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Science and Morality

  
 
Perfect Tommy
03:16 / 14.12.05
Science has nothing to say about morality--Duncan

Not sure that's entirely true, Dunc. At least, I'm not sure that the implications of scientific theory don't have anything to say about morality.

There's a topic in this, actuallyally.--Boboss

****************************************************

I've been giving this some thought lately. The collision in my brain has been this: I studied game theory all this past year, and then over the summer, started reading, very slowly, Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. He suggests that the fact that people have consciences which urge them to do 'the right thing,' even when it is inconvenient, is evidence that there is some universal moral law out there, even if people can't quite agree on what it is. Which is interesting, but I couldn't help but wonder about the possibility of conscience having evolved because it was useful to have around in a population of very smart, social primates. From there, I had to wonder if the mathematics of games force a conscience to develop (and to be sometimes ignored) in any suitable civilization in any compossible world invented by God.

More generally, altruism appears to have some sort of evolutionary benefit (either to the individual, or by increasing the likelihood of relatives reproducing). Monkeys go on strike when they perceive unfairness. What other implications about morality might we find from math, biology, and other sciences?
 
 
modern maenad
11:21 / 14.12.05
Tommy - thanks for flagging the Capuchin research - I'm really interested in work on the emotional and cultural lives of other animals. What sprung immediately to mind after reading your post was the almost universal altruism of parent animals who feed/protect/teach their young. I'm thinking birds running themselves ragged to feed a nest of young, luring potential dangers to themselves to protect chicks etc. Widening this out I've read accounts of adult to adult altruism amongst several mammaliam species, elephants, all the primates, whales and dolphins. It also blows my mind when you get cross species altruism, for example dogs protecting humans. There's a great chapter on altruism in When Elephants Weep; The Emotional Lives of Animals by Jeffrey Mason. It opens with an account of an elephant repeatedly trying to rescue a baby rhino from a salt lick, despite being charged by the mother rhino trying to protect the infant.

In relation to your question about science having something to say about morality, then I feel the answer is yes and no - I find it sad that we have to keep nonhuman animals in artificial, captive environments and conduct behavioural experiments to 'demonstrate' the commonalities between ourselves. As humans I feel we're so hung up and heavily invested in being not animal that we (ontologically) twist and manipulate the nonhuman animals around us into being extreme other. All this is deeply embedded in our language and conceptualisations - human = altruism, animal = instinct.
 
 
Evil Scientist
12:53 / 14.12.05
All this is deeply embedded in our language and conceptualisations - human = altruism, animal = instinct.

I totally agree that most animals above a certain level of behavioural development are capable of demonstrating altruistic behaviour. The mistake many people make is assuming that all human altruism comes from a source other than instinctive.

We're animals, just like the rest. Altruistic behaviour is something that is critical to the cohesion of social animal groups, and also to maintain the next generation of offspring in species which give birth to vulnerable infants.

Of course, there are some animals who do not demonstrate much in the way of alturistic behaviour, or rather have not been observed demonstrating altruistic behaviour. Unless you count salmon dying after swimming upstream to mate and die as altruistic (in that they die to give life to their spawn).
 
 
astrojax69
22:43 / 14.12.05
I'm really interested in work on the emotional and cultural lives of other animals.

i strongly urge you to read temple grandin's 'animals in translation', mm.


as for a more focused response to the thread topic, i often wonder that we don't more often hear the argument against, say lewis, about the seemingness of our mental life to 'perhaps' suggest a higher order power/principle of some sort - couldn't equally we say that the existence of our choices, per se, equally forcefully suggests that there could be no higher order principles to obey.

how can a choice be 'right' or 'wrong' without some end point assumed. but if we are merely matter - and we know we are matter, what we argue about is if it is 'merely' - then the choices simply represent possible ways of living out our existence. we choose to impose a moral to say an action is good, or otherwise. why?

the instinct to what we 'call' moral behaviour is simply the instantiation of a fabulously complex brain that gives us, somehow, an awareness of our existence and so a realisation that the experience we have can be modified and affected by deliberate strategies, but these can only conform to the limitations set by the physics of our existence. back to matter...

in short, yes, science can tell us much about morality - but perhaps not the kind of insights your post might have expected. well, s'what i rekkun, anyway
 
 
squib
21:29 / 20.12.05
do I have the thread right? something like

how do the sciences define "morality" as a biological attribute?

