The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
5. Is it always wrong to slice open a child's belly with a knife? No. One might be performing an emergency appendectomy.
6. One could respond by saying that scientists agree about science more than ordinary people agree about morality (I'm not sure this is true). But this is an empty claim, for at least two reasons: (1) it is circular, because anyone who insufficiently agrees with the majority opinion in any domain of science won't count as a "scientist" (so the definition of scientist is question begging); (2) Scientists are an elite group, by definition. "Moral experts" would also constitute an elite group, and the existence of such experts is completely in line with my argument.
7. Obvious exceptions include "socially constructed" phenomena that require some degree of consensus to be made real. The paper in my pocket really is "money"—but it is only money because a sufficient number of people are willing to treat it as such (see Searle, 1995).
8. Practically speaking, I think we have some very useful intuitions on this front. We care more about creatures that can experience a greater range of suffering and happiness—and we are right to, because suffering and happiness (defined in the widest possible sense) are all that can be cared about. Are all animal lives equivalent?
No. Do monkeys suffer more than mice from medical experiments? If so, all other things being equal, it is worse to run experiments on monkeys than on mice.
Are all human lives equivalent? No. I have no problem admitting that certain people's lives are more valuable than mine (I need only imagine a person whose death would create much greater suffering and prevent much greater happiness). However, it also seems quite rational for us to collectively act as though all human lives were equally valuable. Hence, most of our laws and social institutions generally ignore differences between people. I suspect that this is a very good thing. Of course, I could be wrong about this—and that is precisely the point. If we didn't behave this way, our world would be different, and these differences would either affect the totality of human well-being, or they wouldn't. Once again, there are answers to such questions, whether we can ever answer them in practice.
9. At bottom, this is purely a semantic point: I am claiming that whatever answer a person gives to the question "Why is religion important?" can be framed in terms of a concern about someone's well-being (whether misplaced or not).
10. I do not think that the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant represents an exception either. Kant's categorical imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J. S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism). One could argue, therefore, that what is serviceable in Kant's moral philosophy amounts to a covert form of consequentialism. I offer a few more remarks about Kant's categorical imperative below.
11. For instance, many people assume that an emphasis on human "well-being" would lead us to do terrible things like reinstate slavery, harvest the organs of the poor, periodically nuke the developing world, or nurture our children on a continuous drip of heroin. Such expectations are the result of not thinking about these issues seriously. There are rather clear reasons not to do these things—all of which relate to the immensity of suffering that such actions would cause and the possibilities of deeper happiness that they would foreclose. Does anyone really believe that the highest possible state of human flourishing is compatible with slavery, organ theft, and genocide?
12. Are there trade-offs and exceptions? Of course. There may be circumstances in which the very survival of a community requires that certain of these principles be violated. But this doesn't mean that they aren't generally conducive to human well-being.
13. Stewart, 2008.
14. I confess that, as a critic of religion, I have paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Frankly, it felt somehow unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel. This scandal was one of the most spectacular "own goals" in the history of religion, and there seemed to be no need to deride faith at its most vulnerable and self-abased. Even in retrospect, it is easy to understand the impulse to avert one's eyes: Just imagine a pious mother and father sending their beloved child to the Church of a Thousand Hands for spiritual instruction, only to have him raped and terrified into silence by threats of hell. And then imagine this occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time—and to children beyond reckoning for over a thousand years. The spectacle of faith so utterly misplaced, and so fully betrayed, is simply too depressing to think about.
But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my attention. Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible: the Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception: preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy—or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution—one of the wealthiest on earth—that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever Church teaching holds sway—leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.
In 2009, the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) investigated such of these events as occurred on Irish soil. Their report runs to 2,600 pages (www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/). Having read only an oppressive fraction of this document, I can say that when thinking about the ecclesiastical abuse of children, it is best not to imagine shades of ancient Athens and the blandishments of a "love that dare not speak its name." Yes, there have surely been polite pederasts in the priesthood, expressing anguished affection for boys who would turn eighteen the next morning. But behind these indiscretions there is a continuum of abuse that terminates in absolute evil. The scandal in the Catholic Church—one might now safely say the scandal that is the Catholic Church—includes the systematic rape and torture of orphaned and disabled children. Its victims attest to being whipped with belts and sodomized until bloody—sometimes by multiple attackers—and then whipped again and threatened with death and hellfire if they breathed a word about their abuse. And yes, many of the children who were desperate or courageous enough to report these crimes were accused of lying and returned to their tormentors to be raped and tortured again.
