Fear of Science

Many people react negatively to the idea that moral principles can be inferred entirely using scientific method. There is a general feeling that this is impossible. This seems to be partly why quite a lot of people view the decline of traditional sources of moral instruction as a serious threat. This is a major, double mistake.

In August last year, I attended an event, 'Answers in Science,' at Houston Museum of Natural Science, aimed at raising awareness of the way that a number of christian fundamentalists have been trying to sabotage the quality of scientific education in Texas schools. Among several that spoke there, two people raised points that struck me as highly significant, given the line of thought I've been pursuing for some time, with regard to the relationship between science and morality. They were Kathy Miller, from Texas Freedom Network, and Mike Aus, a former pastor.

Announcing: Moral Science Index

Continuing the paradigm established by my glossary and my mathematical index, I've put together an index to and summary of the material I've accumulated on the topic of moral science. The index can be reached here, or from the link, 'Moral Science', on the right-hand side, beneath my profile.

The idea is simply to provide a point of entry for people interested in knowing what I have to say on this topic. People can see everything I have presented on this theme, the order in which the different pieces were published (and hence, approximately their dependency), a short description of each piece's function, together with some global motivating and qualifying remarks. 

The relationship between science and morality represents a significant percentage of the material on my blog. It's an important (by definition) and highly overlooked topic, so I think it is important for people to have a single point of access to this material, the same way that the mathematical index provides a consolidated resource for learning about statistics, and the same way that the glossary represents the most definitive statement of my philosophy available, anywhere. (In some respects, I now view the blog as secondary to the glossary.)

I will try to keep the moral science index current - as I release more material, I'll update the index accordingly.

As always, I welcome your comments, questions, criticisms, outraged indignation, etc. If anything needs clarification, the fault is mine. If you're curious about some detail I can help with, then I'm delighted to do so (that's the whole point of the website, actually). Comments are open here and on the index itself, and alternative contact details exist on the right hand side of this page.

Some Highlights:

For your convenience, I'll reproduce here some of the major points from the moral science page. 

(1) As of the publication date of this blog post, the index stands at:

Blog entries on this topic (in order of publication):

• Scientific Morality
• Crime and Punishment
• Is Rationality Desirable?
• Practical Morality, Part 1
• Practical Morality, Part 2

Glossary entries on relevant concepts:

• Absolutism
• Consequentialism
• Morality
• Rationality

(2) To disclaim any extraordinary expertise in any specific realm of moral decision:

My writing on ethics is not to prescribe how to behave, but to inform on how to know how to behave.

(3) Quoting from the overview:

The founding principle behind my writing on this blog is that there is no better method to learn about anything than science. If a thing is meaningful - has consequences - science can measure it, by virtue of those consequences.... 

It is often said that science has nothing to say on the matter of what constitutes moral behaviour. If correct, this leaves us with only one option: morality has no meaning, it is a non-concept. It seems to me absurdly trivial that this is not so. Anyway, only a moderate amount of reflection is required to prove it. Thus, it is equally trivial to prove that science can guide us - in fact, is the optimal guide - concerning moral prescription.

(4) Another feature on the moral science page is a short list of blog articles I expect to write on the topic in the near future, covering (in no particular order):

• the correspondence, if any, between correct consequentialism and classic utilitarianism

• the correspondence, if any, between correct consequentialism and political libertarianism

(Spoiler alert: the answer in both cases is, not so much.)

• some necessary aspects of the nature of human decision criteria

• the limited insight offered by the classic thought experiments in the philosophy of ethics

• the potential for correct moral realism to significantly reduce reliance on superstition, leading to a better informed and more rationally directed society 

Practical Morality, Part 2

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those others that have been tried.

Winston Churchill 

(The second of two parts. Read the first installment here.)

Politics & Science

I have a funny little feeling that Churchill actually knew a small bit about politics. According to dear, old Winston, democracy sucks. But why does it suck? And does it necessarily suck?

A full analysis of these questions could run into thousands of pages, and obviously stretches far beyond any area in which I could claim expertise, but for now at least, I want to point out just one aspect of democracy's poor performance to date that can most definitely be fixed. That is, the failure so far of both politicians and the electorate to explicitly recognize the necessarily rational basis for morality.

Practical Morality, Part 1

(The first of two parts. Part 2 is here.)

The Social Contract

Where-ever you are right now, take a quick look around. Do a quick survey of all the stuff you can see. Think about the number of things you have around you that other people have made. If you are in your own home, then great, the experiment works even better - the things around you probably belong to you, you make some kind of use of them, and quite possibly your life would be less satisfying without them. Some of these things may even be, if not essential for life, indispensable for a comfortable modern existence.

