Scientific Morality

[ak666]

I want to attempt to provide a case that science establishes the closest thing to "objective morality". This idea of objective morality has puzzled philosophers throughout history. One of the questions is this:

Why can we seem to intuitively determine that one set of moral principles is superior to another if there is no objective basis for morality?

This article attempts an answer from an engineering mindset, and the short answer is science combined with empathy, programmed in us by nature as a cooperative and altruistic species.

It's also intended to answer questions from religious people about how an atheist, like myself, can possibly have moral principles.

"Morality"

Empathy and altruism is practically embedded into the concept of "morality". If anyone is acting in an entirely selfish way with no concern about the well-being of others, everyone of every religious denomination can most likely agree that such an individual is morally bankrupt.

Keep this in mind since when I refer to "scientific morality", I am suggesting the combination of science, empathy, and altruism. It does not lead to a cold-hearted, utilitarian society that considers it beneficial to tyrannize a group for the greater good, even if that can be scientifically justified as an optimal action. That would simply be "scientific" and hardly moral.

Objective Morality

For a start, I'm going to claim that objective morality does not exist. Many assume that if you don't believe it does, you must be a moral nihilist who believes that nothing is inherently right or wrong. I don't believe that either.

Instead, to the best of my findings, humans appear to be a social and cooperative species. Lacking any significant anomalies (brain damage, extreme social conditioning, etc), they're typically cooperative and altruistic. Their self-interests generally go far beyond themselves, expressing concern for the welfare of others in their social group and sometimes even those outside their social group*.

* Xenophobia is one unfortunate exception. For the sake of brevity, let's gloss over this. However, it's worth noting that rational, scientific thinking is also one of the most effective cures against the most irrational, instinctive fear of outsiders.

These social, cooperative, altruistic, empathetic tendencies are the closest thing to what we all have in common universally as I see it. We care for the well-being of others and we're willing to make altruistic sacrifices to benefit others. When those we care about suffer and are treated unfairly, we suffer as well.

Reliable Knowledge

So given these universal tendencies for us to care not only about ourselves individually, but others as well, what allows us to reach a wide consensus that one set of moral principles is superior to another?

The answer as I see it is "reliable" knowledge. We don't even have to worry about "correctness". I'll avoid "correctness" to avoid getting into debates about what scientific theories are wrong or right. Let's please avoid that. Let's just say:

Reliable knowledge makes accurate, testable predictions of the consequences of our actions. Unreliable knowledge does not.

"Reliable" knowledge has practical utility in the material world. It lets us consistently predict that, when we take a certain action, a particular outcome will occur.

For example, if we treat the Black Death with antibiotics, it will be cured. That's scientific knowledge, derived rigorously, and capable of being tested by independent parties, with consistent results.

The Black Death

Take the Black Death which spread throughout Europe. It was estimated to have killed one-third of Europe's population (in the tens of millions). Imagine living in such a time where one-third of your loved ones were dying due to the plague. There is no known cure around at the time.

Now take a group of fanatics who believe that Jews were responsible for the plague by poisoning wells. They believe this with such certainty that they massacre Jewish communities, burning Jews alive at the stake.

What would you do if you wholeheartedly accepted what these fanatics believed while your loved ones were dying left and right? Would you just let these evil people who brought this plague upon your loved ones go about continuing to poison wells and kill everyone you know, or will you join in massacring their communities and burning them alive at the stake?

What allows us to condemn the actions of these fanatics today? The answer is simple: science. Science informs us that rodents were the source of the plague, not poisoning of wells, and it also discovered a cure for the plague.

With this knowledge, we discover that the Europeans who massacred Jews did so for no good reason at all except faulty knowledge. Yet they weren't "immoral", so to speak, so much as "misguided" by faulty beliefs.

Moral Dilemma

Let's now look at a moral dilemma. If your family member is infected with the plague, what should you do?

A) Kill Jews, believing that they're poisoning your family.
B) Perform witch trials, believing the plague is God's wrath for witchcraft and heresy.
C) Pray for a cure.
D) Administer antibiotics.

What's the best choice, and how do we determine that one of these actions is morally superior to another? The answer to this question is the closest thing we get to "objective morality" in a nutshell. One of these options is based on knowledge which was rigorously obtained, capable of being tested and verified, with consistent results. The knowledge and beliefs behind the other options cannot be tested and validated in any consistent way.

