Michael Shermer is on the book tour for his new book explaining morality.
Morality? Shermer?
Yes. Bemusing, isn’t it.
Known for his analytic approach to the complex plight of humanity, New York Times bestselling author Michael Shermer (Skeptic Magazine) brings his characteristic insight to the nuanced relationship between science and morality in his latest book, The Moral Arc. From paying ransom to Somali pirates and the dilemmas of being a Nazi, to an analysis of the Bible’s basic principles, Shermer unpacks the philosophies behind some of today’s greatest moral questions. He’ll explain how beginning with The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, scientific ways of thinking have made society more moral and in turn, created a freer, more just world.
Not by themselves they haven’t.
How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom
They don’t; that’s how. Not on their own. They can help; they can help a lot; they can correct a lot of mistakes. But they don’t just lead humanity toward justice, like a beacon in the night. Science and reason on their own can’t, for instance, convince someone that it’s immoral to get someone drunk and then steer her into your hotel room and then have sex with her. You need more than science and reason for that.
Shermer on morality. Funny old world, isn’t it.
You know what they say: “Those who cannot do, teach.”
Wow, that’s rich coming from him!
It’s hard to tell exactly what Shermer means by “science,” but I certainly think reason can lead one to a better morality. Like, it is perfectly rational to conclude that if you have to use alcohol to get a woman to the point that she can’t give consent, then you probably shouldn’t fucking do it.
I would never say that Shermer is a perfectly rational, non-hypocritical person.
Shouldn’t ’empathy’ be in there somewhere, or does he think empathy is another by-product of science and reason?
Empathy certainly COULD be a by-product of reason, as in, “Would I like it if someone else did this to me? No? Well, then, I will not do it to them, either, because reason.” Ergo empathy.
Reason is clearly necessary for any coherent concept of morality, but it’s far from sufficient. Critical thinking can tell you that the statements “God is perfectly morally good.”, “Genocide is morally wrong.” and “The bible is the literal truth.” are inconsistent. But, while it can give you tools for assessing the likelihood of these statements, it can’t, by itself, tell you which are true, which are false and which are nonsensical.
I know some may have their disagreements with Pigliucci as well, but it’s fun watching him crush Shermer here…
Blanche @ 5 – no, that’s not empathy.
invivoMark @ 3 – but it isn’t perfectly rational to conclude that. Perfectly rational doesn’t get you to the “shouldn’t” part. It would be great if it did, but it doesn’t. You have to give a shit first.
Ophelia, you say: “Science and reason on their own can’t, for instance, convince someone that…”
But I’ve never understood what convincing somebody is supposed to have to do with anything, at least when it comes to questions of truth. People may be resistant to conclusions about what is morally right. That’s unfortunate, but people are ignorant.
When I was a teenager I was resistant to the idea that 0.999… = 1, and I think that’s still a common reaction high schoolers have. But no one takes that as an indictment of mathematics. People still deny global warming and evolution, too. It’s bad, they shouldn’t, their denial is a problem. But it mixes things up to take inability to convince people as a problem with the substance of the message.
josef – ah well I meant only conclusions about what is morally right. Truth is a different matter.
Well this may be a subject for a different post, but I’m coming from a point of view that could be called ethical naturalist, moral realist, scientismist, and a few other things. So I wouldn’t be putting “morally right” and “truth” into different boxes.
Ya, I’m also on the side of reason and science of morality.
All science depends on facts. The question “is the theory of evolution true?” isn’t one of pure armchair thinking. Empericism is required.
@Ophelia, comment 9, you touch upon this kind of distinction as well:
brian – wut? You seem to be saying opposite things there.
Which things do you think are in opposition?
Maybe you mean your quote wasn’t exactly agreeing with me. I know you don’t agree, and I didn’t say that your quote agreed with me, only that it seemed to make an important distinction about needing the correct premises lest your logic won’t get anywhere.
Ophelia @9: What, then, do you think can get us to the “shouldn’t” part? I don’t like “empathy” as an answer, since I think of that as more of an evolved instinct than a foundational criterion upon which to base a system of morality. And evolved instincts, unfortunately, are also what get us things like bigotry and xenophobia.
I do think that reason alone can get us to a “shouldn’t” clause, and I know there are some influential philosophers who agree. There are also many who disagree, of course.
invivoMark to Ophelia:
While she presumably sleeps, I offer you my own perception: that there is no objective “there” to get to. It very much depends on one’s personal morality.