Is Rationality Desirable?

Seriously, why all this fuss about rationality and science, and all that? Can we be just as happy, or even more so, being irrational, as by being rational? Are there aspects of our lives where rationality doesn't help? Might rationality actually be a danger?

Think for a moment about what it means to desire something.

To desire something trivially entails desiring an efficient means to attain it. To desire X is to expect my life to be better if I add X to my possessions. To desire X, and not to avail of a known opportunity to increase my probability to add X to my possessions, therefore, is either (1) to do something counter to my desires, or (2) to desire my life not to get better. Number (2) is strictly impossible – a better life for me is, by definition, one in which more of my desires are fulfilled. Number (1) is incoherent – there can be no motivation for anyone to do anything against their own interests. Behaviour mode (1) is not impossible, but it can only be the result of a malfunction.

Let’s consider some complicating circumstances to check the robustness of this.

1. Suppose I desire a cigarette. Not to smoke a cigarette, however, is clearly in my interests. There is no contradiction here. Besides (hypothetically) wanting to smoke something, I also have other goals, such as a long healthy life, which are of greater importance to me. To desire a cigarette is to be aware of part of my mind that mistakenly thinks this will make my life better, even though in expectation, it will not. This is not really an example of desiring what I do not desire, because a few puffs of nicotine is not my highest desire – when all desires that can be compared on the same dimension are accounted for, the net outcome is what counts. Neither is it an example of acting against my desires if I turn down the offer of a smoke, for the same reason.


2. Suppose I desire to reach the top of a mountain, but I refuse to take the cable car that conveniently departs every 30 minutes, preferring instead to scale the steep and difficult cliffs by hand and foot. Simplistically, this looks like genuinely desiring to not avail of an efficient means to attain my desires, but in reality, it is clearly the case that reaching the summit is only part of the goal, another part being the pleasure derived from the challenging method of getting there.   

Despite complications arising from the inner structure of our desires, therefore, for me to knowingly refuse to adopt behaviour that would increase my probability to fulfill my desires is undeniably undesirable. Now, behavior that we know increases our chances to get what we desire has certain general features. For example, it requires an ability to accumulate reliable information about the world. It is not satisfactory to take a wild guess at the best course of action, and just hope that it works. This might work, but it will not work reliably. My rational expectation to achieve my goal is no better than if I do nothing. Reliability begins to enter the picture when I can make informed guesses. I must be able to make reliable predictions about what will happen as a result of my actions, and to make these predictions, I need a model of reality with some fidelity. Not just fidelity, but known fidelity - to increase the probability to achieve my goals, I need a strategy that I have good reasons to trust.

It happens that there is a procedure capable of supplying the kinds of reliable information and models of reality that enable the kinds of predictions we desire to make, in the pursuit of our desires. Furthermore, we all know what it is. It is called scientific method. Remember the reliability criterion? This is what makes science scientific. The gold standard for assessing the reliability of a proposition about the real world is probability theory – a kind of reasoning from empirical experience. Thus the ability of science to say anything worthwhile about the structure of reality comes from its application of probability theory or any of several approximations that are demonstrably good in certain special cases. If there is something that is better than today’s science, then better is the result of a favorable outcome under probabilistic analysis (since 'better' implies 'reliably better'), thus, whatever it is, it is tomorrow’s science.

So, if I desire a thing, then I desire a means to maximize my expectation to get it, so I desire a means to make reliable predictions of the outcomes of my actions, meaning that I desire a model of the world in which I can justifiably invest a high level of belief, thus I desire to employ scientific method, the set of procedures best qualified to identify reliable propositions about reality. Therefore, rationality is desirable. Full stop.

We cannot expect to be as happy by being irrational as by being rational. We might be lucky, but by definition, we cannot rely on luck, and our desires entail also desiring reliable strategies.

Items (A) to (D), below, detail some subtleties related to these conclusions.

(A) Where’s the fun in that?

Seriously? Being rational is always desirable? Seems like an awfully dry, humorless existence, always having to consult a set of equations before deciding what to do!

What this objection amounts to is another example (ii), from above, where the climber chooses to take the difficult route to the top of the mountain. What is really meant by a dry existence is something like elimination of pleasant surprises, spontaneity, and ad-hoc creativity, and that these things are actually part of what we value.