The evidence suggests that the misery of these children was facilitated and concealed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at every level, up to and including the prefrontal cortex of the current pope. In his former capacity as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict personally oversaw the Vatican's response to reports of sexual abuse in the Church. What did this wise and compassionate man do upon learning that his employees were raping children by the thousands? Did he immediately alert the police and ensure that the victims would be protected from further torments? One still dares to imagine such an effulgence of basic human sanity might have been possible, even within the Church. On the contrary, repeated and increasingly desperate complaints of abuse were set aside, witnesses were pressured into silence, bishops were praised for their defiance of secular authority, and offending priests were relocated only to destroy fresh lives in unsuspecting parishes. It is no exaggeration to say that for decades (if not centuries) the Vatican has met the formal definition of a criminal organizati
on devoted—not to gambling, prostitution, drugs, or any other venial sin—but to the sexual enslavement of children. Consider the following passages from the CICA report:
7.129 In relation to one School, four witnesses gave detailed accounts of sexual abuse, including rape in all instances, by two or more Brothers and on one occasion along with an older resident. A witness from the second School, from which there were several reports, described being raped by three Brothers: "1 was brought to the infirmary...they held me over the bed, they were animals.... They penetrated me, I was bleeding. "Another witness reported he was abused twice weekly on particular days by two Brothers in the toilets off the dormitory:
One Brother kept watch while the other abused me... [sexually] ... then they changed over. Every time it ended with a severe beating. When I told the priest in Confession, he called me a liar. I never spoke about it again.
I would have to go into his... [Br X's] ... room every time he wanted. You'd get a hiding if you didn't, and he'd make me do it... [masturbate]... to him. One night I didn't... [masturbate him]... and there was another Brother there who held me down and they hit me with a hurley and they burst my fingers... [displayed scar]....
7.232 Witnesses reported being particularly fearful at night as they listened to residents screaming in cloakrooms, dormitories or in a staff member's bedroom while they were being abused. Witnesses were conscious that co-residents whom they described as orphans had a particularly difficult time:
The orphan children, they had it bad. I knew... [who they were] ... by the size of them, I'd ask them and they'd say they come from... named institution....They were there from an early age. You'd hear the screams from the room where Br... X... would be abusing them.
There was one night, I wasn't long there and I seen one of the Brothers on the bed with one of the young boys... and I heard the young lad screaming crying and Br... X... said to me "if you don't mind your own business you'll get the same. "... I heard kids screaming and you know they are getting abused and that's a nightmare in anybody's mind. You are going to try and break out.... So there was no way I was going to let that happen to me... I remember one boy and he was bleeding from the back passage and I made up my mind, there was no way it... [anal rape]... was going to happen to me.... That used to play on my mind.
This is the kind of abuse that the Church has practiced and concealed since time out of memory. Even the CICA report declined to name the offending priests.
I have been awakened from my unconscionable slumber on this issue by recent press reports (Goodstein and Callender, 2010; Goodstein, 2010a, 2010b; Donadio, 2010a, 2010b; Wakin and McKinley Jr., 2010), and especially by the eloquence of my colleagues Christopher Hitchens (2010a, 2010b, 2010c, and 2010d), and Richard Dawkins (2010a, 2010b).
15. The Church even excommunicated the girl's mother (http://news.bbc xo.uk/2/hi/americas/7930380.stm).
16. The philosopher Hilary Putnam (2007) has argued that facts and values are "entangled." Scientific judgments presuppose "epistemic values"—coherence, simplicity, beauty, parsimony, etc. Putnam has pointed out, as I do here, that all the arguments against the existence of moral truth could be applied to scientific truth without any change.