At the end of the day, one can make their own determinations (be a freethinker) or choose someone else’s to adopt (as one understands it, of course!).
(Or: there is no one-size-fits-all morality; it’s always subjective)
This criticism is absurd. If science and reason led inexorably to “truth, justice and freedom”, then it would not be necessary to write a book about how they do so.
Let me put it another way. These same objections to Shermer’s claims could be made to the claim that cigarettes cause cancer. Not on their own they don’t. Only in some circumstances, but not in others. That’s why we need science and medicine to explain how cigarettes cause cancer.
I’m with Dr. Carrier on this one, and I would love love love to see a back-and-forth on this topic between he and Ophelia, particularly with respect to Sam Harris’s take on the subject. Both agree that Harris botches the argument in “The Moral landscape”, but Carrier maintains that Harris’s conclusion is nevertheless correct. Same with Shermer, in my view. He’s a lightweight, and I have no interest in reading his book. However, just because it is beyond Shermer’s limited capabilities to write a cogent, convincing book on this topic doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
I’m not sure there’s any surefire way to get to objectivity in ethics, but science isn’t one of them, despite Shermer and Harris. Of course, it was obvious from the start of Harris’s book that he had built in a value premise about human flourishing from the start, which made his exercise terminally uninteresting. There is nothing in science that can get you to ‘ought’, as Hume noticed so perspicaciously long ago. And in that case he was talking about (scholastic) natural law morality. If you want a good example of the perils of natural law morality just take a look at George Weigel’s latest at First Things To see things as they are, where he so confidently concludes, as follows:
Refusing to accept this, however, as of course we must, since it makes claims regarding the authority of the Church which no reasonable person could countenance, does not turn values into purely subjective preferences. It just means that ethics is a realm of language (and correlated knowledge of human experience) that is less precise than, say, certain parts of (but not all of) science, but where there are distinct limits, which can be indicated simply by there are limits to acceptable behaviour to which normal human beings (almost) universally agree. If there aren’t such limits, then Ophelia’s attempt to map out limits for appropriate behaviour with respect to women (whether it be imprisonment in El Salvador for miscarriage, or the drugging and raping of women) is merely an individual preference, and her disparagement of such kinds of behaviour merely subjective emoting. Even if we cannot pin down with the precision of quantum physics what is right and wrong, there is no reason for questioning that we do have language that is usually sufficient to the task of ruling out certain behaviours as irresponsible and destructive. Moral truths are not, as Weigel thinks, embodied in human nature, since, as Mirandello pointed out long ago, one of the primary aspects of being human is our ability to create and recreate ourselves (so that there is no fixed human nature as such), but he takes this as a sign that there is something about human beings that distinguishes them importantly from other living things: that we do have the critical ability to recreate ourselves, and in the process to create value, thereby establishing moral limits regarding the way we relate to and deal with each other.
I think people are reading ‘lead’ in a different fashion than Ophelia is, and that’s coming through in some of the objections.
If we already have an agreed-upon destination, then ‘leading’ is simply the act of trailblazing–of determining the best route to get there. And reason and science are AWESOME for that, obviously, because they’re great ways to determine if you’re on the right course or not.
But prior to that, leading is, in part, the act of determining where you wish to be–the ‘ought’ that folks are mentioning. Reason can help there, if you outline your base criteria first–“I want to not starve, so I need to go someplace where there is fertile soil for farming.” But it won’t tell you what the criteria themselves are. Selecting priorities is also part of leading, and science and reason are functionally useless at that.
John Morales @17: I strongly disagree with the notion of subjective morality. That notion is dangerously close to endorsing a man who keeps a woman chained in his basement because he believes God wants him to, and the woman refusing to resist because she thinks God wants her to suffer for her sins. That notion grants equal moral footing to a cartoonist who wants to depict a religious prophet, and a religious adherent who believes it is morally right to gun that cartoonist down.
I think there is objective morality. I do not think there is an easy way to prove that a given system of morality is the objective morality of this universe, but there are plenty of secular moral systems you can choose from that are objective and will, when followed, lead to a better world.
Michael “I’m not a rapist, I just have sex with people too drunk to know what’s going on around them, let alone legally consent to sex” Shermer? That guy? On morality? That’s like Sam “profile brown people and go to war with Islamic theocracies” Harris writing a book on morality! What a ridiculous notion!