Of course, there are also unpleasant surprises possible, and we do value minimizing those. The capacity to increase the frequency of pleasant surprises, while not dangerously exposing ourselves to trouble is something that, of course, is best delivered through being rational. Being in a contained way irrational may be one of our goals, but as always, the best way to achieve this is by being rational about it. (I won’t have much opportunity to continue my pursuit of irrationality tomorrow, if I die recklessly today.)   

(B) Sophistication effect

To be rational (and thus make maximal use of scientific method, as required by a coherent pursuit of our desires) means to make study of likely failure modes of human reasoning (if you are human). This reduces the probability of committing fallacies of reasoning yourself, thus increasing the probability that your model of reality is correct. But, there is a recognized failure mode of human reasoning that actually results from increased awareness of failure modes of reasoning. It goes like this: knowing many of the mechanisms by which seemingly intelligent people can be misled by their own flawed heuristic reasoning methods makes it easy for me for hypothesize reasons to ignore good evidence, when it supports a proposition that I don’t like – “Oh sure, he says he has seen 20 cases of X and no cases of Y, but that’s probably a confirmation bias.”

Does this undermine my argument? Not at all. This is not really a danger of rationality. If anything, it is a danger of education (though one that I confidently predict that a rational analysis will reveal to be not sufficient to argue for reduced education). What has happened, in the above example is of course itself a form of flawed reasoning, it is reasoning based on what I desire to be true, and thus isn't rational. It may be a pursuit of rationality that led me to reason in this way, but this is only because my quest has been (hopefully temporarily) derailed. Thus my desire to be rational (entailed trivially by my possession of desire for anything) makes it often desirable for me to have the support of like-minded rational people, capable of pointing out the error, when even the honest quest for reliable information leads me into a trap of fallacious inference.

(C) Where does it stop?

The assessment of probability is open ended. If there is anything about probability theory that sucks, this is it, but no matter how brilliant the minds that come to work on this problem, no way around it can ever be found, in principle. It is just something we have to live with - pretending it's not there won't make it go away. What it means, though, is that no probability can be divorced from the model within which it is calculated. There is always a possibility that my hypothesis space does not contain a true hypothesis. For example, I can use probability theory to determine the most likely coefficients, A and B, in a linear model used to fit some data, but investigation of the linear model will say nothing about other possible fitting functions. I can repeat a similar analysis using say a three-parameter quadratic fit, and then decide which fitting model is the most likely using Ockham’s razor, but then what about some third candidate? Or what if the Gaussian noise model I used in my assessment of the fits is wrong? What if I suspect that some of the measurements in my data set are flawed? Perhaps the whole experiment was just a dream. These things can all be checked in essentially the same way as all the previously considered possibilities (using probability theory), but it is quite clear that the process can continue indefinitely.

Rationality is thus a slippery concept: how much does it take to be rational? Since the underlying procedure of rationality, the calculation of probabilities, can always be improved by adding another level, won’t it go on forever, precluding the possibility to ever reach a decision?

To answer this, let us note that to execute a calculation capable of deciding how to achieve maximal happiness and prosperity for all of humanity and all other life on Earth is not a rational thing to do if the calculation is so costly that its completion results in the immediate extinction of all humanity and all other life on Earth.

Rationality is necessarily a reflexive process, both (as described above) in that it requires analysis of the potential failure modes of the particular hardware/software combination being utilized (awareness of cognitive biases), and in that it must try to monitor its own cost. Recall that rationality owes its ultimate justification to the fulfillment of desires. These desires necessarily supersede the desire to be rational itself. An algorithm designed to do nothing other than be rational would do literally nothing - so without a higher goal above it, rationality is literally nothing.

Thus, if the cost of the chosen rational procedure is expected to prevent the necessarily higher-level desire being fulfilled, then rationality dictates that the calculation be stopped (or better, not started). Furthermore, the (necessary) desire to employ a procedure that doesn't diminish the likelihood to achieve the highest goals entails a procedure capable of assessing and flagging when such an occurrence is likely.

(D) Going with your gut feeling

On a related issue, concerning again the contingency (the lack of guarantee that the hypothesis space actually contains a true hypothesis) and potential difficulty of a rational calculation, do we need to worry that the possible computational difficulty and, ultimately, the possibility that we will be wrong in the end will make rationality uncompetitive with our innate capabilities of judgment? Only in a very limited sense.

Yes, we have superbly adapted computational organs, with efficiencies far exceeding any artificial hardware that we can so far devise, and capable of solving problems vastly more difficult than any rigorous probability-crunching machine that we can now build. And yes, it probably is rational under many circumstances to favor the rough and ready output of somebody’s bias-ridden squishy brain over the hassle of a near-impossible, but oh-so rigorous calculation. But under what circumstances? Either, as noted, when the cost of the calculation prohibits the attainment of the ultimate goal, or when rationally evaluated empirical evidence indicates that it is probably safe to do so.

