Cheating with stipulative definitions
I’ve been trying to argue with Sam Harris about his latest map for how to get from is to ought. It’s a list of 9 putative facts, which are true enough as far as they go, but I keep pointing out that the list doesn’t really confront the difference between avoiding the worst possible misery for oneself and avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone. No one’s paying any attention, but it keeps me out of trouble.
Russell discusses the same post.
The trick is to avoid cheating with stipulative definitions and to avoid relying on human psychology or human institutions. You are supposed to derive that I really, really ought to do X without relying on any of those short-cuts. That is the sort of derivation that so many people want, as its a derivation that will transcend subjectivity or semantics or culture. If you do the job, you’ve made normativity “objective”.
Cheating with stipulative definitions is exactly what Francisco Ayala has been doing, as I pointed out a couple of days ago:
‘Religion and science are not properly understood by some people, Christians particularly.’ In other words he is right by definition, because he gets to define what religion and science properly understood are, and the fact that they are not like that in practice is not evidence that he is wrong but just…that pesky Scots fella again.
Must play fair. That’s an ‘ought.’
It is all going round and round. Are we getting anywhere?
Eek! I see I wrote “its” when I meant “it’s”. The other way round is the more common mistake, of course. (Silently fixed now.)
NEB, I doubt we’re getting anywhere with Sam. He’ll stick to his guns, because it seems important to him that morality be “objective”.
Whether the field of metaethics is getting anywhere is another matter. It’s one of those fields where the wheels grind very, very slowly. I do think it’s making glacial progess. But just as there has been huge resistance, over the centuries, to the idea that God does not exist, so there has been huge resistance to the idea that there are no objective moral oughts, in the strong sense of “objective” that people seem to want. Philosophy only ever makes progress in the face of strong resistance from people who are committed to saving the appearances/and or the traditional picture of the world.
The interesting question at the cutting edge of metaethics is what follows if we accept that morality is not objective. E.g. should we stop using moral language entirely (in a similar way to the way that many of us have stopped using theological language relating to “sin”)? If so, how should we talk when we want to discuss what people ought to do – because we seem to need some concept like that.
The guy to watch in metaethics, IMHO, is Richard Joyce, who now teaches at the University of Sydney, and is embroiled in these debates. He’s a much better philosopher than Sam Harris, at least when it comes to this kind of stuff.
I’m giving a paper on some of this in July, at the next AAP (Australasian Association of Philosophers) conference, but I’m now uncertain what I want to say. Though I’m not very impressed by the metaethical end of what Harris is doing lately, and I think it’s far behind the cutting edge, I’m now not sure what I think should be said about how we ought (that word again) to use moral language … given that morality can’t deliver all the things that the folk naively assume it can.
Even I balk at concluding that all moral claims are just false, for example. Strictly speaking, that radical claim might be correct, but it would be a very misleading thing to say outside a philosophy seminar room.
Thanks for that Russell. I guess I need to just take a Xanas and read a whole lot more. Also, thank you Ophelia.
True, our default inclination is to stick to the “moral realism equals independent of the mind” thing. That seems like a natural starting point.
But it isn’t Harris’s starting point. His approach neither opts out of psychological premises, nor (at least on his own terms) needs to. For him, the subjective is just viewed as a subset of the objective: “Values, therefore, are (explicit or implicit) judgments about how the universe works and are themselves facts about our universe (i.e. states of the human brain).” (emphasis mine) So he can borrow as much psychology as he likes and it won’t threaten his conception of moral realism. That’s because his moral realism is evidently mere consequentialism: the right is the function of preventing the bad.
Though of course we can still complain that his interesting remarks don’t amount to what we expect from moral realism: namely, that it be independent of the mind. But we have to first see him eye to eye.
I defended Sam Harris from similar objections here.
Ophelia, I don’t entirely feel that I understand your complaint. There is a certain kind of “ought” Harris doesn’t provide, but that’s because its a kind of ought that (I think) doesn’t exist. So failure to provide it cannot be a shortcoming of his system.
