Summing up the way I've been thinking so far

I'm about to dig into a more substantial phase of research now. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be trying to understand what an explanation of the world is, and what the differences are between science, math, and ethics in this regard. So before I do, I want to clarify what I'm going into this research with, what my hypothesis (of sorts) is. I can't really defend this view; it's just a starting point, a bunch of suspicions that I have.

Without a doubt there is something that is quite different about ethics, science and math. Pinning down exactly what is really the challenge, and the next challenge is trying to figure out what those differences should mean--why the differences matter.

My general hypothesis is that hard, strong, epistemological lines tend to break down under stress. For example, Quine convinced most of the philosophical world that there is no strong, philosophically useful distinction between the meaning of words in a sentence and the substance of those sentences; there's no strong dichotomy between analytic sentences and synthetic ones. The argument comes down to just applying a great deal of stress to the dichotomy, and watching it collapse under investigation. I expect, coming into a philosophical investigation, a similar thing to happen when we've set up boundaries between realms of knowledge. Facts/values, empirical/non-empirical, a priori/a posteriori, history/science, objective/subjective and of course science/math/ethics are all ways that people have tried to divide up realms of knowledge. The problem is not dividing up realms of knowledge itself--everyone does that because there are real differences between the areas--but when it comes to epistemology, how we know what we know about these realms, I expect the dichotomies to break down. I expect that the way we gain historical knowledge isn't very different from the way we gain scientific knowledge. I expect that the way we gain mathematical knowledge isn't so different from the way we gain scientific or ethical knowledge. That's my hypothesis, in general. It's heavily influenced by Quine and Putnam (and Dewey, through Putnam), I think. At the very least, it's influenced by a misinterpretation of Quine and Putnam.

So, in particular, I expect that the distinctions between how we gain ethical knowledge and how we gain scientific knowledge break down under pressure. I expect that all knowledge is more or less in the same boat. I suspect that the differences are all of quantity, and not quality of knowledge. So I suspect that any attempt to explain why scientific stuff is objective and ethical or mathematical stuff is not eventually breaks down. I think that the indispensability argument goes a good way towards showing how the distinction breaks down between math and science, and I suspect that something similar can be adapted for ethics. I think that there are at least two good, promising ways of doing this, but in the end every way of making the argument does it by trying to make science a little bit more modest.

But I started by saying that there are real differences between math and ethics and science? It's just a fact that there are no ethics laboratories in universities, and it doesn't strike us as a very good idea to start such labs. Why is that? An analogy from math is useful in clarifying the question. Once Quine/Putnam argue that math is actually empirical knowledge and as objectively known as science, they need to answer the question: what fooled people for so long? Why did people think that math was a priori and divorced from experience? So, if you argue that ethics is on the same par as science, you have to explain why ethics strikes people as being the sort of thing that it doesn't make sense to start a lab for.

Of course, you could say that people are wrong, and that we really should be building ethics labs of some sort. Some people--I think that I heard this in the name of Nagel or Parfit--think that ethics is just a young science, one that's bound to develop the way that other sciences have. So maybe these people think that opening ethics labs makes sense. But I'm more sympathetic to the position that there is something about ethics that makes such a notion strange. I guess this could be consistent with the view that we should open labs, but I guess the view I find most attractive is that ethics is really really really hard. (This is also the reason why I'm not swayed by an argument from disagreement that ethics is subjective. Disagreement is consistent not only with subjective views, but also with really really really hard ones.) I bet that I could even show that some things that eventually fell into the realm of science were considered subjective problems, ones that it wouldn't make sense for a lab to study. For example, I bet a lot of brain stuff fits this pattern.

How does this relate to the original program of contrasting math with ethics? Well, the idea is that by taking an argument that's found in the math literature, and seeing how it holds up under ethics we'll be able to see what math and ethics have in common. And my guess is that math and ethics can be both shown to be close to science when it comes to epistemology. And that the differences in the way they have been considered have to do with how hard/easy studying the subject is (math is more objective cuz we're able to isolate variables, ethics is REALLY hard cuz there are so many variables, math is a priori because it's an essential part of the web of beleif, ethics barely seems like knowledge because it's so hard to get secure on it, etc.).