Human brain function is at least partially rational, after all. Our brains are adapted for and (I am highly justified in believing) quite successful at making self-serving judgments, which, as noted, is founded upon an ability to form a reliable impression of the workings of our environment. And, as also noted, the degree of rigor called for in any rational calculation is determined by the costs of the possible calculations, the costs of not doing the calculations, and the amount we expect to gain from them.

This is not to downplay the importance of scientific method. Let me emphasize: a reliable estimate of when it is acceptable to rely on heuristics, rather than full-blown analysis, can only come from a rational procedure. The list of known cognitive biases that interfere with sound reasoning is unfortunately rather extensive, and presumably still growing. The science informs us that rather often, our innate judgement exhibits significantly less success than rational procedure. 

Crime and Punishment

There’s been an idea circulating for some time that retributive justice is morally and logically founded upon the fact that we possess a thing called free will - some assumed weird mechanism that disconnects human behaviour from the normal cause-and-effect based evolution of nature. If, after all, human actions were really ‘just’ the result of mechanistic microscopic processes, then whatever we do would be entirely determined by the laws of physics and the configuration of our environment. And if this were really so, then whatever somebody does is a consequence of the fact that they could not have willfully done otherwise, in which case there is no sense in which a person can be blamed for doing wrong. And if culpability can not be established, then doesn't the validity of punishment look suspect? So prevalent is this idea that it forms a major part of contemporary legal philosophy.

Not only is this idea of free will completely nonsensical, but the connection between it and the justice of retribution is totally unfounded. Vengeance, after all is really just an expression of anger. Is anger rational? Is it a reliable, systematic producer of well judged behaviour? Or is it merely a crude and ancient heuristic moderator of human interaction that in a modern, enlightened era, we could do with much less of?

There is simply no logical link between culpability and the righteousness of retributive punishment,  which somehow ‘repays a debt to society.’ Try to derive this principle logically, and you will find it impossible without directly assuming the desired outcome among the required premises. 

What we must see instead is that, in line with more agreeable consequentialist moral philosophies, the only appropriate consideration when assigning juridical interventions is: what actions will lead to a better society for us, and for our children to grow up in? In this case, the problem justifying enforced treatment (e.g. imprisonment) upon somebody who ‘couldn't have acted any other way’ disappears completely. The enforced treatment is only indirectly determined by the person’s actions, and is wholly derived from what we would like the world to look like in the future. The relevance of past behaviour is limited to the extent to which it serves as a predictor of future behaviour. What are traditionally viewed as punishments - justice administered for the satisfaction of the victims - become more properly viewed as treatments, designed to minimize the cost for society of a person’s demonstrated antisocial tendencies. 

The desire for revenge against a person who has committed wrongs against us is likely to be at least partly due to population genetics, naturally selected for self-preserving behaviour (it is advantageous for me to create an environment in which another’s bad behaviour toward me makes life uncomfortable for them), but the idea linking this concept of justice to free will seems to be far more memetic than genetic: it is a matter of culture.

The concept that free will is necessary and sufficient to entail the punishment of moral failing seems to date back to Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics. I’m no scholar of Aristotle, but to me its not clear whether for him the appropriateness of blame has a consequentialist or an absolutist foundation - are praise and blame desirable because they make certain modes of future behaviour more likely, or because they try to balance what has happened in the past?

If I had to speculate on the reason for the cultural success of the notion specifically linking retribution to free will, I’d guess that it was found to come in very useful when dictators wrestled with the seemingly contradictory goals of being loved, yet being utterly feared.

How can you be brutally violent against your enemies, while remaining admired by the remaining population? One way would seem to be to claim that violence against certain people is morally just, even necessary. “It made me cry to do that to him, but his crimes left me no choice.” Such pious adherence to absolute moral principle, even when it demands the most unpleasant actions, might even elevate a thug to saintly status, bringing joyous tears to the eyes of his devoted followers.

In the course of time, it may be that neuroscience, experimental psychology, and the social sciences will come to the conclusion that a better society is generally one in which people’s innate desire for vengeance is somewhat fulfilled (I doubt this, as I’ll explain shortly), but this would not undermine the principle that treatment of criminals should be determined on purely consequentialist grounds. If it happened to be that this desire was so strong, and so innate that no amount of cultural evolution could remove it, and that the frustration of unplacated victims of crime was so intense as to threaten civil unrest, then a retributive element may need to be restored, but the ultimate reasoning would be the rational evaluation of different courses of action, and selection in favour of those strategies determined to be in society’s best interests.

