5 ms·

I'm curious to hear how you are making the jump from "empiricism and the scientific method are simply better at making predictions about the world" to deriving

I'm curious to hear how you are making the jump from "empiricism and the scientific method are simply better at making predictions about the world" to deriving any kind of moral order that instructs how you ought to act in this world.

recursivedoubts 6y ago
Exactly. [1] 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
- bobthechef 6y ago
  That's a false dichotomy. In natural law theory, the "ought" proceeds from the "is". The good of a thing is determined by its nature. Thus, we eat food because it IS good for us to do so and we OUGHT to do what is good. A thing's excellence is teleological. In other words, is/ought is only a problem in a materialistic/Cartesian metaphysics. A hylomorphic metaphysics, on the other hand, has no problems with this. I encourage reading Aquinas and Aristotle to this effect. We've been brain damaged by a very crude worldview taught in schools that must be confronted and undone. So given that, while empirical science doesn't determine moral truths per se, it can give enrich out understanding to permit us to make moral determinations. A good example is fetal development. Before science was able to know how prenatal human life begins and develops exactly, the accepted theory in the West held that the human organism comes into being 40 days after fertilization. However, we now know that the human organism comes into being at the moment of fertilization. This fact has moral consequences and we must adjust our moral judgements and actions accordingly.
  - recursivedoubts 6y ago
    > That's a false dichotomy > In natural law theory It's a real dichotomy. You confirm the dichotomy by bringing in Natural Law for the aught, which is not scientific. I am an orthodox catholic I and agree entirely with your moral reasoning. But science, as strict empirical observation, can't get us from here to there. Fides et ratio.
Kednicma 6y ago
Sure. There's an old saying, "you're entitled to the effort, but not the outcome." You can plan to do something, but you cannot ensure that the effects of your actions are limited or constrained to merely what you intended. The distance between what we expect to happen and what actually happens is therefore a measure of how well our ethical reasoning lines up with our moral compass. But this is precisely what predictive modelling gives us; a model shows us approximately what will happen, according to some mechanism of action. If we want to see some particular change in the world, then the predictive model shows us what we should do in order to effect that change. To be concrete and continue talking about Christianity, it is a common feature of many different Christian practices around the world to catastrophically misunderstand COVID-19 and SARS-COV-2. Church buildings offering in-person services, church leaders reusing masks in ceremonies, church leaders claiming to remove COVID-19 from communities with holy power, etc. Many of these practices seem to be based on delusional beliefs about cellular biology, combined with magical thinking about the power of prayer and baptism. While I don't doubt that these folks would like COVID-19 to go away, they are not behaving as if they want that to be the case. A nibling comment precisely says "is-ought" as if it's a checkmate. I would reply that the entire idea of morality is contingent on who we consider to be agentive and what choices we expect them to make. Pirsig considered atoms to be moral when they obeyed the laws of chemistry; Conway considered the fact that particles are morally required to contextualize their behavior. Both of them took this stance because they realized that atoms are sometimes forced to make choices. To complete the analogy, we can use predictive modelling to perform chemical reactions and expect that the chemicals ought to react within a certain time to produce certain yield and byproducts, even though the reaction isn't obligated to do so just by thermodynamics alone.
- jmoss20 6y ago