Unreliable Knowledge

When we allow unreliable knowledge based on predictions which cannot be validated (ex: predictions about consequences in the afterlife) to dictate morality, then anything goes.

A group of religious people can believe that sacrificing virgins each month to ward off earthquakes is a viable option to appease their gods in this world and ensure their salvation in the afterlife. How can we criticize these people and condemn their actions as immoral? From their standpoint, they're saving humanity.

Religious people of all denominations might point at ancient scripture suggesting that they are in the wrong, but now we've got a holy war. Which religion is correct? Which one is wrong? How do we establish a rigorous criteria to determine which set of beliefs accurately predicts the outcomes of their actions and which do not?

The only higher authority that rises above the rest that I can see people of all religious denominations potentially agreeing upon is science. Science can inform us that sacrificing virgins monthly is not going to have any effect on earthquakes. It can demonstrate this reliably in ways that no religious claims can.

Deranged Killer

If a deranged serial killer believes that the voices in his head are coming from angels telling him to kill people, how can we say he's wrong? Maybe we're all wrong and he's actually right.

We can't say that for sure unless we have a rigorous way to test the validity of his claims. It's only through science that we can say, with some confidence, that the voices from his head are the result of psychological disorders and possibly even brain damage.

If we don't establish a rigorous way of obtaining and testing knowledge, who are we to say he's in the wrong? This killer is operating on faith. We cannot test and validate his claims. If we're trying counter faith-based beliefs with more faith-based beliefs, we end up nowhere.

The only way we can say that something is "right" and something is "wrong" with any degree of confidence is if we can test the claims and see if they produce consistent results. That's the closest we get to "objectively right": various people can test something over and over and end up with consistent results.

Misguided

I want to start replacing the word, "immoral", with "misguided". Many acts in history which we can largely agree upon today as being "evil" did not sprout from thin air. If we examine the people and their ideologies and what they believed to be absolutely true, they weren't "bad" people necessarily; they were misguided.

They relied upon unreliable knowledge which made inaccurate predictions about the outcome of their actions. That's how we can look back at these people and say they were in the wrong.

They were wrong not because they were satanic creatures, but simply misguided human beings who actually believed they were doing the right thing.

Hume's Law

More simply known as the is-ought problem, Hume's Law states that we cannot necessarily derive a prescriptive claim about what ought to be from a descriptive statement about what is.

For example, even though we now know that administering antibiotics effectively cures the Black Death, why should we? Why should we bother to save people?

The key to bridging this gap requires that we establish a goal. If we can establish a goal and agree on it, then descriptive statements can lead to prescriptive statements.

Given everything we understand from these statements, we ought to do this to best fulfill this goal.

So does humanity have a set of goals that would allow us to at least reach a fairly wide consensus? I'd say, "yes, mostly". Since we're an empathetic and cooperative species who care about the well-being of others, especially our loved ones, we largely share this goal in common. We might individually care for different sets of people, but given the overlap from one individual to the next, it can quickly encompass an entire population.

As a result it should be obvious to most of us that if someone is infected with the Black Death and antibiotics are an effective and inexpensive cure, we ought to administer antibiotics to the infected. We have these overlapping goals to protect those we care about.

This especially applies when we consider that if we don't, the plague could easily spread to us and those we love even if the infected are outside the immediate group of people we personally care about.

Nihilism

Of course we could divorce ourselves from our humanity and ask, what's the point of even being humane? What's the point of being an altruistic, cooperative species, even if we have these tendencies? What's the point of caring for my loved ones?

If we do that, then we've ventured into outer space as far as morality goes. That's working towards moral nihilism, but at that point we're no longer even immersing ourselves in our own humanity. I see this type of thinking as fruitless.

Scientific Morality

I hope I've made some case for why scientific knowledge combined with our human tendencies to be empathetic and cooperative is the closest thing we have to "objective morality". I also see it as the only hope for humanity to reach a near-universal consensus on what is right and wrong.

We cannot do this if we fail to establish a rigorous, testable criteria to determine what set of beliefs guiding our actions make more accurate predictions than others. If we can't reliably know the consequences of our actions, then anything goes.

