Science Can Answer Moral Questions?

[Sophus]

I would rather morality be in the hands of the rational too, but still science doesn't have the job of telling us how we should behave. Here's something PZ Meyers wrote recently...

1. Can science provide a morality to change the world?

NO.

Science merely describes what is, not what should be, and it also takes a rather universal view: science as science takes no sides on matters relevant to a particular species, and would not say that an ape is more important than a mouse is more important than a rock. Don't ask science to tell you what to do when making some fine-grained moral decision, because that is not what science is good at.

What science is, is a policeman of the truth. What it's very good at is telling you when a moral decision is being made badly, in opposition to the facts. If you try to claim that homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural, science can provide you a long list of animals that practice homosexuality freely, naturally, and with no ill consequences. If you try to claim that abortion is bad because it has horrible physiological consequences to pregnant women, science will provide you with the evidence that it does no such thing, and also that childbirth is far more physiologically debilitating.

If you want to claim that homosexuals should be stoned to death because the Bible says so, science will tell you yep, that's what it says, and further, we'll point out that the Abrahamic religions seem to be part of a culturally successful and relatively stable matrix. "Science", if we're imagining it as some institutional entity in the world, really doesn't care -- there is no grand objective morality, no goal or purpose to life other than survival over multiple generations, and it could dispassionately conclude that many cultures with moral rules that we might personally consider abhorrent can be viable.

However, I would suggest that science would also concede that we as a species ought to support a particular moral philosophy, not because it is objectively superior, but because it is subjectively the proper emphasis of humanity...and that philosophy is humanism. In the same way, of course, we'd also suggest that cephalopods would ideally follow the precepts of cephalopodism.

So don't look to science for a moral philosophy: look to humanism. Humanism says that we should strive to maximize the long-term welfare and happiness of humans; that we should look to ourselves, not to imaginary beings in the sky or to the imperatives written down in old books, to aspire to something better, something more coherent and successful at promoting our existence on the planet.

Science wouldn't disagree. But it would be a kind of passive agreement that says, sure, nothing in that idea is in violation of reality, go for it. It would also be egging the cephalopods on, though.

[Chewbie Chan]

That video is over an hour long so I'll have to watch it later.

I don't think he's looking for a universal right and wrong or anything of that sort. I think he's looking into how morality works in the brain. That has all kinds of applications.

I hope this turns out to be the case. Looking for a universal right and wrong with the preconceived notion that there is such a thing? - not interested. How morality works in the brain? -  that's a big deal!

[Sophus]

Here's an article I read today that's very much related: Why Science Won't Teach You About Homosexuality, Morals, and Religion