It helps to remember that there are lots of kinds of oughts. A certain species of ought tells me what to do to make caramelized onion quiche, another kind of ought points the way to a perfect replica of the Lego castle I saw in a magazine, another ought shows me how to delay health care reform.
Moral “oughts” are only meaningful after morality is made meaningful, and I don’t think Harris re-defines morality so much as substitutes the absence of a definition for a definition that does a good job conforming to the way people actually use the word. He can only be wrong about his oughts if he is wrong about morality. And he can only be wrong about morality if you think morality is such that its essence isn’t found in any fact of the matter.
Also Ophelia,
I agree that it is nefarious for Ayala to just define his way into being correct about what religion is, and I think there is probably a compelling case that his definition is different from how many people view religion who actually are religious. And I think this is enough in some important sense to render Ayala “wrong”.
But do you think the same can be said of Harris? Do you think the definition he put forward (which makes him correct “by definition), is in any way substantially incongruous with how people use the word morality generally?
Yes, Josef, but if he says that morality is “objective” and it turns out that he is using the word “objective” in some non-standard way, then he had better distinguish between the standard usage and his own usage.
I.e., he can’t go to a Taliban autocrat and say: “Forcing women to wear burkas is objectively wrong”, while using the word “objectively” in some sense of his own. Once the Taliban autocrat becomes aware of this, he has an easy answer: “Okay, it’s objectively wrong in your sense of ‘objectively’. But what’s that to me? Show me how it’s objectively wrong in my sense of ‘objectively’.”
We need to show the Taliban bloke that he is breaking a moral rule that is absolutely binding on him irrespective of his own desires, preferences, etc. Either that or we need to find some way to appeal to deep values that he shares with us after all (perhaps values associated with compassion). Or better still, we could convince him that the facts are different from what he always believed, e.g. there is no Allah, Islam is a human construction, etc.
In the real world, all these approaches may be futile. It may turn out that the most we can do is persuade our fellow Westerners to stop behaving like vulgar relativists and to stand up for values such as individual liberty.
Josef, I worry about is the fact that people don’t define morality generally, because they don’t need to. As far as the semantics are concerned, we might as well be deflationists. i.e., the only thing people need to understand about “ought” is that it is an abstract sense of having a necessary impulse. It doesn’t matter if people attribute the force of the necessity to divine authority, or social authority, or the dictates of reason, or consequence, or natural law. We can suppose it’s one of them, or many of them, and not particularly care which of them happen to be behind the semantics of “ought”.
So for instance, looking at Harris’s examples, neither the command “You ought to blow up the world” nor is “Apocalypses are fun” are self-contradictory (though both are clearly demented). But “You should never kill” is not consistent with “Killing is optional”, and there’s a case to be made that if both are asserted, then they must both be meaningless.
Maybe your point — or Harris’s point — is meant to force us to infer that “You morally ought to blow up the world” is an absurdity, or at least as close as we’ll get to a working definition. But I don’t know if that’s right. I once asked an ethics professor whether or not he thought he ought to kill his daughter, if he knew that she would turn out to be the Anti-Christ, and would bring about plagues and fires and mean people. He said he wouldn’t do so, because he had certain associational duties. We can infer, in that case, that he would be one of those people who would argue that his moral duty was to blow up the world. I disagreed with him, but was secretly troubled by both of our opinions.
Russell said, “We need to show the Taliban bloke that he is breaking a moral rule that is absolutely binding on him … Either that or we need to find some way to appeal to deep values that he shares with us … Or …we could convince him that the facts are different from what he always believed, e.g. there is no Allah, Islam is a human construction, etc.”
Yes, the facts are different from what he always believed. He thinks that he can have a moral code that lets him brutalize all eight of his wives. It turns out that this is not correct. Such a code is not a moral one. As Harris is suggesting (I think), we should reserve the word ‘moral’ for decisions which revolve on the well-being of everyone, because when you think about it carefully, you notice that that’s what the word ‘moral’ means.
