Can Science Demonstrate Racism or Genocide is Morally Wrong?

[AllenWitmerMiller (Retired Professor & Minister.)]

It has always bothered me when I hear some who claim to know Jesus’ teachings and the Bible claim that atheists “have no basis for determining morality”. Absurd. All humans have criteria for determining morality. It is not a monopoly of Christians or theists or anybody else.

[Mung]

It bothers me too. And I sure hope no one here is doing that.

[T_aquaticus]

@Mung

I agree, though I would state it in more forceful terms. Science is incapable of telling us what we ought to do. Science is incapable of telling us what we ought to believe. Science cannot tell us that we ought to believe that the earth is more than 6000 years old.

This is one reason I say that at heart it all boils down to morality. So what if something is a “fact” if there is no reason that anyone ought to believe it. It’s not wrong to be wrong, and it’s most certainly not evil to teach things that are not true.

As stated earlier, science is a tool used for acquiring knowledge. People can certainly refuse to use that tool.

[Patrick]

@NLENTS

I think it is morally wrong to teach untruths because you are doing harm and potentially increasing suffering and reducing flourishing of the students who could have received a proper education. But if someone really believes those untruths, they are not morally culpable, and certainly not evil, because they were doing what they think is best. That’s why I would never call the YECs evil .

So if a group of Muslims honestly believed that they were doing what Allah wanted them to do by crashing airplanes into buildings, they are not morally culpable and not evil?

[nwrickert (Neil Rickert)]

@NLENTS

I think it is morally wrong to teach untruths because you are doing harm and potentially increasing suffering and reducing flourishing of the students who could have received a proper education.

Good teachers often over-simplify.

Is that teaching untruths? Is that harmful?

“i” before “e” except after “c” – an untruth.

[NLENTS (Nathan H. Lents)]

@nwrickert

Good teachers often over-simplify.

Is that teaching untruths? Is that harmful?

“i” before “e” except after “c” – an untruth.

If you think a pedagogical strategy that simplifies complicated material in order to teach it is the same thing, morally or practically, as teaching something that is in explicit conflict with modern scientific standards, than I can’t help you.

[NLENTS (Nathan H. Lents)]

@Patrick

So if a group of Muslims honestly believed that they were doing what Allah wanted them to do by crashing airplanes into buildings, they are not morally culpable and not evil?

That doesn’t at all follow from my point. My point is about suffering, nourishing, and so forth, not what someone believes that God wants of them. Moral culpability still applies because they know full well all of the innocent life they are about to snuff out and the ripples of suffering that will flow from that. In my equation of morality, and moral culpability, belief about the divine do not factor at all. God gets no credit, no blame.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@NLENTS, to restate your position, you are arguing for utilitarianism with benefits and harms established by scientific inquiry.

This, however, is equivocating badly between utilitarianism and science. It is not possible to derive that the “right” thing to do is the greatest good for the greatest number. Also, in practice, there are always trade offs that arise. It is not clear how science helps us resolve them. In fact, science usually heightens our awareness of the tradeoffs.

You even allude to this at time…

@NLENTS

This is all “how I see it,” and of course I’m aware that lots disagree, but this is grounded in scholarship on moral philosophy and it came to me through the writings of Sam Harris, a neuroscientist. Here goes…

Moral philosophy is NOT science. One cannot derive moral philosophy from science, though a moral philosophy might be able to make use of science to help make assessments. This, it seems, is what you are arguing for here. No one will disagree with this. However, it seems to be a grand equivocation to say that a moral philosophy that makes use of science IS science’s determination.

You also haven’t really answered my questions:

@swamidass

How could science demonstrate that genocide is morally wrong?

How could science demonstrate that racism is wrong?

How could science demonstrate that all humans have universal rights?

You say…

@NLENTS

Any act, decision, etc., can be viewed as morally wrong if it leads to more total net suffering (or less net flourishing), and morally right if it reduces total net suffering (or increases total net flourishing).

