{"id":635,"date":"2007-11-13T11:54:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-13T10:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2007\/11\/can-morality-be-scientific-news-from-beyond-belief.html"},"modified":"2014-11-14T05:56:31","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T04:56:31","slug":"can-morality-be-scientific-news-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2007\/11\/can-morality-be-scientific-news-from.html","title":{"rendered":"Can morality be scientific? News from “Beyond Belief”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Well, the \u201cBeyond Belief<\/a>\u201d meeting has been and gone, and while we wait for the videos to be posted details are a bit thin. Pharyngula <\/a>says that it was all very interesting, but a bit of a mish-mash. The New Scientist\u2019s report on the meeting (available on the Think Humanism<\/a> forum), has a few gems. Apparently, the meeting was less stridently atheist than last year:<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s event<\/a> was something of an \u201catheist love fest\u201d said some, who urged a more wide-ranging discourse this time round. While all present agreed that rational, evidence-based thinking should always be the basis of how we live our lives, it was also conceded that people are irrational by nature, and that faith, religion, culture and emotion must also be recognised as part of the human condition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The New Scientist also gives this gem, on the limitations of reason:<\/p>\n

The first firebrand is lobbed into the audience by Edward Slingerland, an expert on ancient Chinese thought and human cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. \u201cReligion is not going away,\u201d he announced. Even those of us who fancy ourselves rationalists and scientists, he said, rely on moral values \u2013 a set of distinctly unscientific beliefs.<\/p>\n

Where, for instance, does our conviction that human rights are universal come from? \u201cHumans\u2019 rights to me are as mysterious as the holy trinity,\u201d he told the audience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. \u201cYou can\u2019t do a CT scan to show where humans\u2019 rights are, you can\u2019t cut someone open and show us their human rights,\u201d he pointed out. \u201cIt\u2019s not an empirical thing, it\u2019s just something we strongly believe. It\u2019s a purely metaphysical entity.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Slingerhand\u2019s pronouncement has Larry Moran<\/a> spitting:<\/p>\n

Oops. I\u2019ve got news for you, Prof. Slingerland, you can\u2019t count yourself as a rationalist if you think that morality requires religion. And you can\u2019t lay claim to being a scientist if you think that moral values are unscientific.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Slingerland makes a valid point, but unfortunately illustrates it with a gross misconception. As I posted earlier<\/a>, just because just because something is intangible doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t scientific. The mind exists \u2013 although you can\u2019t do an autopsy on it. Language similarly doesn\u2019t exist in any physical sense, yet is certainly open to scientific investigation. Information and concepts such as these exist only insofar as the physical, natural world exists. They depend on the existence of a physical reality, they are products of that physical reality, and they can be investigated empirically.<\/p>\n

But Prof Moran is being unfair. Moral psychology is a bona fide science, no doubt about that. But moral judgments (and non-empirically justified concepts such as human rights)are frequently non scientific. It\u2019s not simply that people use intuition rather than careful analysis (although that often happens too). Rather, these a decisions that cannot <\/span>be made by recourse to science \u2013 they cannot be decided empirically<\/span>. That\u2019s because they rely on subjective judgments regarding values (e.g. how much is a human life worth? How much risk are we willing to take?). Science can inform these decisions, but cannot dictate them. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/a> gives a concrete examples:<\/p>\n

Consider questions regarding \u201cnormal functioning\u201d in mental health care: Are the answers to these questions statistical, or evaluative? For example, is \u201cnormal\u201d mental health simply the psychological condition of most people, or is it good<\/em> mental health? If the former, the issue is, at least in principle, empirically decidable; if the latter, the issues must be decided, if they can be decided, by arguments about value.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a fundamental dichotomy that is often forgotten by science enthusiasts!<\/p>\n

Edit<\/span>: A video of Edward Slingerhand\u2019s talk is available<\/a>, so you can judge for yourself.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, the \u201cBeyond Belief\u201d meeting has been and gone, and while we wait for the videos to be posted details are a bit thin. Pharyngula says that it was all very interesting, but a bit of a mish-mash. The New Scientist\u2019s report on the meeting (available on the Think Humanism forum), has a few gems. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nCan morality be scientific? News from "Beyond Belief"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Well, the "Beyond Belief" meeting has been and gone, and while we wait for the videos to be posted details are a bit thin. 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