It’s not a moral judgment if I weigh only its consequences for the price of tea in China, or the depth of the Mariana Trench, or whether my computer screen is dusty. What makes it a moral judgment is that I am considering its effects on the well-being of humanity. If that’s not what is concerning me, I am not in the process of making a moral decision. My criteria may be practical, or religious, or psychotic — only to the extent that I am trying to do right by everyone are they moral.
P.S. Ophelia, I left you a comment (# 206) on Harris’s blog.
Russell,
I’ve numbered the options you give me with respect to your taliban autocrat.
(1)We need to show the Taliban bloke that he is breaking a moral rule that is absolutely binding on him irrespective of his own desires, preferences, etc. Either that or (2) we need to find some way to appeal to deep values that he shares with us after all (perhaps values associated with compassion). Or better still, 3 we could convince him that the facts are different from what he always believed, e.g. there is no Allah, Islam is a human construction, etc.
I think success on any of these three fronts is unlikely. Meanwhile I hold that (1) or some something similar to it is likely true, that (2) could at least be possible, and that (3) happens to be true. Maybe I’m short sighted, but I think that once we have any of 1-3, the ballgame is over, regardless of whether mr. taliban is convinced.
Also I suspect that something strange is being demanded when you say “We need to show the Taliban bloke that he is breaking a moral rule that is absolutely binding on him irrespective of his own desires, preferences.”
The binding, absolute, or law-like character of the moral system rests in the fact that it really does condemn X as a morally unacceptable act, and it does so with the unwavering rigidity of an absolute moral system. I suspect that Ophelia is looking for something akin to a physical force that arrests the Taliban member right as he is about to commit a heinous act and compels him to hesitate. But if some sort of compulsion, or binding force is necessary, the only kind of force that can be is a moral force (i.e. the fact of the matter that the act really is morally wrong).
That he can proceed with the act despite its being morally prohibited, reveals at most a deficiency in the moral bearings of the actor, not in the moral system. It is not the business of a moral system to causally intervene. The binding character of a moral system issues from the fact that it and nothing else rules on the moral consequences of actions, and that its rulings are final. Whatever else there is that might causally intervene, it would be something amoral.
I recognize that I gave a just-so story, but its one I believe, and one that I think is internally coherent.
Roy, you are using a stipulative definition of morality (it sounds like you got it from R.M. Hare, but Hare is wrong if he thinks that his definition is compelling).
The Taliban guys just says: “Sure, it’s immoral by your definition of the word ‘immorality’. What’s that to me? by my definition it’s just fine.” (Hare spent a lot of his career agonising about this problem, but he never really solved it.)
Josef, the best hope in the long term is surely (2). You really can appeal to the sympathies of most people to at least some extent, especially if you do so over more than one generation.
I cannot see any way in which (1) can be true, and I think the idea that it is true is a delusion. I’m always surprised when I see atheists unable to give up this last delusion, though in your case you’ve only said “likely true” of “something like it”.
Well sure, if we have enough choice of what counts as “something like” it, maybe you’re right. But it will take a lot more than “something like it” to get someone from another culture who has been indoctrinated with entirely values to budge.
As for (3), well sure, the Taliban guy is wrong in believing the existence of Allah, the authority of the Koran and the Hadith, etc. But we know how hard it is in practice to shift people who are deeply indoctrinated in these sorts of beliefs. We should keep plugging away, trying to secularise our own societies, and that may eventually have flow-on effects, but it won’t change the minds of any Taliban in the short or medium term.
The other thing we can keep doing is insist that our standards, though not objective, are not totally arbitrary. Indeed, we have good reason to hang onto them and act in accordance with them. That’s part of the answer to the vulgar moral relavists in our own culture, who should be Sam Harris’s real target.
You really can get people who are inclined to this kind of relativism to realise how incoherent it is – not with the sort of argument Harris is using but with different and well-known arguments. It doesn’t necessarily go all that deep with them.
From my experience talking to first-year university students, who tend to come in from high school with a vague sort of inclination to this vague sort of relativism, hearing the arguments against it shakes them up. But they do not go into denial and reject the arguments outright. On the contrary many will accept them (well, at least if they imagine that will get them marks on the exam paper).