So, does this mean that if genocide reduces net suffering it is morally good? How do you establish scientifically that utilitarianism is morally correct? How you justify throwing away the enlightenment concerns over utilitarianism because of the tyranny of the majority (remember John Stuart Mills)? How do you decide who’s utility function is the correct one?

To be clear, you offer several high level statements about moral philosophy. Great. However, moral philosophy is not science. So all these “hows” have to answered somehow with the scientific method.

[PdotdQ]

@NLENTS

My thinking on this has been impacted by Sam Harris’s work and I urge you to read “the moral landscape.”

The claims in the moral landscape seem incoherent to me. I believe there are actually two claims:

1. Morally good means maximizing happiness and reducing suffering, and science can help in this goal

This is just Utilitarianism. This is not new, and the first part, “morally good means maximizing happiness and reducing suffering” is an unscientific axiom.

The other claim seems to be:

2. Other sciences, say physics or medicine, rely on unproven axioms, so it is okay for morality, which rely on unproven axioms to be considered scientific.

This does not follow. Every philosopher of science knows that any science is motivated by unproven axioms. No one claims that that the axioms required to do physics (e.g. the logic system I choose, or the axiom of Uniformitarianism) is scientific. Further, while this trait is something that both physics and morality have in common, this similarity does not mean that they are both sciences.

Also, the axiomatic statements that underlies science leaves open the conclusion of science to be determined by the scientific process. Harris’ moral landscape on the other hand already assumes axiomatically the conclusion that Utilitarianism is correct. An easy counterargument to the moral landscape is imposing the exact same argument of Harris, but swapping utilitarianism with deontological ethic.

Finally, I think it is important to point out:

@NLENTS

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist.

This is extremely dubious. Sam Harris I believe only ever produce ~3 papers in neuroscience, the last of which is in 2011. His PhD is funded through his own anti-religious think-tank to support a very biased experiment. Not only that, he did not do his own experiments for his PhD thesis!

You can ask @swamidass whether he would graduate a grad student who did not do their own experiment (or in @swamidass’s case numerical simulations) for their own thesis.

You can read more about criticism of his neuroscientific credentials here:

Neuroscientist Sam Harris

Here is a more in depth review of his PhD paper by a statistician:

Can fMRI Predict Who Believes In God? Part I

[jongarvey]

I’m not sure why a non-publishing neuroscience PhD would be the best guide to moral philosophy, but it’s worth recording that there are some significant scientists who don’t buy Sam Harris’s approach to the matter.

Before looking out that link, however, I had already noted that you (on Harris’s behalf) have already taken consequentialist and utilitarian ethics as axiomatic - how would one determine scientifically that that is the right approach?

Once it is admitted, though, there would be a good case for saying that human zoos were part of a Eugenics project that sought the greatest well-being of the greatest number, by purifying the human race of degenerate lines. If that cost a few unhappy degenerates their freedom in educating the public about that greater good, then it’s quite hard to quantify the maths, but the ethics is exemplary.

My own contemporary example, though, is simpler. Leading relief charity organisers - previously lauded for their unique planning and administrative abilities in disaster relief - have been accused of using the bait of food-aid to procure sexual favours from poor disaster victims.

The scientific calculus seems simple in this case. The abilities of Aid Director X are the best hope for the survival hundreds of thousands of shattered lives. But if his sexual needs are not met by the exploitation of a few women, he will withdraw his labour and go elsewhere, at the cost of the well being, and indeed the very lives, of the entire population. The same unfortunate outcome will arise if he is involuntarily removed by disciplinary procedures.

Quite clearly, then, the moral thing to do is to turn a blind eye to his peccadillos in the interests of the greater good.

There seems to be some reason to suppose that the guilty parties in this scandal have made something like that kind of calculation. So what scientific metric would Harris envisage that would deal justly with the abuse of insignificant poor people by “indispensible” rich people?