The debate between absolutist and consequentialist moral philosophies has been going on for a long time: consequentialism goes at least as far back as Machiavelli, around 500 years ago. Absolutism goes much further back, and persists still. This is really quite surprising - its not a difficult problem to solve. All morality is manifestly consequentialist, no matter what we might profess. 

Wait a moment, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ It doesn't get much more absolutist than that does it? No, it doesn't  But just how absolutist is that exactly?

For starters, no society implements principles like this in the strict absolutist way. Christians believe that this basic rule, ‘thou shalt not kill’ was handed to them by their personal deity: thou shalt not kill means that killing is absolutely wrong, under all circumstances - no exceptions allowed. Its never stopped Christian nations going to war when they felt like it. It never prevented Christian inquisitors burning people at the stake when the winter nights were dark and cold. All assumed absolutist principles have always been tacitly appended with a host of additional clauses beginning with the word ‘Unless...’ This is pure consequentialism.

Well, maybe those people adding their arbitrary ‘unless’ clauses were simply bad moralists. Thou shalt not kill is a good rule after all, right? Yes, typically. But what if the person who you are invited to consider killing has a strong ambition to kill you at the earliest convenient moment? Or alternatively, what if that person suffers intolerably, with no hope of improvement, ever? Killing can not be said to be categorically wrong under all circumstances - it all depends on the consequences.

Finally, absolutist versions of morality, in the sense that the content of the principle, “X is wrong,” takes precedence over the actual likely outcomes of performing X, are actually demonstrably incoherent. Lay aside the problem of what could possibly be the source of any absolute moral principle. Suppose for a moment that such principles really are set by some divine entity. What then? These moral laws are obviously not physical laws, since we have the capacity to systematically deviate (if we didn’t, they wouldn’t be called moral laws in the first place). Thus, somewhere in the process of our minds, decisions are made about whether or not to follow a particular moral principle at a particular time. If we believe that Godzilla will roast us alive for eternity if we fail to follow the rules, then those predicted consequences are what guide our behaviour. Moral decisions are always the result of a consequentialist evaluation of the options.

Going a little beyond the standard terminology, then, morality is absolute, but with only one rule: “whatever actions are revealed by a rational analysis to be most likely to bring me closer to achieving my goals are the actions I should implement.” This is exactly as I demonstrated in an earlier article on scientific morality. Furthermore, it illustrates that the founding principles of that argument, (1) goodness does not exist outside minds and (2) morality is doing what is good, are both properly basic: they are necessarily correct, and our knowledge of them is not contingent upon empirical observations.

Lets get back to the potential role of retribution in an advanced consequentialist morality. The extent to which the will to see wrongdoers punished is genetically innate, as opposed to culturally transmitted, is certainly an interesting question, and one whose investigation would no doubt require some ingenious experimental protocols. But I strongly suspect that the innateness of these feelings is limited to an extent that can easily be overruled by rationality, allowing vengeance to be effectively eliminated from all consideration in the problem of dealing with criminals. There are several reasons for this suspicion.

Firstly, if we look at the portion of the population most commonly found expressing anger, I’m fairly sure it'll be small children. Anger is, we all recognize, a childish emotion. We grow out of it. We learn (with great relief to most, I presume) to control it, and when as adults we occasionally succumb to emotional outbursts, we typically feel silly afterwards. As advanced society has developed, we have continually learned, oh so painfully slowly, that anger and resentment typically achieve little except the propagation of more anger and resentment. 

Secondly, there seems to be considerable evidence showing that the traditional practices of retributive justice have failed miserably. This paper, for example, argues strongly that imprisonment is ineffective at reducing the frequency and intensity of crime, and that alternative treatments such as education achieve greater reductions of recidivism. Another article summarizes some of its findings: "Research into specific deterrence shows that imprisonment has, at best, no effect on the rate of reoffending and often results in a greater rates of recidivism." The utilitarian advantages of a more rational approach seem to be there for the taking.

Thirdly, whatever memetic components there are, supporting any in-built tendency to desire vengeance, they can, by definition, be overcome by changing our culture.

