upon their emotions and actions—and in empirical studies, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is verified to work in a variety of circumstances and is more effective than medication for virtually every mental disorder. We do not think as men but feel as rats; we thinkandfeel as human beings.

Because they are evolved instincts, we have limited control over them, and other animals have them, we are often inclined to suppose that emotions are simple, stupid, irrational—but on the contrary they are mind-bogglingly complex, brilliantly intelligent, and the essence of what it means to be a rational being. People who don’t have emotions aren’t rational—they are inert. In psychopathology a loss of capacity for emotion is known as flat affect, and it is often debilitating; it is often found in schizophrenia and autism, and in its most extreme forms it causes catatonia—that is, a total lack of body motion. From Plato to Star Trek, Western culture has taught us to think that a loss of emotion would improve our rationality; but on the contrary, a loss of all emotion would render us completely vegetative. Lieutenant Commander Data without his emotion chip should stand in one place and do nothing—for this is what people without emotion actually do.

Indeed, attractive and aversive experiences—that is, emotions—are the core of goal-seeking behavior, without which rationality is impossible. Apparently simple experiences like pleasure and pain (let alone obviously complicated ones like jealousy and patriotism) are so complex that the most advanced robots in the world cannot even get close to simulating them. Injure a rat, and it will withdraw and cry out in pain; damage a robot (at least any less than a state-of-the-art research robot), and it will not react at all, continuing ineffectually through the same motions it was attempting a moment ago. This shows that rats are smarter than robots—an organism that continues on its way regardless of the stimulus is more like a plant than an animal.

Our emotions do sometimes fail us. They hurt us, they put us at risk, they make us behave in ways that are harmful or irrational. Yet to declare on these grounds that emotions are the enemy of reason would be like declaring that we should all poke out our eyes because sometimes we are fooled by optical illusions. It would be like saying that a shirt with one loose thread is unwearable, that a mathematician who once omits a negative sign should never again be trusted. This is not rationality but perfectionism. Like human eyes, human emotions are rational the vast majority of the time, and when they aren’t, this is cause for concern. Truly irrational emotions include mania, depression, phobia, and paranoia—and it’s no accident that we respond to these emotions with psychotherapy and medication.

Expressivism is legitimate precisely because it is not a challenger to moral realism. Personally, I think that expressivism is wrong because moral claims express facts as much as they express attitudes; but given our present state of knowledge about cognitive science, that is the sort of question upon which reasonable people can disagree. Moreover, the close ties between emotion and reason may ultimately entail that we are wrong to make the distinction in the first place. It is entirely reasonable, at our present state of knowledge, to think that moral judgments are primarily emotional rather than propositional. What isnot reasonable, however, is the claim that moral statements cannot be objectively justified—the evidence against this claim is simply too compelling to ignore. If moral claims are emotions, they are emotions that can be objectively justified.