I don't know if the sciences, biology, chemistry mostly, consider morality. The social sciences do, psychology, sociology anthropology for example.

the purer sciences are studies of the physical. I think there are scientific descriptions of brain and nerve activity and links to particular mental processes.

but I don't think that it covers morality.

at least not any instance i've come across.

i think there's a certain amorality to scientific analysis that negates sympathetic consideration. I think it's what Einstein was trying to introduce to scientific research after the whole Plutonium thing.

It might also explain why scientifically-based medical practicioners must manditorily attend ethics and bedside manner classes in some schools.

any thoughts?
ta
tenix
 
 
Perfect Tommy
23:43 / 20.12.05
Not sure if it's useful to play the 'my science is purer than yours' game that sometimes shows up. As I said, I came to start thinking about this from mathematics. Mathematics is often seen as being 'purer' even than physics, yet math and biology appear to have more to say about morality than the physics that the two disciplines sandwich.

do I have the thread right? something like... how do the sciences define "morality" as a biological attribute?

Maybe... I'm coming to see this as more of a discovery thread, wherein we can figure out just what there is to talk about, by talking about it. Questions that come to mind from the discussion so far:
  • What traits can we unpack from this broad and vague 'morality'?
  • Altruism is one such trait, and appears to have clear evolutionary benefits for humans and other animals. Are there other morality traits which can be seen to have evolutionary benefits (either wrt biological evolution or cultural evolution)?
  • I'm not a social scientist, so I don't really know what they say about morality. Do morality questions get fewer as one moves away from, say, psychology toward social anthropology? If so, is that a mistake?
Morality is something that crops up repeatedly in human cultures. Something like it crops up in non-human animals. It seems like philosophy tends to discuss why something is right or wrong through reasoning, but I think a kind of 'unexamined morality' invents itself and science may be able to give us an idea why and how.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
00:56 / 21.12.05
At least since the the revolution in scientific and philosophical thought in the 16th and 17th centuries and which changed the very way in which we think and exist - this revolution resulted ultimately in the strange crisis that is the western consciousness... However the main thing is surely that since then Science has always been political and consequently like it or not it has always been moral or perhaps more accurately 'moralities'...

Am I alone here in thinking (following many others) that physics is the most political and moral of all sciences ? to avoid this thought is surely to refuse to accept how important science as morality and politics has become...
 
 
Perfect Tommy
01:04 / 21.12.05
Am I alone here in thinking (following many others) that physics is the most political and moral of all sciences ?

Could you expand on that? I don't see anything political in physics, but certainly the types of research that are encouraged have included things like atomic weapons... is that what you're referring to?
 
 
Lurid Archive
14:01 / 21.12.05
I'd second Tommy in wanting to hear that point expanded on, sdv. I suppose the point is seeing the funding process and political directives as part of the discipline itself? I still dont quite see it, tbh.

I also wanted to respond to Tommy's

Not sure if it's useful to play the 'my science is purer than yours' game that sometimes shows up.

because I am the sort of person who makes that distinction. Not as a value judgement, by the way, but as a way to retain meaning. For my money, the social sciences just aren't sciences. A science is not just a systematic study - History doesn't count as a science, for instance - and must also contribute something in the way of quantitive predictive modelling based on repeatable empirical testing. But this is usually taken fairly strictly so as to exclude cookery, for instance and I'd also say that economics fails to be a science. Pure math, by this yardstick, is definitely not a science and neither is much of applied math - that is, the issue isn't "purity".

As to what sciences say about morality....well, if you look at the content of the disciplines as seen in textbooks and research articles and the like, then they say very little. Evolutionary psychology (perhaps also not a science) tries to say something, but it is rather more descriptive than normative.
 
 
squib
18:56 / 21.12.05
I don't have a copy of my biology text from Uni handy (leant it to a friend for the frog-life cycle diagram).

however, the introduction appears to make a disclaimer that I've seen in a number of science texts (physics and chemistry). It describes the discipline in question as seeking out the physically quantifiable, and does not concern itself with the ephemoral (I can't recall how its phrased).

this seems to exclude moral considerations from the discipline, not from any particular scientist.

I recall a 2nd year cellular biology lab, in which the professor took great delight in our squeamishness when he described the process by which they obtain blood for our lab from chickens.

This also brings me to a tangetial topic that I think has some bearing on this thread, particularly if we're tossing ideas about: what exactly is the relationship between sciences & technology?

there's research for private industry & governments. There is the development of new tools for the sciences (say, the electron microscope or a particle collider or ultrasound).