[Note: I’m quitting myself there, paraphrasing my honest understanding of their positions, which I note in case they want to start throwing SLAPPs around. I’m also well aware of The Moral Landscape – that’s the joke.]
If by “funny” you mean it smells bad, then yes.
@invivoMark #21: Eh, here’s the thing. “Morality” is a set of human values, or, perhaps, a set of behavioral prescriptions and proscriptions based on a set of values. These values are not universally shared. If, for example, one values a lack of suffering, for oneself or others, whatever, it may well be the case that there are certain statements we can make about what is objectively the best way to achieve that end. However, valuing a lack of suffering is NOT a universal value, whether talking about oneself or others – there are both sadists and masochists. Any claim to “objective” morality (not based on gods) necessarily presupposes a shared set of values – often a lack of suffering, extending an individual’s life for as long as possible, or promoting the long-term continuation of the human species. But, again, these are not universal values, they are specific to particular subjects. That makes morality subjective, always. It might be possible to achieve broad agreement about what subjectivities will inform morality for a given group of people, but it will still be a subjective morality. Given your last sentence, you appear to be supposing that having “a better world” is a universal value, but it just isn’t. As for your particular examples of immorality, YOU find those immoral and I do too, but other people don’t, clearly, which really just disproves your point – the morality that you want to claim is objective is actually subjective, specific to particular subject positions like yours and mine and unlike those of the people carryign otu teh acts you describe.
Ultimately, “morality” is just a set of social norms that mediate behavior in order to effect a set of values or goals shared (one hopes) by the population subject to the norms.
Ugh, I missed some typos at the end there, sorry.
@24, John Horstman
Ugh, you’re muddling so many things there.
Descriptive moral relativism does not falsify moral realism. You might as well be claiming that the existence of creationists falsifies the theory of evolution.
The universal value is for satisfaction. And the sorts of things that cause satisfaction are constrained by how humans are, and this stuff can be empirically discovered.
“It’s perfectly rational to __________ ” is not the same as “Rationality alone leads one to _________.”
One should be rational. One should practice reason. That doesn’t mean that reason and rationality are anything other than tools. They are the best tools that we have to get what we want, but they are not what we ultimately want. They are tools to get it.
The Good is what we want. Morality is what we want. If the Good is a beautiful island of happiness, reason is the boat we should take to get there. If you fall off the boat, you won’t get to the island. That doesn’t mean the boat is the island.
^ Well said.
John Horstman, your rather diffuse and wandering argument claiming that moral values are subjective itself claims to be an objective judgement (yours) regarding values; namely, that they are subjective: which is a contradiction. It’s a little bit like the old positivist idea that the world is constructed out of subjective items called sense data, and that when we talk about the world we are really talking about our subjective experiences.
There is simply no reason to accept that, because someone disagrees with a moral judgement, it follows that the judgement is subjective. They could quite possibly (indeed, more credibly) be simply wrong. Take the judgement that slavery is wrong. There are pimps worldwide who apparently believe that it is quite okay to buy and sell women (and girls) for sex. It’s a global problem. But should we therefore take the judgement to be merely subjective? And why should we do so? Because some people disagree? How does that make the claim subjective? Morally, it is simply wrong for people to think that they can buy and sell human beings and use them for their own purposes, regardless of the consequences for those who are “owned”. And disagreement with this judgement does not make it subjective. It makes a person who disagrees not only wrong, but probably with a tendency to commit immoral acts, given the opportunity.
As Hume thought, it may be true that our passions drive our morals. Indeed, without passions we would have no morality at all. But it does not follow — and certainly Hume did not think so — that this makes morality subjective, though it certainly makes morality a human science, not a physical one. We can give all sorts of reasons to commend a particular value to someone. If they do not accept those reasons, they must give reasons to the contrary. Simply disagreeing is not an option, if they want to be rational about morality. And merely saying that morality is subjective, always, simply doesn’t qualify as a reason. In other words, you missed more than typos; you simply missed the point that your argument is very weak. Indeed, it is reasonable to think that you have contradicted yourself, accepting claims to reason at some points, and quite irrelevantly disclaiming the need to reason at others.
Well, ‘science and reason’ OUGHT to lead people towards better morality, by discrediting magical/irrational sources of moral authority.
But that would include Ayn Rand so don’t wait for Shermer to be of any help.
My comment was crossed by others who make basically the same point, though in different ways.
josef johann
That would seem to imply that you were either taught very well or taught very badly.