Chris Port Blog #250. Can Science Answer Moral Questions?

© Chris Port, May 2011

“There is no such thing as a fact. There are only stories. Choose different facts, and you get a different story...” ~ Marty Gull 

Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

Hmm. I would like to throw Lyotard’s ‘performativity’ and Smolin’s ‘groupthink’ into Harris’ mix. (See also Blog #62. Is education a commodity?) There is (unfortunately) no inevitability of scientific paradigms converging on Harris' 'factspace' of empathy and compassion. By way of counter-factual example, see Francis Fukuyama’s optimistically myopic ‘End of History’!

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” (The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama, 1992)

I agree with Harris’ advocacy of rational moral expertise (which seems reminiscent of Plato’s philosopher kings transformed into political scientists). However, politics has always been about the pursuit of power rather than truth, and science is just pissing in the wind when it goes against expediency. That is why I am so wary of giving the language of science any moral authority.

In The Postmodern Condition (1974), the postmodernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard predicted the growth of information technology and the breakdown of the nation state to be replaced by multi-national corporations and scientific discourse. According to Lyotard, science cannot legitimize its own activity. It must turn to narrative (political and philosophical).

However, the general decline in metanarratives after the Second World War led science to try and legitimize itself through performativity. What kind of research will generate more research of the same kind? Moral claims on the objective search for truth are soon compromised in the political wheeler-dealing required to secure funding and careers. In The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (2006), the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin is deeply critical of politics in science and the highly selective decision-processes created by ‘group think’.

Revising Popper with Wittgenstein, anomalous exceptions to a mostly accurate theory do not totally invalidate said theory. They merely indicate the inaccuracy of all generalizations and the advisability of applying a more context-specific theory.

(See Epistemological Debate Map - Probability, Statistics and Bikinis).

For example, Harris’s chess analogy of the law of queen conservation permits occasions when queen-sacrifice is more advantageous. So it is not a physical ‘law’, simply a general guideline. Science does not deal in general guidelines. It deals in non-negotiable physical processes.

The language of science is not suited to the negotiations of meaning. The language of art is. I think that may even be the reason for art’s evolution. Morality may have discernible patterns, and data analysis of those patterns may yield valuable insights, but moral decisions are not suited to mathematical formulas.

If ‘values reduce to facts’ then why stop there? Science is reductionism, an inexorable process of reduction to information theory. Information theory, by the reduction of language to 1s and 0s, has nothing to say. It is data for analysis, digital not analogous. What facts we reconstitute from that data are as analogous to values as freeze-dried re-hydrated soup is to ‘the real thing’.

To reduce the subjectivity of an experience to a mathematical model unavoidably reduces not only the quality of the experience but also the quality of the facts and their values. Moral values are not equivalent to numeric values, means-testing and points-systems. Claiming that facts are equivalent to values is slippery maths. Early Nazi euthanasia experiments on the mentally ill used rational, utilitarian economic arguments for their moral justification.

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History lesson for neo-positivists. Teachers talking maths in 1930s Italy... (From Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, Melampo Cinematografica, Italy 1997).

“Third grade. Listen to this work. Really. It’s quite shocking. The problem. Supporting a lunatic costs the state four marks a day. Supporting a cripple costs four and a half marks. An epileptic, three and a half marks. Figuring the average at four marks per day, and considering there are three hundred thousand, how much would the state save if these individuals were simply eliminated?”

“Completely unbelievable!”

“That is exactly how I reacted. Completely unbelievable. I can’t believe an elementary school child is expected to solve something like this. It’s a difficult calculation. The proportions, the percentages. They’d need some algebra to solve these equations, right? That would be high school material for us.”

“No, no. It’s just multiplication. What did you say it was? Three hundred thousand cripples?”

“Yes.”

“Three hundred thousand times four. We’d be saving around one million two hundred thousand marks a day if we killed them all. It’s easy.”

“Exactly. But you’re an adult. In Germany, seven year-olds are given these problems to work out. A most amazing race indeed...”

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All Harris has ‘factually’ claimed is that values are a demonstrable result of biological complexity and sentient consciousness. He has not, however, defined any value system, any moral formula for us to prove that one value is correct while another value is incorrect. He’s just played a very clever language game blurring the linguistic uses of ‘value’ and ‘fact’ until they appear to be little more than synonyms. He has also neatly sidestepped Gödel's incompleteness theorem which proves that no system can prove the consistency of the system itself.

However, to sidestep is not to solve, it is simply to avoid with nimble footwork. There may be a ‘continuum’ of facts whereby we know what it’s like to live in a failed state, but in the ‘real world’ of chaotic interacting incompletely defined systems, science has not (and, I would claim, cannot) define or prove any complete or successful system. Evolution and progress are not synonyms for the same thing. Evolution is a reasonably consistent theory that explains bio-diversity. Progress is a rationally inconsistent attempt to map physical bio-diversity to metaphysical values. Values have no factual physical existence.

Ultimately (as I have said before) they are only as ‘true’ as 2+2=4. Values may be reduced to information theory but, like laughter and consciousness, I quote from my dissertation Humour in the Holocaust:

‘All theories... may be inherently flawed by their specific cultural context and choice of metaphor. From such a simple relativistic perspective, it may be the case that even our current theories inform us more about our society’s preoccupations with itself than about the ostensible phenomenon under discussion.’

and

‘...if we try to explain consciousness and humour in terms of neurophysiology, the 'feeling' of it is somehow left behind.’

I would question whether any moral decision made without feeling is actually a moral decision at all. If we wish to retain any feeling in our moral decisions, I do not think that scientific arguments should be given priority. An advisory capacity, yes, but the final decision should be holistic. If we defer morality to science we are attempting to sidestep our consciences. Some judgments are better than others, and some decision-takers are better qualified than others. History teaches us more useful morality lessons than science after that.

Is history a science or an art? It’s a selection of narratives...