17. Many people find the idea of "moral experts" abhorrent. Indeed, this ramification of my argument has been called "positively Orwellian" and a "recipe for fascism." Again, these concerns seem to arise from an uncanny reluctance to think about what the concept of "well-being" actually entails or how science might shed light on its causes and conditions. The analogy with health seems important to keep in view: Is there anything "Orwellian" about the scientific consensus on the link between smoking and lung cancer? Has the medical community's insistence that people should not smoke led to "fascism"? Many people's reflexive response to the notion of moral expertise is to say, "I don't want anyone telling me how to live my life." To which I can only respond, "If there were a way for you and those you care about to be much happier than you now are, would you want to know about it?"
18. This is the subject of that now infamous quotation from Albert Einstein, endlessly recycled by religious apologists, claiming that "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Far from indicating his belief in God, or his respect for unjustified belief, Einstein was speaking about the primitive urge to understand the universe, along with the "faith" that such understanding is possible:
Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. This situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind (Einstein, 1954, p. 49).
19. These impasses are seldom as insurmountable as skeptics imagine. For instance, Creationist "scientists" can be led to see that the very standards of reasoning they use to vindicate scripture in light of empirical data also reveal hundreds of inconsistencies within scripture—thereby undermining their entire project. The same is true for moral impasses: those who claim to get their morality from God, without reference to any terrestrial concerns, are often susceptible to such concerns in the end. In an extreme case, the New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman once reported meeting a Sunni militant who had begun fighting alongside the American military against al-Qaeda in Iraq, having been persuaded that the infidel troops were the lesser of two evils. What convinced him? He witnessed a member of al-Qaeda decapitate an eight-year-old girl (Friedman, 2007). It would seem, therefore, that the boundary between the crazy values of Islam and the utterly crazy can be discerned when drawn in the spilled blood of little girls. This is a basis for hope, of sorts.
In fact, I think that morality will be on firmer ground than any other branch of science in the end, since scientific knowledge is only valuable because it contributes to our well-being. Of course, we must include among these contributions the claims of people who say that they value knowledge "for its own sake"—for they are merely describing the mental pleasure that comes with understanding the world, solving problems, etc. It is clear that well-being must take precedence over knowledge, because we can easily imagine situations in which it would be better not to know the truth, or when false knowledge would be desirable. No doubt, there are circumstances in which religious delusion functions in this way: where, for instance, soldiers are vastly outnumbered on the battlefield but, being ignorant of the odds against them and convinced that God is on their side, they manage to draw on emotional resources that would be unavailable to people with complete information and fully justified beliefs. However, the fact that a combination of ignorance and false knowledge can occasionally be helpful is no argument for the general utility of religious faith (much less for its truth). Indeed, the great weakness of religion, apart from the obvious implausibility of its doctrines, is that the cost of holding irrational and divisive beliefs on a global scale is extraordinarily high.
20. The physicist Sean Carroll finds Hume's analysis of facts and values so compelling that he elevates it to the status of mathematical truth:
Attempts to derive ought from is are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they've done it, you don't have to check their math; you know that they've made a mistake (Carroll, 2010a).
21. This spurious notion of "ought" can be introduced into any enterprise and seem to plant a fatal seed of doubt. Asking why we "ought" to value well-being makes even less sense than asking why we "ought" to be rational or scientific. And while it is possible to say that one can't move from "is" to "ought," we should be ho
nest about how we get to "is" in the first place. Scientific "is" statements rest on implicit "oughts" all the way down. When I say, "Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen," I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn't share these values? What can I say then? As it turns out, this is the wrong question. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks about chemistry?
So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal) because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal) because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. Yes, both endeavors rest on assumptions (and, as I have said, I think the former will prove to be more firmly grounded), but this is not a problem. No framework of knowledge can with stand utter skepticism, for none is perfectly self-justifying. Without being able to stand entirely outside of a framework, one is always open to the charge that the framework rests on nothing, that its axioms are wrong, or that there are foundational questions it cannot answer. Occasionally some of our basic assumptions do turn out to be wrong or limited in scope—e.g., the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry does not apply to geometry as a whole—but these errors can be detected only by the light of other assumptions that stand firm.