I realize this article may challenge the beliefs of some religious people and possibly even philosophers. For the religious, I'd like you to consider other religious groups you consider to be highly immoral people, and try to figure out how you can reliably show, with consistent results, that the consequences of their actions are not what they believe them to be without science.

If we allow faith to guide our notions of right and wrong, then everyone ends up in an arbitrary place based on whatever ideologies they accept on faith alone. A Mormon cannot criticize a Jihadist as being immoral in any viable way besides:

My beliefs which make no accurate predictions are right, while your beliefs which make no accurate predictions are wrong.

This gets us nowhere. Probably the only way we can expect a winner to come out of such an argument is for one to kill the other.

Science, combined with broadening our empathy, is the only hope I see for those of us of all religious denominations to come together and largely agree on a set of moral principles. It's the only hope I see to uniting all of us without simply converging on the same religious beliefs which we accept through nothing more than faith (ex: one world religion to rule them all which we all come to subscribe towards).

[rjroy3]

Science, just like Math is amoral. It merely IS.
It is up to the people involved to deal with morality/immorality in given any given matter. Science is merely when X is done, we found Y outcome happens. It's inept of any moral sense. You do not discover morals in science. You can only attempt to understand the morals you already have and why you have them, using science to sort of reverse engineer how they came to be.

The morals you have you received from the culture in which you were raised, along with personal experiences. Your personal experience is the space of variations. An atheist whether he chooses to accept it or not. All of his deeply held moral principles comes from a religious principles that his culture was founded on and adhered to, along with ancillary principles that stemmed from personal experiences as well and were passed down. If he was raised in an Atheist culture, then he would have a very very different set of morals than being raised in a Muslim, Hindu or Christian culture.

[ak666]

Empathy is the crucial part, but what leads to the idea that certain actions committed in the past is immoral is based on a different set of beliefs.

Modern Christians might say Hitler was no true Christian because he not only went against the teachings of Christ but also started turning against Christians, believing he had a superior understanding of God's purpose. Either way that's a pissing contest between faith vs. faith. There's no way we can say with any certainty that one set of beliefs is right and the other is wrong. We have no criteria for it. It's like who is right, a Muslim or a Christian? The Muslim can cite the Quran, the Christian can cite the New Testament.

Meanwhile if we appeal to science, we can at least start picking apart a lot of the antisemitic ideas of Nazi Germany. The idea of the Untermensch, of sub-human people, is based on pseudo-scientific claims that don't withstand even the most basic of tests or even the most basic understanding of biology.

[rjroy3]

1. You're right. Looking back on the past and deeming actions right or wrong from a moral standpoint is based on what your beliefs are at this time. But the topic is "Scientific Morality". You do not come to morality through science. You have specific morals despite science.
We can seek to understand how morals are formed and why, but science doesn't formulate them.

2. This is getting off into the weeds, but Hitler was a skeptic who planned to take down the church in Germany. He was merely raised by a Catholic mother and he was baptised as a child not by choice. He was not Christian, but raised in a Catholic/Christian home. Scholars believe him to have been an Atheist.

3. " There's no way we can say with any certainty that one set of beliefs is right and the other is wrong. We have no criteria for it. "
For sake of clarity. How do you personally define "moral right" and "moral wrong"?

[ak666]

>> You do not come to morality through science.

You're totally right. Empathy is the key as I see it. I went for "Scientific Morality" as a title in the sense of empathy guided by science. I don't see anything remotely resembling morality without empathy in the first place.

>> How do you personally define "moral right" and "moral wrong"?

In my case, self-interest, but my self-interest expands to the well-being of all sorts of people around me, and I feel bad seeing others suffer, even complete strangers. "Selfless self-interest" sounds like an oxymoron but it's as best as I can put it.

So I want to take actions that maximize the well-being of myself and those I care about, prevent needless harm, etc. That's the whole "morality" part for me in a nutshell.

The main part where the science helps is that I can't do that effectively if I don't know the overall consequences of my actions. If I believed killing people was a path to martyrdom and paradise, I might very well be a killer.

[rjroy3]

"In my case, self-interest, but my self-interest expands to the well-being of all sorts of people around me, and I feel bad seeing others suffer, even complete strangers. "Selfless self-interest" sounds like an oxymoron but it's as best as I can put it."

