Chris Port Blog #352. The Singing Pig: A Reply to The Moral Landscape Challenge

© Chris Port, 8 February 2014

 

A reply to The Moral Landscape Challenge

(I had to reduce a 10,000 word argument to 1,000 words, so it’s a bit ‘crammed’).

 

“Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.” ~ Robert Heinlein

 

 

Pigs are highly intelligent animals. They can learn their names by two to three weeks of age, they can run a mile in seven minutes, and they taste nice in bacon sandwiches. Life… it’s not fair, is it?

 

Ought morality to be fair? If so, do we mean ‘equitable’ or ‘deserving’? Ultimately, this is a neuroaesthetic problem (e.g. a cognitive bias towards utilitarianism or elitism).

 

Sam Harris proposes that the only coherent principle of morality is ‘the well-being of conscious creatures’. I agree.

 

The real problem is one of in[ex]clusivity. Sticking with our porcine metaphor: ‘All conscious creatures are unequal, but some conscious creatures are more unequal than others’. This is a variation of our earlier neuroaesthetic problem.

 

Consider the following case study:

 

Food Project Proposes Matrix-Style Vertical Chicken Farms

Olivia Solon, Wired, 15 February 2012

 

Admittedly, breeding brainless livestock would reduce their conscious suffering. Is it then moral? Arguably. But many would feel an aesthetic ‘wisdom of repugnance’ and sense a slippery slope. If chickens, why not pigs? And if pigs, why not lobotomized human work drones? My point here is that moral facts are inextricably linked to neuroaesthetic values.

 

Applying a variation of the equivalence principle, Sam Harris argues that facts about well-being equate to moral values. I mostly agree, with some quibbles about selectivity and performativity. On the surface, these are institutional problems but their underlying cause is also neuroaesthetic (e.g. altruism versus greed).

 

Do these quibbles falsify the principle? No. But without a sound system of prioritization, it may be incoherent in practice. Prioritization (possibly optimization) is another neuroaesthetic problem – all facts are uselessly indifferent until contextualized in a narrative.

 

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

 

Can moral facts be scientifically tested and falsified? Yes. They can be mapped and navigated by empirical cartographers independently of cultural compasses – insofar as cultural institutions will permit in practice.

 

The real problem is one of persuasion, and the real question is always “Cui bono” (to whose benefit?). I suspect that The Moral Landscape is undermined not by de jure principle but by de facto cynicism – selectivity and performativity.

 

Assuming evolution (and discounting intelligent design) we would be committing a teleological fallacy if we claimed that morality evolved for any purpose.

 

It would be less erroneous if we simply claimed that communities (and shared cultural values) evolved as a successful survival strategy. From this we can deduce that morality evolved from a natural hierarchical pecking order into etiquette.

 

Homo sapiens evolved in the (mostly insentient) natural world. Our intelligence evolved as another successful survival strategy. Eventually, this sapient differential evolved into misrecognition. We began to see ourselves as separate from the natural world. Thus, I would argue that the essence of higher level consciousness is not so much recognition as misrecognition.

 

However, this separation is a fallacy. In (physical) reality, sentience is an emergent phenomenon. The artificial is still part of the natural world.

 

Morality can only exist in higher level consciousness. Facts can only be contextualized and [mis]recognized within narratives. These are Wittgensteinian language games which are inextricably linked to cultural practices.

 

Sam Harris proposes we should discard cultural relativism and quantify these language games in terms of falsifiable facts about conscious well-being. However, consciousness must precede well-being.

 

This is a one-way logic gate. We can talk of consciousness without well-being, but it makes no sense to talk of well-being without consciousness.

 

Therefore, existence must precede essence (sans Sartrean Free Will) and survival must precede morality. But survival of what? Individuals, communities, genes, or memes?

 

These qualities are entangled and interdependent, but we cannot be equitable from first principle here. Unfortunately, we do not live in a deathless paradise. Therefore, in the physical universe, we can only talk of survival and morality in terms of priorities (e.g. dilemmas or conflicts of interest).

 

This is the essence of morality. How do we choose? More importantly, if others disagree, how do we persuade (or enforce)? Ultimately, persuasion comes down to neuroaesthetics.

 

From a pseudo-liberal perspective, the rise of religious fundamentalism is ambiguous. It appears to be a Third World backlash against ultra-positivist hegemony. However, it is simultaneously appearing on the political agendas of the developed world. This suggests that fundamentalism may have deep-rooted psychological and memetic causes as well as political and economic ones. Is fundamentalism the inevitable sequitur to postmodernism, or are there more sophisticated and pragmatic options (e.g. metamodernism)?

 

The ‘free market’ has created an institutional trap where rational individuals no longer have even the illusion of free will. The profit motive dominates and coerces: “If I don’t do it, somebody else will, and my family will be out on the street…”

 

How do we dismantle institutionalized irrationality? How do we teach pigs to sing?

 

When confronted by meticulously reasoned falsification arguments, religious fundamentalists experience cognitive dissonance. Their whole belief system is challenged. However, instead of reconstructing their belief system, they retreat into the psychology of denial and prevarication.

Capitalist fundamentalists exhibit similar behaviour. So, rather than being different phenomena, dogmatic religion and dogmatic capitalism may be different manifestations of the same underlying problem: irrationality.

 

There is an obvious problem here. Most scientific research is not dependent on funding from religious fundamentalists. However, it is dependent on funding from capitalist fundamentalists.

 

At the moment, mainstream debates are dominated by the language games (and logic traps) of ‘performativity’. Further separation of science and the humanities can only make this worse. This is why I want to move in the opposite direction.

 

The more we can engage the sciences in meaningful debate, the more we can bring the concept of falsification to bear on performativity. It’s not the solution in itself, but changing the language game is the only way forward – and I can’t see any other way of doing it.