Ethics and Observation, Harman

(I'll explain the cat picture soon enough.)

I'm having great difficulty trying to pin down the difference between the role of observation in ethics and science that Harman describes (in "The Nature of Morality"). Not sure why, but I'm just unable to state the difference between ethics and science with regards to observation in any clear way. Anyway, here's my attempt to formulate it. Hopefully this will help me get closer to understanding it.

Harman's thesis: Observational evidence plays a role in science that it doesn't play in ethics. Specifically, observations can provide evidence for scientific theories, but observations can't provide evidence for ethical theories. Ethics fails to meet the standards of science, then.

So how does observation work in science? Harman begins by telling you how observation doesn't work in science. You might think that science works like this: you, the scientist, observe a new species of animal: looks kinda like a cat, kinda like a horse. It might be tempting to think that you're getting an usullied picture of the world when you make this observation. Like you're just downloading a bunch of data into your brain. But that wouldn't be quite true. Philosophers and psychologists know that this isn't the way that people perceive the world; there's a lot of your preexisting beliefs that go into your perceptions. Put another way, how you think about the world has a lot to do with how you see the world. For example, you need to know what a "box" is before you could possible perceive a box. For another example, suppose you experienced something totally unlike anything that you had experienced before. Would you be able to describe it? So perception is more like receiving processed data than it is receiving straight data. All of our data gets processed in the process of observation.

So does that mean that we should be skeptical of our observations? Why should we think that there is anything behind our observations, if our mind and preexisting beliefs color the way that we look at the world?

The answer, for Harman, is that we have good reason to believe that our observations are true because of inference to the best explanation. What is the best explanation of your observation? And by that I mean, what's the best explanation of the fact that you had the observation that you had? Well, let's list some of the possible explanations of the fact that you had the observation that you had.

(a) You were hallucinating, causing you to have the observation of something that seemed real.
(b) Your theory, your preexisting beliefs, colored the way that you observed the world. What you really saw was something that didn't have the kind of animal you observed, but you interpreted it in that way because of your theory and beliefs.
(c) You actually saw something in the world that looked the way you thought it did.

The best explanation is the third one. So in order to explain the fact that you observed something, we need to infer that you actually did observe something. It's inference to the best explanation.

Now, clearly this is right, but I'm not sure if it all adds up the way I'm describing it. What makes (c) the best explanation? Is it the simplest? What does simple mean? Does simple mean only one sentence long? Is it simpler to assume that you were hallucinating or simpler to assume that you actually saw a new species? By simpler, do we just mean "more likely to happen to a person"? So we assume that people see real stuff all the time, and from that we reason that the best explanation of a phenomenon is that you actually saw something? But that's gonna end up being a bit circular, because what we're interested in knowing is what justifies the thought that we're not hallucinating during observation.

Let me move on to ethics. Ethics, Harman says, is quite unlike science when it comes to observation. So, having told us how science works, we should be able to see that ethics doesn't work that way. Let's give it a shot.

So, Harman discusses the example of an ethical obseravtion. You're walking down the street, and you see a bunch of kids burning a cat (his example, not mine!). You immediately come to the conclusion "It's wrong to burn a cat." Now, you didn't necessarily believe this before you saw it. It might be that life never afforded you the opportunity to consider the case of a cat lynching. So we can call this a full-fledged observation of an ethical fact. Of course, of course, your pre-existing beliefs about what's right and wrong factor into your observation, but that doesn't matter because (as Harman argued above) the case is the same for any observation, including a scientific one. Every obseration is processed through the brain's machinary before coming to your consciousness, whether it's an ethical observation or a scientific one.

Now, in science we said that we have reason to believe that scientific facts are true because they are necessary for providing the best explanation for the fact that you had the observation that you did. Now, let's try this for ethics. What is the best explanation for the fact that you had the ethical obseration that you did, that you observed that it's wrong to burn cats? Here are a couple options:
(a) You actually did perceived something in the world that appears the way that you observed it, that is, you actually managed to perceive/see ethical properties in the world, the same way people observe that a ball is blue or that a tree is tall.
(b) You were "hallucinating." Your experience was that of an observation about something real in the world, but actually it was your brain and beliefs doing all the work.