This is actually a biblical principle. Do unto others or "love others as you love yourself". It's a selfless love that is surrounded around self interest.

"The main part where the science helps is that I can't do that effectively if I don't know the overall consequences of my actions. If I believed killing people was a path to martyrdom and paradise, I might very well be a killer."

The actions taken wouldn't be having the interests of others in mind. It would be about your own interests at their sake. Unless we're getting into territory of preventing future harm. Such as logically determining why it was morally right to kill Saddam Hussein. It's not that he killed people, because 9/11 was done by other people. It was future trouble.

[rjroy3]

Just a heads up. I'm heading to bed and will reply tomorrow if you're up to continue

[ak666]

Cheers. The Golden Rule is also found in other cultures (Confucius, e. g.).

I think it's actually something that was naturally embedded in me for some reason or another. I don't know if it was for everyone, but I was an unusual kid in that I offered my ice cream to a middle aged woman when she dropped hers, e. g., at 4 years old. The other kids laughed.

I just projected myself in her shoes and imagined what it would be like if I dropped my ice cream and how upsetting it would be to me, and then imagined how to make me happy.

Of course I was wrong though because I think I cheered the lady up, but not because she took the ice cream. I slobbered all over it and didn't realize, at the time, that this was absolutely gross to offer my ice cream. :-D

[ak666]

>> The actions taken wouldn't be having the interests of others in mind.

It wouldn't, but if I believed the people I was killing were enemies of a god or something to this effect, and that this was the best way to ensure my eternal salvation... eternal salvation is a damn tempting thing. The idea of that would probably make me act in a way where I put my own interests above others, especially if the failure of that lead to eternal damnation.

Basically if I can be made to believe things like this, then I can become a killer... I just think I'm a bit invulnerable since I'd need really solid data to support the idea that this god exists, that an afterlife exists, and that eternal salvation can be had by killing this god's enemies.

[rjroy3]

"Cheers. The Golden Rule is also found in other cultures (Confucius, e. g.)."

This is still a principle of a religion in which other cultures were founded. Ergo those people came to their morals through religion.

"I think it's actually something that was naturally embedded in me for some reason or another. I don't know if it was for everyone, but I was an unusual kid in that I offered my ice cream to a middle aged woman when she dropped hers, e. g., at 4 years old. The other kids laughed."

I was the same way. I think it's common to be loving, but this is also fostered through upbringing. Kids are naturally selfish, unless a parent teaches sharing and helping others. You had some experience where this type of treatment was the norm. Whether you saw it with your parents, a sibling or you yourself did it and had a positive experience from it.

I appreciate the childhood story tho. It made me smile : )

[rjroy3]

"It wouldn't, but if I believed the people I was killing were enemies of a god or something to this effect, and that this was the best way to ensure my eternal salvation... eternal salvation is a damn tempting thing."

Well then it's dipping into something that is considered immoral even in that mindset. It's self serving and disregarding the other person.
Just to clarify again. The base of your argument is, "There is no basis for defining what belief sets are morally right or wrong. But using a scientific method we can determine what is morally right and wrong". Is that a fair summation of your argument? I just want to stay on point and not get lost amidst the individual statements.

[rjroy3]

And morally right or wrong is essentially, "loving" others as yourself or having a level of empathy that you only do unto others what you would want done unto you.

[ak666]

>> Well then it's dipping into something that is considered immoral even in that mindset. It's self serving and disregarding the other person.

It's a tricky part since xenophobia seems to be an intrinsic part of human nature. The moment humans fail to identify a certain group of people as "own kind", all their tendencies to be cooperative and peaceful among each other can suddenly shut off. The worst part is just how many ways they can fail to do this: differences in religion, ethnicity, sex, nationality, etc. It can go to the point where they can convince themselves that these outsiders aren't even human, and that's where I'm thinking the conditioning can allow them to override any sense of conscience. My thinking is that this sort of conditioning combined with xenophobia combined with the belief that this leads to eternal salvation could actually allow me to massacre a group of people without thinking twice, and even without any kind of brain disorders.

[ak666]

>> . The base of your argument is, "There is no basis for defining what belief sets are morally right or wrong. But using a scientific method we can determine what is morally right and wrong".