Fourthly, religious leaders throughout history seem to have made artful use of the philosophy of free will in order to bolster acceptance of their reign of terror (hell doesn’t seem very fair, if all your actions are fixed by the way God set up the boundary conditions, and so damnation only gains a veneer of coherence if we have free will - a notion that evidently has to extend to the mortal plane, in order to justify certain historical hobbies of the major religions). This suggests that the hard-wired machinery of anger was, stripped of any socially conditioned props, insufficient to sustain the required levels of violence in our ever increasingly sophisticated culture.

When it comes to figuring out how to deal with crime, therefore, it is irrational to decide based on a shortsighted lust to see a criminal's debt repaid through suffering. Instead, we must look to scientific data to decide what courses of action minimize the costs to society. We must seek to understand what treatments will cost-effectively turn today's rule breakers into tomorrow's contributors to society, and what measures will economically eliminate the desire and the opportunity to commit crimes in the first place. 

Scientific Morality

Elsewhere, I have argued that all questions relating to facts about the real world can be addressed by scientific method, and that if we are truly interested in approaching the correct answers to such questions, then we are foolish to rely on any other method. One important class of questions most people, including, it seems, many scientists, think can’t be answered scientifically concerns how we should determine our moral goals. It seems to me that only a modest amount of reflection is required to dispel this pervasive myth.

The purpose of science is to provide ever more precise plausibility estimates for propositions concerning the sate of reality. Rightness and wrongness, though, are not among the objective properties matter. To attribute ideas such as good and evil to external nature is to commit the mind projection fallacy – to assume that properties of our internal model of reality correspond to properties of the reality.

Consider that classic image of natural selection in action, a lion chasing a zebra, with intention to devour it. There is no sense in which we can apply concepts of right and wrong, or good and evil to this situation. It is not evil that the zebra suffers agony at the teeth and claws of the lion, any more than it is evil if the lion suffers misery and protracted death from starvation. What we have here is simply chemistry unfolding in a mildly interesting manner – genes either preparing to replicate or losing the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, to assert that humanity is something more than this mildly interesting chemistry is certainly not founded on any rational procedure.

That we experience pain, misery, and torment are mind-bending, heart-wrenching facts about life, for us. But the universe does not care. There is no sense in which these values can be attributed as properties of the universe. To the universe, we are just yet more chemistry, a collection of slightly unusual aggregates of matter that dance about on the surface of an otherwise insignificant chunk of rock, one of an estimated 10²⁰ planets in the known universe.

It is not that natural selection, or the universe, wants us to maximize our happiness. It is simply that a genome capable of generating an algorithm for producing the sensation of such a value apparently gains an additional advantage in the struggle to preserve its information. In fact, it is possible that our genes would prefer us to be unhappy – its that ‘Oh shit, I’d better not do that again,’ effect that seems to give the mechanism its selective advantage. If you are really happy, then you will stop striving to do better, and your cousin, who has the ‘try harder’ mutation, will walk all over you.

This might seem an odd line of reasoning, given the agenda I have defined in the opening paragraph, but we have already established enough to demonstrate undeniably that morality concerns matters of fact with objective truth, and that there is a clear scientific route to take in pursuit of those truths. In fact, it was formulating an argument along the above lines, a couple of years ago, while trying to refute the conclusions of this infamous TED talk by Sam Harris, that I came to my current understanding of the topic. I had formerly assumed the standard position, that science can not specify moral goals. (Harris's ideas were shortly afterward expanded to book length, in 'The moral landscape.')

The above paragraphs can be condensed into one very simple statement, one of only two simple principles (the other being a trivial tautology) needed to establish the validity of a potential science-based morality:

Principle (1):

‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts with no reality outside minds.

To obtain principle (2), we simply must remind ourselves what the word ‘morality’ means:

Principle (2):

            Morality is doing what is good.

Principle (1) states that good and evil do not exist outside minds. This does not, however, mean that they have no objective existence. Since they are words used to describe our mental reactions to different situations, then it is clear that they are values with some physical representation inside our minds. We forget this too easily, partly, perhaps, because of the scientific doctrine of objectivity, which typically means that our mental state should be kept as separate from the system under study and the process of gathering evidence as possible. This is normally a good principle – we have dozens of documented cognitive biases that make it essential to eliminate the influence of our preconceptions and emotional responses when conducting science. But what happens when our minds are the system under study? Crude application of the doctrine of objectivity can cause confusion. A mental state is not something lacking objective reality, as we might erroneously infer from this doctrine – we are, after all, physical entities. Our brains are made of atoms, and our thoughts and emotions necessarily correspond to specific configurations of matter and energy in our neurological hardware.

Because the mental states pertaining to right and wrong have no existence outside minds, then we can be confident that anything there is to be known about them can only be discovered by looking inside minds.

