Morality without God

[vulcanlogician]

To Moore and to current analytic realists (now mostly scientific naturalists) - the idea that we can't prove good™ is as ludicrous for all of the same reasons as the contention that we couldn't prove gravity.  Scientific naturalists take it a step further.  Not only can we prove good, we can test it.  Here, Moores formulation utterly fails - if only for the moment.  The claim that humans possess an innate moral sense has become alot more testable than it was when moore (or anyone before him) presented it as a possibility.  It (or something like it) may end up being true, and it's truth may come at the cost of it's objectivity or realism, in that case.

Yeah. Moore's ethics has some issues. He even made pretty bad errors in logic in his Principia. But I think it's a pretty good attempt to answer Hume. And I also think that he's on to something by saying "goodness" is a simple concept. Further, I think he articulated something clearly that Plato was on to concerning "the Form of the Good." And while I think Plato was largely wrong in his assessment of the Form of the Good, there was a grain of truth in Plato's idea. I think Moore clarified something that Plato was right about... removing much Platonic Wrongness™ in the process.  

On a good day, I think that moral naturalism is quite plausible. To return to the tire example, maybe I'm asking too much to insist that "well-inflated tires are good" be explicitly expressed as a premise. A moral naturalist may say that we can observe that tires run most efficiently at 32 psi. And then when someone asks "what's the most efficient air pressure for my tires?" well, there it is (empirical science can figure this out without referring to an abstract ideal): "The best air pressure is 32 psi." Likewise when someone asks, about moral questions, similar scientific assessments can be made which put all matters to rest.

But Moore's theory is still worth working on. I'm not ready to abandon ship. I found the lecture I referred to earlier, by the way, in which the (very beautiful) philosopher Nandi Theunissen unpacks some Moorean ideas as they are accepted today and relates them to aesthetics among other things. She adequately describes the problem in very clear terms in the first ten minutes. I wonder if what she calls "GF theorists" wouldn't tend more toward moral naturalism. To bring in an example she offers: according to a GF theorist, a novel is "good" because --and only because-- it is "good for someone"-- ie. they find the experience of reading the novel beneficial for them. Where as a Moorean would want to say, "The novel is good for them because it is a good novel. End of story.

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The difficulty comes in selecting the goals. For example, having the goal of killing all of my enemies is not one that most societies recognize without limitations. Hence, my goals may well conflict with your goals. The question of whose goals take priority is, in some senses, the goal of laws and of morality (two very different things, I would point out).

And, I would say that in both law and morality, the idea is that there are more worthy goals and less worthy ones. There are goals that promote a smoothly functioning society and those that do not. There are those that promote happiness and well-being and those that do not.

The is/ought distinction seems to me to ultimately be a question of goals. The 'is' side has no goals: it says what various courses of action will lead to. The 'ought' chooses between the possibilities so as to meet certain desirable consequences. What makes a consequence desirable is the next issue, of course.

I think philosophers are going to hone in on this problem of "how do we know which goals to select?" Because it's pretty uncontroversial that once you've decided which goals are best, the oughts become clear.

As a mathematician, I'm sure you're aware of the view that ultimately mathematics cannot produce truth statements. Ultimately it is only a "useful fiction." That's something that I struggle with because (I've largely forgotten the argument) but I was convinced by it when I encountered it years back. But even so, it still seems that the pythagorean theorem says something true about right triangles. And I'm sure, in day-to-day practice, mathematicians assume something similar.

I think that morality is real in the same sense that mathematics is real. Ultimately (and I mean ONLY when you seriously lay the stink eye of skepticism on it) is morality a fiction. But for all intents and purposes, moral philosophy, with proper axioms CAN produce truth statements... just like (for all intents and purposes) mathematics can make truth statements about right triangles.

My issue is, if people are going to treat morality in this way, they ought also treat math and science in this way. People want to say "science can produce truth statements"-- "math can produce truth statements"-- but moral theory cannot. I think they apply the same amount of skepticism that renders math a "useful fiction" to morality but fail to apply the same amount of skepticism to math or science.

I love skepticism. I think it's all fine and good to be skeptical about morality. In fact, I advocate such a thing. But you can have runaway skepticism. You can wonder if the table in front of you or the chair you are sitting on is actually real. And again, I think it's wonderful to explore that kind of question. But people need to be aware what level of skepticism they use. An astronomer needs to assume "Jupiter is actually there," at some point to make accurate observations of its hydrogen content. If he is unwilling in this regard, he might be apt to ignore many things his observations reveal to him. I mean, why pay attention to those observations?

In short, I think morality is just as real as mathematical or scientific postulations. No more. No less. Maybe it's all "useful fiction" in the end. But, if that's the case then: oh well!

So, along this vein, I think we can ask something like, "What are the most worthy goals?" and come up with objectively true answers. I don't mean The One and Only Answer™. I mean, a workable theory. Something like Newtonian physics that can be (and should be) improved upon. Much debate and observation and questioning ought to transpire, but I think we can get there.

Will everyone agree in the end? Hell no. But people don't agree about proven scientific fact. Look at creationists. Just because a creationist will never accept that the world is more than a few thousand years old, doesn't mean the rest of us can't look at the data and come to a better conclusion. There will always be controversy in moral theory. And the masses will often prefer the cruder theories that religion provides to more accurate ones.

Doesn't mean that (in the end) there isn't a more accurate way to see moral postulates. I think there is. And for this reason, I think morality is objective (rather than subjective).