Not quite but just that science gives us a way to determine the possible consequences of our actions in a way whose results can be consistently replicated with more and more evidence supporting the assumptions typically being gathered over time.

Pseudoscience, religion, crazy ideologies, conspiracy theories, etc. generally can't withstand this criteria.

Science can't tell us what's right or wrong morally, but it can tell us that if we release a coconut while standing on top of a tree with a child below it, that coconut is going to fall and potentially kill the child as an absurdly simple example. If we didn't think that to be the case and thought the coconut was just going to be suspended in mid-air, we could kill that child inadvertently just failing to understand the consequences.

[ak666]

With that silly coconut example, when we combine that type of reliable knowledge with empathy, we end up deliberately avoiding things that hurt others.

About ethics, that's very complicated about how cultures arrive at certain values. But I think altruism is not so complicated. Even some of the most seemingly monstrous societies today to us had the members generally caring for those they at least identified as "own kind", and especially those in their own family, their own children, closest friends, etc.

The way I see it is that if we have a small populace such as a tribe, they're generally peaceful and cooperative with each other without a codified set of laws.

Where ethics become necessary, as I see it, is when that tribe encounters another to counteract those xenophobic tendencies or when the population gets large enough that it consists of a lot of people who know or don't care for each other in the slightest.

[ak666]

It is at this larger scale that I see it as necessary to then promote concepts like the golden rule along with laws or divine laws: "Thou shalt not kill or we will lock you away." "Thou shalt not kill or you will face eternal damnation." ... with either human or divine enforcers of these laws.

[rjroy3]

Pardon the late response. Life took me away for a few days.

"My thinking is that this sort of conditioning combined with xenophobia combined with the belief that this leads to eternal salvation could actually allow me to massacre a group of people without thinking twice"

I guess where I'm getting confused is the connection between having a sense of morality being your starting point and using an example of someone who is essentially not moral. Because it is self serving regardless of the self justifications they have.

"Pseudoscience, religion, crazy ideologies, conspiracy theories, etc. generally can't withstand this criteria"

In regards to ideology then how are we to say that one is crazy or not if there is no objective way to say it is morally right or wrong? We can do mental simulation of where any one pattern will take us, but who are the arbiters that have the final say in the inevitable event of disagreement of thought?

[rjroy3]

"The way I see it is that if we have a small populace such as a tribe, they're generally peaceful and cooperative with each other without a codified set of laws."

100% agree. This is why the only place Socialism works is your own household. Sharing what you have with the family, because they're family works. You extend that out to a larger population and it ceases to function.

"Where ethics become necessary, as I see it, is when that tribe encounters another to counteract those xenophobic tendencies or when the population gets large enough that it consists of a lot of people who know or don't care for each other in the slightest.'

Personally, I fundamentally disagree that humans of inherent xenophobic tendencies, but it's common to fear what you do not understand. But xenophobia is a step further than just having a fear of the unknown so I wouldn't go as far as to say that. But I do agree that the larger the populations have less care for eachother, which is in part with...

[rjroy3]

with my point regarding Socialism only working on a small scale, but falls short when applied to a country.

"It is at this larger scale that I see it as necessary to then promote concepts like the golden rule along with laws or divine laws: "Thou shalt not kill or we will lock you away." "Thou shalt not kill or you will face eternal damnation." ... with either human or divine enforcers of these laws."

That is where Natural Law comes in and is actually a fundamental difference from having the punishment mindset. It focuses on people having inherent rights, rather than focusing on we'll punish you for doing x, y or z.

[ak666]

Socialism is an interesting example since a lot of my concerns relate to scale and complexity with dense populations, currency, nuclear weapons, internet, global markets, etc.

If I was ideologically-motivated and disregarded the results, I'd be a communist. It's the most idealistic-sounding principle and rather utopian when we come to think about it. The problem is that it just doesn't work in practice.

It's only through a type of scientific thinking focused on data and results that has me favoring capitalism. It's, as far as I can gather in terms of data, the most effective system when it comes to allowing a large population to thrive.

That's kind of getting to the difference between ideologically-motivated and scientifically-motivated. The former doesn't really care about the actual results. It places principles above results, even at the cost of greater overall suffering, even at the cost of societies collapsing. What "sounds right" becomes more important than results.