We already have instrumentation capable of measuring important data pertaining to mental states (functional magnetic resonance imaging being currently very popular), and since enormous improvements in this technology are quite likely, then it is in principle possible that we will at some time be capable of generating extremely detailed scientific information on the subject of what stimuli correspond to value judgements of right and wrong. I believe we already know enough to make a highly functional first approximation.

We can correlate measured mental states with people’s self-reported happiness, and other surrogate measures, and we can stochastically map those mental states to the stimuli that caused them. And since morality is simply doing good, we can scientifically optimize our behaviour to maximize the occurrence of the relevant mental states (experienced good), and scientific morality has in principle entirely achieved it objectives.

Objections:

1.     The value problem

Goes something like this: ‘How can we know that we should value wellbeing? Surely science can’t tell us what to value, can it?’ These questions are confused. It is not the goal for science to tell us what to value (not at the highest level, at least). We want science to tell us what we actually do value. Note that value and perceived good are completely synonymous, and there is no good other than the perceived kind. Similarly, the declaration that we value wellbeing is another unavoidable tautology. We are talking about measuring the perception of value in people’s brains, and trying to bring about the circumstances that enhance the frequency of the observed mental states. There is no ambiguity about whether or not we should do this: to say you don’t value wellbeing, or happiness, or whatever is good would be self contradictory. Goodness is the extent to which something is appropriate, so there is no sense asking why we should do good: you might as well ask for proof that we should do what we should do.

2.     The measurement problem

Another commonly voiced objection is: ‘How do we know we are measuring the right thing?’ We can’t, but this does not nullify the existence of objective answers to questions about morality. While being one of the commonest complaints against objective morality, it is also one of the most unfair and idiotic. The same objection applies to all of science. Science systematically evaluates knowledge, in the form of direct sensory experience, in order to ascribe probabilities to propositions about phenomena in nature. There is no direct logical link between these sensory experiences and the phenomena we wish to learn about - the actual truth values of these scientific propositions remain forever obscured. This is exactly why probabilities constitute the ultimate expression of our knowledge.

Consider an apparently simple physical concept, temperature, and its measurement. The original concept of temperature related entirely to a subjective experience – if I put my hand on something hot, it feels hot, and this is how we originally knew that something possessed a high temperature. (There are occasionally other indicators as well, such as combustion, but all of these come down to subjective experience in the end.) At some point, a clever person realized that they could correlate these subjective symptoms of high temperature with the expansion of a fluid in a narrow glass capillary. The first accurate thermometer was born. How did they know that the rising fluid in the thermometer corresponded to the same phenomenon they were experiencing when they felt an object’s high temperature? They did carefully controlled experiments. But ultimately, they had no way of knowing for certain.

As science advanced, people realized that the assumed linear thermal expansion upon which calibration of these simple thermometers is based breaks down at extreme temperatures, and new technologies were developed to overcome the difficulty, giving progressively more accurate measurements, and greater ranges of validity.    

Now note a curious thing. Even with the crude glass capillary style of thermometer, subjective experience is no longer the ultimate arbiter of temperature. A concept originally devised to account for subjective experience was found (with very high probability) to have an underlying physical mechanism that could be characterized accurately with external instruments. Given two objects of similar temperature, even a practiced human can easily be mistaken as to which one is hotter. A precise thermometer, however, will not be mistaken, and will give a result in direct conflict with the human. There has never been a serious suggestion, however, that such occurrences invalidate the use of the thermometer – instead, it is obvious that subjective experience is not perfectly correlated with the physics that it tries to characterize. So it is with feelings of wellbeing, and we must expect that neuroscience will quickly advance to a point where many kinds of mental states can be determined far more accurately than using a person’s self-reported state of mind (I would think this condition already holds in several cases). There is no contradiction here, as these mental states are real states of matter inside the substrates of minds (usually brains). People can be mistaken about what they want.

3.     The persuasion problem

You can not persuade somebody who is committed to the contrary view that wellbeing should be valued. Does this mean that value is not an objective property of reality, or that wellbeing can’t be the basic guide of morality? Of course not. That wellbeing is valued is a tautology, as pointed out already. Being well, happy, and satisfied is just the fortunate condition of possessing much of what you value. That some people will not accept this analytical truth is a consequence of the failure of their minds to operate efficiently. The often-quoted fact that nearly half of all Americans do not accept the theory of evolution (link) has absolutely no impact on the validity of this model of how life reaches is various states of diversity.