  Doesn't this assume that morality has mostly to do with consequences (effects/outcomes/...)? That's a reasonable idea, but it's relatively modern. Semitic religions seem more concerned with (or at least, also very concerned with) intention, no matter what actions and downstream consequences those may or may not bring about.
  - Kednicma 6y ago
Reimersholme 6y ago
Yes, it seems a bit implicitly assumed that people agree that the technological breakthroughs of the last few hundred years has made the world a better place to live in (child mortality, average life expectancy etc. metrics), and that the values (empiricism and scientific method) that made this possible thus ought to be protected.
msla 6y ago
> I'm curious to hear how you are making the jump from "empiricism and the scientific method are simply better at making predictions about the world" to deriving any kind of moral order that instructs how you ought to act in this world. I'm curious to hear why you need an explicit moral order in your life at all. Imagine you didn't believe in any religion, if you happen to be religious now, and further imagine we were alone and nobody would know what you or I did after it was done. If I walked up to you and gave you a gun, would you shoot me? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't. My society is pretty sure you wouldn't. It has, after all, bet the existence of New York City on that proposition. NYC has a population of a bit over eight million. If even 0.1% of them were utterly amoral and violent, the city would collapse under the weight of eight thousand murderers. Extrapolate for Tokyo, London, Beijing, Singapore... humanity bets quite a lot on the notion that most people, when handed a way to commit a perfect murder, would not do so.
- jacobush 6y ago
  Sidenote but, amoral does not imply stupid. There are wolves among us.
- bobthechef 6y ago
  > I'm curious to hear why you need an explicit moral order in your life at all. >Imagine you didn't believe in any religion > would you shoot me? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't. You misunderstand morality and religion. Consider the following: 1. Religion is not morality nor is it the source of all moral knowledge. Actually, the problem with the word "religion" is that it's very difficult to define and its current usage is historically speaking relatively recent. I prefer to avoid using it because it seems to accomplish little else than stir up connotations, misconceptions, and confusion. It's much better to address individual truth claims and ask for justification. Religious claims are no different. You just have to know what methods of verification are appropriate to what kind of truth claim. Method, of course, follows apprehension of the real. Also, everyone has a religion in the sense of holding something as the highest good. The question if whether what you hold to be the highest good is the highest good. Failure to make the proper identification is disastrous, even if apparently so or immediately so. 2. What is an "explicit moral order"? There is a moral order in reality that we discover. We reason morally every time we make a decision and that moral reasoning draw from our knowledge of reality and the moral order within it. Now, Cartesian materialists will find this difficult to understand because for them, the world is just a pile of homogeneous dead crap arranged in various configurations (they can't explain the "illusion" that the world is otherwise because they've necessarily reduced the mind to meaningless motions of homogeneous dead crap we call a "brain" for some reason). In any case, we can come to know moral principles explicitly precisely because the moral order is real and not an arbitrarily imposed fiction. In our day to day affairs, we also engage in prudent reasoning that considers the various circumstances we find ourselves in. All of this involves reasoning about the good. 3. Why wouldn't someone shoot you? There must be motive and motive has moral meaning. Of course, it's also true that we live in a society heavily influenced by Christianity, so your example doesn't supply us with the kind of critical experiment you were hoping for.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