[ak666]

If we look at this from a political mindset, one of my questions might be:

How much freedom can we allow an ordinary individual before we expect him or her to turn to evil? How much freedom can we allow before such an individual turns to chaos, violence, tyranny, etc. leading to a society where if there were many of such individuals, we would find ourselves, as a whole or even with minority groups set aside, living in the most undesirable circumstances?

That's the money question for me since, as an atheist, I have a substantially greater amount of freedom than a religious person. I'm free from 24/7 surveillance by a governing body, I'm free to covet my neighbor's wife, I'm free to use the Lord's name in vain, I'm free to work on the Sabbath, I'm free to have premarital sex, etc.

I don't know the answer to this question but my optimistic thinking is that if we can guide ourselves largely through empathy and science, we can actually maximize individual freedom and not expect chaos.

[rjroy3]

"That's kind of getting to the difference between ideologically-motivated and scientifically-motivated. The former doesn't really care about the actual results. It places principles above results, even at the cost of greater overall suffering, even at the cost of societies collapsing. What "sounds right" becomes more important than results."

Yes and no. Yes ideologies do focus on the principle rather than the result, but this is also where morality comes in. Is it morally right to take from one person to give to another person, for the sake of lessening overall suffering? Or is maintaining the principle that (just for example) you have a sovereign right to life, liberty and property?

If the outcome for all is all that matters, then that in and of itself is inherently an ideological principle. Just a different moral value. A moral value of equal outcomes being held higher than all else.

[rjroy3]

"I don't know the answer to this question but my optimistic thinking is that if we can guide ourselves largely through empathy and science, we can actually maximize individual freedom and not expect chaos."

I wholeheartedly disagree, because at the end of the day there has to be a moral arbiter who will enforce the guiding principle (law) of empathy. The idea of big brother taking what is yours, because someone big brother thinks needs it more is good enough reason to take it and if you disagree with big brother then it's just for him to take what's yours by force because that individual just needs to have empathy.

[rjroy3]

This isn't a new idea and it's honestly not empathy at a certain point.
Imagine you have 3 men on an island. 1 guy gets sick. He's going to recover just fine, but he's not doing that well. Guy 2 wants to help out sick guy, because he's having a rough time so guy 2 goes to Guy 3 who is the best hunter and had extra food for the next couple days and tells guy 3 he should give his extra food to guy 1.

If we look at this from the standpoint of what would be empathetic. Then guy 3 giving to guy 1 would certainly be empathetic. But if guy 3 says no, because he only got extra food so that he wouldn't have to hunt for a couple days what then is the empathetic option for guy 2? To put himself in the shoes of guy 3 and accept that he's not going to share for good reason OR maneuvering any way he can to steal or force guy 3 to give to guy 1?

If the outcome needs to be taken into account as a guiding principle.

[ak666]

>> Is it morally right to take from one person to give to another person, for the sake of lessening overall suffering?

Cold utilitarian kind of choices tend to have to violate empathy at some level or another, and they tend to fail an empathetic kind of thinking. For example, if we allowed a society to torture suspects accused of a crime, it doesn't take a big stretch of imagination to see how such a society could easily end up torturing us or someone we care about. Empathy narrows the possible choices as I see it, science can highlight that torturing may not even be effective in this scenario even if we think it sounds right.

Now about the last example, I'm all for free enterprise for rather scientific reasons. It's because even though it's counter-intuitive and I changed my views considerably from decades before, maximizing freedom and seeking equality of opportunity actually seems more effective at addressing inequity than seeking equality of results through intervention.

[ak666]

Another thing about cold utilitarian scenarios is that they're often presented as hypothetical scenarios where we're *certain* about the outcome. That level of certainty rarely exists in real world scenarios.

We typically cannot be absolutely certain, for example, that wiping out a certain group of human beings is actually going to make anything better. That also already requires violating any empathetic constraints. It's usually not sound science that leads people to this level of certainty. It's usually an ideology that is, at best, pseudoscience and sometimes just outright religion.

Most of the times in a moral dilemma, we deal with probability. We have these soldiers stranded in enemy territory. If we attempt to send a rescue team, there is a risk that no one may come out alive. We may lose both the rescue team and the stranded soldiers. What do we do?