4.     What about psychopaths?

Is one morality less true than another? Since morality is rationally figuring out how to improve you state of happiness, no, symmetry demands that there is no privileged authority on ethical behaviour.

But this implies that psychopaths are also moral, right? Wrong, actually. It doesn’t imply that anybody’s actions are moral, the requirement for rationality needs to be met. 

Ultimately, though, it is possible to imagine that there might be psychopaths who are perfectly rational, and highly successful at maximizing their own fulfillment by acting abhorrently to others. This still poses no real philosophical problem. Psychopaths are outnumbered by an estimated 99 to 1 (in the US), so our morality trumps theirs (actually, by those odds there seems a reasonable chance that some psychopath will read this). Our (non-psychopathic) morality dictates that we do what we can to limit their harmful tendencies. Even the psychopaths, by the way, presumably do not want to be the victims of other psychopaths.

Additionally, a person can be mistaken about what their highest-level desires are. A person can be mistaken about the relationship between their lower-level desires and their ultimate goals, and most obviously, a person can be mistaken about the likely outcomes of their actions and what will be the results on their happiness. This means that even the ethics of a person acting rationally can be improved by furnishing then with more accurate facts.  

All rational, equally well-informed behaviour is equally valid. Pretending that there is something wrong with this principle, because it fails to unambiguously condemn the foul actions of sadists is to ignore the obvious truth that the appropriateness of one’s conduct is tautologically determined by its capacity to generate mental states corresponding to appropriateness. Furthermore, it is to insist that room be left open for some principle that, besides being wrong, will, almost by definition, not have the slightest impact on the behaviour of psychopaths, who don’t seem to care what is expected of them by moral philosophers.

5.     Lack of uniqueness

It is not clear that there is a unique solution to the mathematical problem of maximizing wellbeing. There may very well be some upper limit to how happy I can be, and there may be many ways to arrive at that upper limit (but I’m not holding my breath). This does nothing to negate the arguments laid out. Whatever class of conditions enables that upper limit to be attained, it is determined by objective facts about nature. 

6.     Lack of universality

Different people have different values, but as discussed at number 4, this poses no philosophical threat to my thesis. Human beings, however, as members of a single species, are more similar than we are different, so substantial overlap between the ambitions of different individuals is to be highly expected. Furthermore, direct commonality of goals can also be confidently predicted – what’s good for you is good for me. The fact that our morality is ultimately selfish does not need to stand in the way of a high degree of cooperation.

A society that protects all people indiscriminately is very likely to protect me. A global economy that flourishes has a good chance to be one in which I am not poor. A society where learning and technology thrive is a good choice if I hope to have a comfortable life, and complex technology is very difficult to attain without close, structured cooperation between thousands of people.

In ‘The selfish gene,’ Richard Dawkins has written much on how cooperative behaviour emerges naturally among selfish agents, by mechanisms such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. He has also made a nice TV documentary, 'Nice guys finish first,' on the topic, specifically to answer critics who unintelligently insisted that selfish genes imply selfish people. Further, by initiating the concept of memes, he has made it clear how human behaviour has evolved far beyond the consequences of mere population genetics. We are not bound by genetic evolution anymore, and cultural innovations capable of enhancing mutually beneficial technological and social developments are to be positively expected.

7.     Which utility function?

There are different ways to model value, e.g. a rational utility function, or prospect theory (which more accurately models how humans naturally assess utility), but which one should we use? The answer is simple: the one that works. Briefly, (a bit late for that, I think) the point is that one day we might be smart enough to measure utility directly, by studying the physical states of brains (and potentially other substrates supporting minds).

8.     Kahneman’s alternate selves

Daniel Kahneman and coworkers have repeatedly shown that there are different measures of happiness within a single human mind (see this TED talk, for example): the experiencing self, and the remembering self. Which one is correct for our purposes? Again, (and again very briefly) the one that works. Measure the success of basing your behaviour on one choice and compare to outcomes with the other choice, then adopt the policy that produces the optimal result.

9.     How does wellbeing aggregate?

Assuming that my happiness is affected by some measure of global happiness (see number 6), how should we combine happiness measures for different people? Should they be added, multiplied, or what? Isn’t the final choice ultimately arbitrary?

No, its not. Once more, measure the outcome of some likely aggregation function and compare it with other candidates. Did we need some a-priori basis for accurately combining temperatures in order to accept its validity as a physical concept? Did the cave man need to know that two objects placed in contact would equilibrate to some intermediate temperature, rather than their temperatures adding algebraically, in order to know that the embers in his fire were hot?