Around here is where I get stuck. The idea is supposed to be that the best explanation of the fact that you had an ethical observation is (b). And so inference to the best explanation doesn't require any ethical facts to exist. But isn't this just to assume what what we were trying to prove? Oy. Need to get back to this.

Can meat eaters who think they're doing something wrong teach us about metaethics?

I dunno. There are definitely people in the world who think that it's wrong to eat animals but do it anyway. Myself, I come close to it. Louis CK thinks the same thing, and if you don't mind the profanity here's a funny youtube video explaining the point.



OK. So some people are convinced that it's wrong to eat animals, but don't do it. How can this help us?

Some arguments against the objectivity of ethics go like this: if we had objective knowledge about ethics, it would be knowledge about a realm unlike anything else that we have knowledge of. Indeed, objective ethical knowledge would have to be about a realm of ethical objects that share the feature of being able to bring about obligations just through knowing them. That's unlike the rest of our knowledge: I don't immediately get any obligation just from knowing that "That tree is green." So, this knowledge of ethics would have to be unlike any other knowledge. And from here a small jump is taken--we have no secure reason to believe that such knowledge is possible or exists at all, and no reason to think that there are any objects such that knowledge of them leads to any sort of obligation.

So, there are two responses I can think of. The first I mentioned in the previous post, and it's the idea that there are actually lots of objects such that knowledge of or about them leads to obligations of some sort (the obligation to believe certain things, I pointed to in the post).

Another sort of response relates to vegetarianism, and people who think that it's wrong to eat animals but eat animals anyway. If you could get enough examples like this, you could begin to wear away at the notion that knowledge of ethical objects necessarily involves obligations--meaning, if you could know for certain, and securely, that it's wrong to eat animals while still not feeling obligated to stop eating 'em then this would be difficult for the notion that there is something intrinsically queer or weird about ethical knowledge. The weird thing, the obligation, has to come from somewhere else. But you could start to wear away at the strangeness of ethical knowledge, and through this you could resist the argument that ethical knowledge would have to be knowledge about a mysterious, curious and queer domain.

Update: As I think about this, a good analogy would be "I see the evidence, but I can't bring myself to believe it." In both cases reasons are given and recognized, and it's conceded that a rational person would probably act differently, but one doesn't believe the thing that he should, or doesn't do what he ought to. I guess, then, my point is complementary to the previous post. Together, I argue that the situation in ethics isn't so different from truth in general, and there are two responses one can make to the argument from queerness about ethics. One is that oughtness, or ought-to-ness is present in discussions of truth in general just as much as it is in ethics. So it's not queer unless truth is. But the other response is that reasonable people can know stuff about ethics/truth without acting/believing, so that knowledge isn't really knowledge of something that is essentially normative.

You can't derive an "ought" from an "is"

Here's something that we hear all the time: you can't derive an "ought" from an "is." What's an example of this? You can't derive any obligations or requirements from any fact. So, you can't derive an obligation to do something about poverty from the statement "That person is poor." Just from believing that "That tree is causing trouble" you can't derive any ought statement, such as "We ought to cut down that tree" or "We ought not to cut down that tree."

I don't know much about this area of philosophy, but it seems to me that there's a fairly simple counter-example to this. The fact that it seems simple to me is evidence that it's probably wrong, but I'm not sure where the fault is. So if anybody can figure it out, let me know.

So, "truth" has a certain normativity, ought-ness about it, no? If you think that p is true, then you ought to believe p. For example, imagine encountering a person who thought that it was true that the world was round, but believed that the world was flat. What would you be able to say to such a person? You would say: "you don't really believe that it's true that the world is round. Because if you believe that the world is round, you OUGHT to believe that the world isn't flat, that it's round."

So, isn't there a simple "ought" that you can derive from an "is"? Namely, from "I think that p is true" you can derive that "I ought to believe p."

If anyone can tell me where this reasoning fails, I would definitely appreciate it.