We have to weigh the odds, but a lot of times humans perform admirably here as long as there's a fighting chance.

[ak666]

Now with this stranded soldier example, let's say we had some kind of futuristic technology that could accurately predict that any attempt to rescue these soldiers only has a 0.000000001% chance of success. In that case we might become a bit more cold and utilitarian in our thinking, but only because we wouldn't attempt to save lives in a scenario where we are almost scientifically certain to lose *both* the rescue and the stranded soldiers. We'd probably lose heroic attempts at futility... but arguably that's really saving lives as a result of having more data to inform our choices. We avoid futile attempts at doing so which are pretty much guaranteed to fail.

[ak666]

Futile attempts that attempt to achieve a good outcome but ultimately cause greater suffering for everyone involved is at least something a scientific approach can help to mitigate and rule out.

[rjroy3]

"Futile attempts that attempt to achieve a good outcome but ultimately cause greater suffering for everyone involved is at least something a scientific approach can help to mitigate and rule out."

That soldier example is legitimately a tough one. If damage mitigation relates directly to lives lost in that example, then you can argue a moral case for it. But if we're talking about the morale of a cause and those involved aswell then that's no longer really the case. If you were apart of a group that you knew would leave you to die, rather than risk their lives to try and save you makes the overall team believe less in the cause. This is instinctual.

[rjroy3]

A good example is a child raising a puppy. The puppy falls into water for the first time and quickly turns to the child for help, but the child due to fear of not knowing how to swim and belief that he himself will be harmed freaks out and leaves the puppy in the water. The child accidentally falls into the water in a panic and turns to the pup for help who happens to have figured out how to paddle. Leaving the screaming child to drown.

The loyalty was already broken, when the boy abandoned him in time of need. Tho the puppy didn't do so out of spite. He simply learned that self preservation mattered above all else and now there is a guaranteed outcome. As long as you are safe, then nothing else matters. Most medal of honor stories on the books began with a man who was convinced that he would be dead by the end of the battle. Many of them actually do die. Sometimes they return alive, having won a major event. Boosting the morale of everyone involved. Even in death heroic acts matter.

[rjroy3]

War is a prime case of principle beliefs meaning more than numbers. Why you're in it. The cause. What you stand to lose. What you're willing to do. Obviously success rates are taken into account and you don't make stupid moves for the hell of it. But if the cause is so great you'll make choices that the chance of success is substantially lower.

[ak666]

I actually got into a very similar line of discussion with someone else who said he was very glad that humans are "imperfectly rational" creatures. I took some issue with that wording.

He used an example of a general who tried to dissuade a soldier from rescuing his wounded friend. The general didn't want to risk the chance of losing two good soldiers instead of one. The soldier went anyway and got wounded and failed to rescue his friend who already died from his injuries.

The implication here is that the general is "perfectly rational" while the soldier who went to rescue his friend was behaving "irrationally".

I disagreed with the wording and I used morale for the justification. The general isn't necessarily behaving "optimally" applying a cold utilitarian mindset. It's only optimal if he assumes all his soldiers lack any empathy for the other and also don't care if they're abandoned when they're wounded.

[ak666]

When we take into account the fact that soldiers typically don't want to be abandoned when they're wounded and, furthermore, the fact that many of them wouldn't want their peers to be left behind when wounded, simply abandoning any soldier that gets wounded is very arguably sub-optimal. Even if guided by rational thought about what is "optimal", it's neglecting very critical variables which could easily lead to the most sub-optimal outcome with soldiers losing morale, refusing to cooperate, fleeing in terror, turning renegade, etc.

Of course we might say that's not "moral" even though its altruistic for the general to avoid abandoning the wounded, to leave no one behind. I tend to just call anything altruistic "moral" anyway because if we investigate the source of altruism in human beings deeply enough, it can almost always be traced back to some form of self-interest.

I used to become disheartened by this fact that "goodness" in humans often boils down to self-interest.

[ak666]

It has to be because for any autonomous agent to behave altruistically, it must somehow boil back down to self-interest. But I've come to simply take it for granted and appreciate that motivations driven by self-interest, however conscious or subconscious, can still lead to selfless behavior.