Unfortunately, they might go over to an equally naive moral realism, but not necessarily. When they think about it, they may well realise that morality as we understand it is based on values that they themselves accept at a very deep level and can see are not just arbitrary. Once you get people to see that, you’ve achieved most of what I assume Sam really wants.
I.e., I assume his aim at this stage is not actually to convince Taliban nutcases to change their behaviour. It is more to get Western relativists to show a bit of spine in dealing with barbaric practices from other cultures. This is one of the things that I hope his book will clarify.
This is an interesting discussion, but I’m not at all sure about the conflation of “objective” with “absolutely binding,” in the sense of some external force making you do something irrespective of what’s in your head. I think morality comes from objective facts about human subjectivity. Conflating “objective” with “has nothing to do with what’s inside your head” is a mistake, I think.
I’m also not at all sure that there has truly been great resistance to the idea of a lack of objective morality. It seems that this idea has been embraced by intellectuals and others alike, and you’re more likely to cause controversy if you try to defend objective morality. It seems to me that a weak relativism is the most broadly accepted meta-ethical view.
As for the “my definition of morality” thing, Russell, I don’t see how that’s such a problem. Words have meanings–not absolute or rigid ones, but meanings nonetheless. A Taliban official can say that his definition of “tomato” means “potato,” but we wouldn’t hesitate to say he was wrong about that, so why should morality be different?
“Yes, the facts are different from what he always believed. He thinks that he can have a moral code that lets him brutalize all eight of his wives. It turns out that this is not correct. Such a code is not a moral one. As Harris is suggesting (I think), we should reserve the word ‘moral’ for decisions which revolve on the well-being of everyone, because when you think about it carefully, you notice that that’s what the word ‘moral’ means.”
But that really isn’t a factual question. Stipulating definitions isn’t the same thing as pointing out facts – and saying “we should reserve the word ‘moral’ for” etcetera just gets us right back into oughts rather than ises. And it isn’t universally or historically true that “the well-being of everyone” is what the word ‘moral’ means, so it seems unlikely that it’s factually true except in a local sense. Historically ‘moral’ has very often meant ‘help friends and harm enemies.’ That’s the morality of the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example. So we now think that’s what ‘moral’ means – but Taliban guy could and would just say we’re the ones who have our facts wrong. Which doesn’t make him right (cf that dispute with Taner Edis recently), but it makes the claim that all this is just factual look dubious.
Following Jen, we probably don’t want to beg the question against Harris’s moral realism. So I suppose we might formulate the dispute as being over what is “independent of particular decisions” (as opposed to “independent of the mind”). That way, we could still draw upon objective facts about anthropology and psychology while retaining the power to criticize pathological institutions. And wherever we find that institutions are more or less equal in providing happiness, we would be able, like Jen, to say a form of relativism follows.
“A Taliban official can say that his definition of “tomato” means “potato,” but we wouldn’t hesitate to say he was wrong about that, so why should morality be different?”
Because the first is factual and the second isn’t! The first is simple and the second is very damn complicated.
Look it’s no good just trying to make all this stuff easy by definition. If it were easy, human history would look very different from the way it does look! If not treating some people like dirt were just a matter of knowing a potato from a tomato, then the world would look totally utterly unrecognizably different. That would be great, but it isn’t the case.
I think people don’t realize how weird and novel and exceptional the kind of morality we’re talking about is. We think it’s obvious and self-evident and tomato-like, but it isn’t. Egalitarianism is not natural and it’s not purely factual (to put it mildly). It’s a commitment – and one that has to be defended and argued for as such.
Russell, your problem about convincing person X about what morality is, sounds to me more like a sociological problem than a philosophical problem.
Ophelia,
you say:
Because the first is factual and the second isn’t! The first is simple and the second is very damn complicated.
Talk about stipulative definitions!