Exactly. [1] 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

bobthechef 6y ago
That's a false dichotomy. In natural law theory, the "ought" proceeds from the "is". The good of a thing is determined by its nature. Thus, we eat food because it IS good for us to do so and we OUGHT to do what is good. A thing's excellence is teleological. In other words, is/ought is only a problem in a materialistic/Cartesian metaphysics. A hylomorphic metaphysics, on the other hand, has no problems with this. I encourage reading Aquinas and Aristotle to this effect. We've been brain damaged by a very crude worldview taught in schools that must be confronted and undone. So given that, while empirical science doesn't determine moral truths per se, it can give enrich out understanding to permit us to make moral determinations. A good example is fetal development. Before science was able to know how prenatal human life begins and develops exactly, the accepted theory in the West held that the human organism comes into being 40 days after fertilization. However, we now know that the human organism comes into being at the moment of fertilization. This fact has moral consequences and we must adjust our moral judgements and actions accordingly.
- recursivedoubts 6y ago
  > That's a false dichotomy > In natural law theory It's a real dichotomy. You confirm the dichotomy by bringing in Natural Law for the aught, which is not scientific. I am an orthodox catholic I and agree entirely with your moral reasoning. But science, as strict empirical observation, can't get us from here to there. Fides et ratio.

Kednicma 6y ago

Sure. There's an old saying, "you're entitled to the effort, but not the outcome." You can plan to do something, but you cannot ensure that the effects of your actions are limited or constrained to merely what you intended. The distance between what we expect to happen and what actually happens is therefore a measure of how well our ethical reasoning lines up with our moral compass. But this is precisely what predictive modelling gives us; a model shows us approximately what will happen, according to some mechanism of action. If we want to see some particular change in the world, then the predictive model shows us what we should do in order to effect that change. To be concrete and continue talking about Christianity, it is a common feature of many different Christian practices around the world to catastrophically misunderstand COVID-19 and SARS-COV-2. Church buildings offering in-person services, church leaders reusing masks in ceremonies, church leaders claiming to remove COVID-19 from communities with holy power, etc. Many of these practices seem to be based on delusional beliefs about cellular biology, combined with magical thinking about the power of prayer and baptism. While I don't doubt that these folks would like COVID-19 to go away, they are not behaving as if they want that to be the case. A nibling comment precisely says "is-ought" as if it's a checkmate. I would reply that the entire idea of morality is contingent on who we consider to be agentive and what choices we expect them to make. Pirsig considered atoms to be moral when they obeyed the laws of chemistry; Conway considered the fact that particles are morally required to contextualize their behavior. Both of them took this stance because they realized that atoms are sometimes forced to make choices. To complete the analogy, we can use predictive modelling to perform chemical reactions and expect that the chemicals ought to react within a certain time to produce certain yield and byproducts, even though the reaction isn't obligated to do so just by thermodynamics alone.

jmoss20 6y ago
Doesn't this assume that morality has mostly to do with consequences (effects/outcomes/...)? That's a reasonable idea, but it's relatively modern. Semitic religions seem more concerned with (or at least, also very concerned with) intention, no matter what actions and downstream consequences those may or may not bring about.
- Kednicma 6y ago

Reimersholme 6y ago

Yes, it seems a bit implicitly assumed that people agree that the technological breakthroughs of the last few hundred years has made the world a better place to live in (child mortality, average life expectancy etc. metrics), and that the values (empiricism and scientific method) that made this possible thus ought to be protected.

msla 6y ago

> I'm curious to hear how you are making the jump from "empiricism and the scientific method are simply better at making predictions about the world" to deriving any kind of moral order that instructs how you ought to act in this world. I'm curious to hear why you need an explicit moral order in your life at all. Imagine you didn't believe in any religion, if you happen to be religious now, and further imagine we were alone and nobody would know what you or I did after it was done. If I walked up to you and gave you a gun, would you shoot me? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't. My society is pretty sure you wouldn't. It has, after all, bet the existence of New York City on that proposition. NYC has a population of a bit over eight million. If even 0.1% of them were utterly amoral and violent, the city would collapse under the weight of eight thousand murderers. Extrapolate for Tokyo, London, Beijing, Singapore... humanity bets quite a lot on the notion that most people, when handed a way to commit a perfect murder, would not do so.

jacobush 6y ago
Sidenote but, amoral does not imply stupid. There are wolves among us.
bobthechef 6y ago
> I'm curious to hear why you need an explicit moral order in your life at all. >Imagine you didn't believe in any religion > would you shoot me? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't. You misunderstand morality and religion. Consider the following: 1. Religion is not morality nor is it the source of all moral knowledge. Actually, the problem with the word "religion" is that it's very difficult to define and its current usage is historically speaking relatively recent. I prefer to avoid using it because it seems to accomplish little else than stir up connotations, misconceptions, and confusion. It's much better to address individual truth claims and ask for justification. Religious claims are no different. You just have to know what methods of verification are appropriate to what kind of truth claim. Method, of course, follows apprehension of the real. Also, everyone has a religion in the sense of holding something as the highest good. The question if whether what you hold to be the highest good is the highest good. Failure to make the proper identification is disastrous, even if apparently so or immediately so. 2. What is an "explicit moral order"? There is a moral order in reality that we discover. We reason morally every time we make a decision and that moral reasoning draw from our knowledge of reality and the moral order within it. Now, Cartesian materialists will find this difficult to understand because for them, the world is just a pile of homogeneous dead crap arranged in various configurations (they can't explain the "illusion" that the world is otherwise because they've necessarily reduced the mind to meaningless motions of homogeneous dead crap we call a "brain" for some reason). In any case, we can come to know moral principles explicitly precisely because the moral order is real and not an arbitrarily imposed fiction. In our day to day affairs, we also engage in prudent reasoning that considers the various circumstances we find ourselves in. All of this involves reasoning about the good. 3. Why wouldn't someone shoot you? There must be motive and motive has moral meaning. Of course, it's also true that we live in a society heavily influenced by Christianity, so your example doesn't supply us with the kind of critical experiment you were hoping for.