In terms of developing our measuring tools, we distance ourselves from our own direct perception of the universe. We are placing the lens of a microscope between the lens of our eyes and the object we're observing.

this distances the human observer from the observed thing. The tools push us further from direct observation. The further we isolate ourselves, the harder it is to feel sympathy. think of holding someone's hand with a glove on or without one.

(there's also a can of worms here for another thread, possibly in the laboratory - if scientists want to see something normally invisible, and build a machine to help them detect it using theory, until they complete a machine that shows them what they expect to see, then how do we know that the machine's displayed result are objective beyond the maker's bias?)

I actually read an account of a new method for slaughtering chickens faster. The spokesperson referred to it as a success because it "shaved valuable tenths of a second off of the manufacturing times." I wept.

there's also experimentation on animals and humans. dissection. "modern" medical practice (invasive and cutting). If our medical practice developed on the battlefield, where is the morality supposed to come from? I believe that war teaches mercy as it deals death.

when big business (most decidedly immoral) takes the sciences under its wing, the hopes for a moral voice dies out under the mounds of spun lies of the marketing machine.

Monsanto anyone? they have taken the biological sciences to a whole new level of immorality. Why else would they expand the amount of products with aspertame in them, despite growing public concern over the reported deleterious effects on one's immune system (google it if you like, there's lots).

Where is the voice to say, "dudes, factory farms are concentration camps for chickens. Why do you hate poultry so much?"

Also - the sciences are quite predominantly a male discipline. Our agricultural industry exploits the females of given species in extremis. Chickens to lay eggs, cattle to create milk, bees honey, etc.

As individual humans involved in the sciences, where is our personal responsibility? what about for those of us outside of the sciences?

If the sciences are indifferent to morality, what's to be done?

-not jack
 
 
museum in time, tiger in space
03:50 / 20.10.08
E.O Wilson's article on The Biological Basis of Morality has been put online recently. It's several years old now, but still has some interesting stuff in it. There's a well-written (and, in my opinion, very valid) attack on it here.
 
 
grant
20:48 / 21.10.08
EO Wilson seems to be popping up everywhere lately - I just found a book he co-authored with Newt Gingrich on, of all things, conservative environmentalism.

I'll have to carve time to read that article.
 
 
Evil Scientist
14:08 / 22.10.08
Also - the sciences are quite predominantly a male discipline.

You might find this Lab thread an interesting read as it discusses the gender imbalance in the scientific fields.

Our agricultural industry exploits the females of given species in extremis. Chickens to lay eggs, cattle to create milk, bees honey, etc.

I'm not quite sure what your point is here Squib, are you suggesting that there is some sinister reason that female cows are used to produce milk beyond the fact that they...well...produce milk?

Where is the voice to say, "dudes, factory farms are concentration camps for chickens. Why do you hate poultry so much?"

That would be PETA wouldn't it? But I would argue that, of all the reasons behind battery farming and industrialisation, hatred of chickens is pretty far down the list of reasons why it's done.

"modern" medical practice (invasive and cutting).

As oppose to what? Why do you feel invasive/cutting is a bad thing? Of course you're only talking about surgery here which is one element of modern medicine not the whole kit and kaboodle (and surgery has been around since the dawn of civilisation so not so much modern, maybe that was what the "quotes" were for).

(there's also a can of worms here for another thread, possibly in the laboratory - if scientists want to see something normally invisible, and build a machine to help them detect it using theory, until they complete a machine that shows them what they expect to see, then how do we know that the machine's displayed result are objective beyond the maker's bias?)

The scientific method is designed to try and reduce bias by designing experiments that can be independantly verfied. It's difficult to totally eliminate experimenter bias, but that's what double-blind drug trials and the like are for.

this seems to exclude moral considerations from the discipline, not from any particular scientist.

I recall a 2nd year cellular biology lab, in which the professor took great delight in our squeamishness when he described the process by which they obtain blood for our lab from chickens.

The actions of one professor hardly confims that science as a discipline excludes moral concerns.

The statement that science does not concern itself with "the emphemeral" can be taken a number of ways. You've interpretted it as including concepts such as justice, morality, and ethics. As far as I have understood it, this disclaimer is there to explain that science is concerned only with the physical world and the beings that live therein, not with the "emphemeral" beings such as gods and djinn. Basically explaining that, whilst the textbook might go on to explain the wonders of evolution it is not, therefore, saying that there is no such thing as a god.
 
  
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