In November, 2010, some leading thinkers in various areas of science (e.g. neuroscience, theoretical physics), philosophy (applied ethics, metaethics) and psychology (cognitive psychology) gathered together to debate the question of whether science can 'teach us right from wrong.' Debaters included:
Simon Blackburn (metaethicist)
Peter Singer (ethicist / applied ethicist)
Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist)
Patricia Churchland (philosophy of neuroscience)
Sam Harris (neuroscientist, author)
Stephen Pinker (cognitive psychologist)
The debate, moderated by the Science Network's Roger Bingham, can be found in its entirety here.
In some sense, the debate constituted exactly the sort of thing we should be hoping to see more of: important questions being approached in a way that is informed by cutting edge research across disciplines. Unfortunately, this debate was in many ways a 'cringe-fest.' Let me explain.
What should have been (in principle), given the calibre of the discussants, one of the most fruitful discussions in the past five years, resulted in (by my estimation) in a discussion in which little to nothing was accomplished. Why? What went wrong?
Several things. One problem was that there were (roughly) two different 'claims of dominion' on the subject matter in question. Consider again the question Can Science Teach us Right From Wrong? Those from the 'science camp' took themselves to have the appropriate sort of expertise to answer the question because they take themselves to be experts in the subject matter of What Science Can Teach Us. The moral philosophers take themselves to be experts in the subject matter of What Can Teach us Right From Wrong. The science camp then took 'Can Science Teach us Right From Wrong?' to be an aspect of the embedded question 'What can Science Teach Us?' while the moral philosophers take Can Science Teach us Right From Wrong to be an aspect of the embedded question 'What Can Teach us Right From Wrong?'
The source of the cringe-fest runs deeper than this problem. Roughly, from my perspective as viewer, it seemed that no one in the panel had any confusion about what sort of methodology is used in science, and more broadly, what science is. The same is not true for philosophy. Setting aside Patricia Churchland for the moment, Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss seemed to view (falsely, and unfoundedly) philosophy as having 'one methodology' and the methodology they seemed to be attributing to philosophy is the sort of methodology that we (with some mistrust) attribute to the speculative metaphysics of the 17th century rationalists. Harris and Krauss, taking themselves to be answering an aspect of the embedded question, "What Can Science Teach Us?", were inclined to think along the lines of: "Someone's got to say something about human values. We've got an evolutionary story about how human values have come to be, that's enough to answer the relevant question, and all they've got is 'philosophical speculation.'" It's no surprise that the representatives of the physical sciences took themselves to have answers to questions of right and wrong, then, and be at odds with the moral philosophers on the matter.
It's also no surprise that the debate was not productive. The assumption that what philosophy has to say about questions of moral philosophy is limited to the methodology of speculative metaphysics is wildly off the mark. In this respect, while the two camps of the debate were not talking past each other when discussing the question from the side of the embedded question 'what can science teach us?' (there was commonality of content vis-a-vis 'science') they were talking past each other when discussing the question from the side of the embedded question 'what can teach us about right and wrong?'. On this side of the question, the two sides had very different pre-debate conceptions of the nature and methodology of philosophy. The debate suffered for this, and it was the scientist's uninformed assumptions about philosophy that was to blame, I'm afraid.
The debate also suffered from another crucial point on which the discussants were 'talking past each other.' Based on the speeches in the debate by Harris, Churchland and Krauss, they took the question driving the debate to be one that receives an affirmative answer so long as science can provide an explanation for human values. Let's say that science explains human values just in case science provides an illuminating explanation of how human values arose within an (appropriately) evidentially supported evolutionary story. Here, the philosophers would all reject out of hand that, if such a story could be provided, it would warrant an affirmative answer to the question of whether science can teach us right from wrong. The moral philosopher finds the matter of 'teaching right and wrong' to be something more than an evolutionary-explanatory story for how human values came into existence. Rather, we want to know (for instance) what makes first-order moral judgements true? Which moral principles (which we appeal to to adjudicate moral disputes) are the right ones, and why? From the perspective where these questions need answering to answer the embedded question 'What teaches us right from wrong?', science (under a conception of science that both sides of the dispute would agree to) obviously fails to 'teach us right from wrong' and this is because the questions do not fall in the domain within which science could in principle have anything to say about.
Because there were (vastly) different conceptions going into the debate about (i) what philosophy, and its methodology, is; and (ii) what constitutes an adequate explanation to the question of whether science can teach us right from wrong, the debate was unfruitful.
At the end of the day, I think most philosophers would agree that, in the sense that the scientists understood the question, it's obvious that science can answer the question of how the emergence of the particular values humans have could have arisen within a plausible evolutionary story. That's not the interesting question, though; it's essentially a descriptive matter, not a normative one. If we tried to control for at least some of the ambiguity by clearly distinguishing descriptive from normative questions and then re-framed the debate around the question, 'Can Science Answer Normative Questions?' (all while getting all discussants on board prior to the debate on the matter of what methods constitute the methods of philosophy and science, respectively), we might have actually learned something!
p.s. The answer is no, of course.
Thanks for clarifying that at the end haha- and a very well written piece. I can understand how it must be frustrating for philosopers. I have often marked papers (I am a scientist by the way, but the illustration will work)in which the student talks at great length about something very interesting, but ultimately irrelevant. Imagine the exam asked "by which methodology can we measure X in tissues of Y?" and the student going off one one about how X arises etc. etc. It's painful to award that student no marks, but that it what has to be done.
ReplyDeleteIf science is incapable of answering such questions, which you iterate in your post script and I agree- surely the debate was destined to be fruitless from the outset though..??
I really enjoyed this post. I may have more substantive to say at some later point, but I just wanted to say very well done!
ReplyDeleteHi Adam
ReplyDeleteLike Ben I really enjoyed that; and, also like Ben, I have several thoughts but nothing very substantive at the minute. One thing I will say is that you draw out very well the distinction between a descriptive account of moral behaviour, i.e. what are the moral norms and where do they come from, and a normative account answering to the question of whether or not these moral norms are true. I think part of the problem here is to convince the scientists (i) that normative accounts are even plausible, (ii) that they have any acceptable level of resolution, (iii) that the descriptive account misses something that the normative account captures; NB it's not the philosopher you need to convince (well at least not all philosophers), but the scientist. From what I can tell, the scientists you mention all seemed to be quite reductionist, such that what a philosopher would see to require a normative account, the scientists in question sought to reduce to the level of scientific explanation; and the latter carries with it a tinge of scientism to the effect that science is the measure of all that is true.