Look it’s no good just trying to make all this stuff easy by definition. If it were easy, human history would look very different from the way it does look! If not treating some people like dirt were just a matter of knowing a potato from a tomato, then the world would look totally utterly unrecognizably different. That would be great, but it isn’t the case.
If Harris is right that morality is about the changes in consciousness of sentient creatures, for humans that means brain states. It is only within the past century (past few decades really), that people have even begun to believe a biological explanation for this kind of thing was possible at all.
In the meantime, we’ve had thousands of years to develop myths, literary traditions and poorly formed philosophical problems in abscence of knowledge about the brain, that have entrenched misconceptions about what consciousness is, what being a moral agent is, what love and suffering are, because we don’t know how to equate first person experiences with third person facts.
If not treating some people like dirt were just a matter of knowing a potato from a tomato, human history would indeed be different. But this is a matter of knowing medial orbito-frontal cortex activity from anterior cingulate gyrus activity. People talked about morality as though it weren’t factual simply because they didn’t understand how it could be so, just as we talked about a ‘vital force’ or spirit before we came up with biological explanations.
Hm. So the idea is that morality is factual in the same way that the mind is what the brain does. Is that it? But the comparison isn’t exact.
I could just turn it around. Moral realists see morality as factual in the same way that dualists see the mind as factual. It’s coherent to say that the mind is what the brain does and morality is what humans do. It is a fact that humans do morality, but that doesn’t make morality itself a matter of facts.
Harris dives straight into the deep end with: “FACT #1: There are behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which potentially lead to the worst possible misery for everyone…”
On the basis of ‘potential’, Harris should campaign for a ban on research in nuclear physics, just for starters. There is also the activity that could put the whole planet past some tipping point, such as the mining and burning of that one particularly critical tonne of coal. But knowledge is indivisible in this regard, and it is not too hard to see why original sin in the Bible is conflated with knowledge in a general sense. If an historic activity like Newton’s watching of an apple fall turns out to ‘lead’ (Harris’ word) to planetary devastation, then on this basis it would have been better in the long term if Newton had been strangled at birth.
Sorry Sam, you’ll have to play it again. I’m still with Hume. There is no road from ‘is’ to ‘ought’.
If the mind is what the brain does –and nothing else– the reality of mind is derived from the reality of the brain, and there is no dualism.
If morality is what humans do (a bit vague but lets go with it) –and nothing else– the reality of morals is derived from the reality of humans and there is nothing extra to be accounted for.
It’s no less stipulative to say that morality, whatever it is, isn’t factual in nature (or has some non-factual element that is still real in an important sense). So it is just as necessary to defend this conception of morality as it would be to defend any other. If this conception of morality isn’t successfully defended, there isn’t any ground for calling Harris wrong because there isn’t any extra content relating to morality for Harris to be wrong about.
I wish Harris would make is argument not just by giving his answer to the is/ought problem, but attacking the conception of morality that leads to the problem in the first place. My 1/50th of a dollar.
Ian,
there are presumably many other points in the causal chain between Newton and planetary devastation where we could intervene.
Granted most cheerfully, Josef. But at which point and where to start is arbitrary.
OB: I don’t agree that it’s all that complicated, actually. Absent very strong cultural indoctrination, fathers don’t kill their daughters for talking to boys. Absent very strong cultural indoctrination, people don’t hack off women’s clitorises. In many of the basic human rights battles that exist today, what “nature” tells us is right is fairly simple. It’s the existence of centuries of culture and accumulated ideological history that make things more complex as a practical matter.
Ian,
A more charitable interpretation of Harris would be this:
Evaluating moral questions “on the basis of possibility” only means we have to recognize those possibilities and integrate them into our moral decision making. It need not entail an absolutist injunction against, say, entire fields of science because they entail harmful possibilities.
Obviously certain things comes at certain costs and our tolerance of dangers must scale with the severity and likelihood of those dangers.
Jenavir, but it’s also the case that in the absence of very strong cultural indoctrination, men don’t see women and girls as having rights, or as the equals of boys and men. It doesn’t take much cultural indoctrination for men to feel entirled to murder women who “cheat on them” for instance.