This is one of the reasons why I think, even if we take aside a psychopath and set him aside from the system and have him lead humanity, even if he's one of those exceptional ones who lacks any empathy towards other human beings, a lot of what is "optimal" behavior has to avoid a cold utilitarian mindset because it is hardly ever shown to be truly optimal.

It requires neglecting crucial properties of all the humans he's leading. That level of misunderstanding is almost certain to lead to an undesirable outcome.

[ak666]

About the only time I can think of where cold, utilitarian type of actions result from level-headed logic is when you have ingroup favoritism leading to a homogeneous group terrorizing others.

As an example, take blue robots and green robots. The blue robots enslave the green ones. The whole blue robot populace is convinced that green robots are not even human beings, and therefore they've come, through conditioning, to fail to empathize whatsoever with the suffering of green robots.

In a war scenario, the green robots are used as cannon fodder. They're forced into the most dangerous front lines at gunpoint. They have no morale, they have only fear. In that case we're applying cold utilitarian thinking, happily sacrificing the lives of green robots in favor of the greater good of blue robots.

But we can only get away with it because we're part of the blue robots terrorizing the green robots, and because none of the blue robots care about the plight of the green robots.

[ak666]

Nevertheless, when we're talking about humans, you typically never find scientific thinking leading to this analogical blue/green robot distinction. Throughout history there almost always seems to be an irrational ideology involved because humans aren't necessarily natural born killers, at least not the majority.

To convince the masses to tyrannize a group often requires some kind of radical ideology which isn't based on sound, rational thought. It's the only way we can turn off the empathetic nature of beings on a mass scale towards another group of beings.

It often requires some crazy propaganda like the belief that the green group is sub-human, or that they are agents of the devil who are going to lead to the destruction of the blue robots if they are not controlled and subjugated, etc. etc.

Science counters that kind of ingroup favoritism since it often points out that these oppressive categorizations are based on rubbish ideology.

[ak666]

Back to my main line of thinking, science can't erase empathy in human beings. There was nothing about my STEM background that made me no longer care about other people or fail to recognize that other people also care about other people.

It can, however, erase a lot of bigoted and discriminatory thoughts. That's something my STEM background helped me do, overcoming stereotypes, becoming less judgmental of people, etc.

It can also help us predict the *actual* consequences of our actions. We can avoid that whole, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of mindset, because that comes from good intentions with a lack of awareness for the actual consequences.

Last but not least, if we could subscribe to it (maybe too idealistic), it allows us to largely *converge* on our values applying a sound method that actually allows us to deprecate or reject inaccurate hypotheses in favor of increasingly accurate ones...

[ak666]

... this convergence is one of the most hopeful things I can think about.

It's because I never find a case where one organized group of people clashed into another and started acting in horrific ways unless the two groups had *incompatible* values. Incompatible values is what seems to lead to massacres.

It might be that one side favors capitalism, another communism. It might be an incompatibility in religious beliefs. It might be that one side believes a certain group of sub-human while these supposed sub-humans don't think they're sub-human. That group subjugating sub-humans might then get into a value conflict with those who don't believe in sub-humans, leading to a war.

All of this type of stuff, I see, as an incompatibility of *values*. And the only practical way I see to converge on values and to find greater compatibility in values is to base the values on something we can actually test and validate independently.

[rjroy3]

So that was a lot lol. I'm only going to really address the last two, because that's where the baseline content lies and I'd also like to add on this quote:

"
I used to become disheartened by this fact that "goodness" in humans often boils down to self-interest."

Likewise. Tho I've read enough on the subject matter that I can say not all good acts boil down to self interest. I was first presented the idea in university. Had me disheartened aswell, because having never even heard of the idea before I didn't really have a deep base to refute the idea. So I did quite a bit of thinking about it. The reason that "goodness" oftentimes boils down to self interest at one point or another has to do with the emotional set point of the individual.

If a person is in a state of "having", then he is more than likely to give unto others. Because he doesn't need anything. He only does what he wants, because he feels like it. If he helps it's because he felt inspired, rather than feels compelled to.

[rjroy3]

'It can also help us predict the *actual* consequences of our actions. We can avoid that whole, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of mindset, because that comes from good intentions with a lack of awareness for the actual consequences. "

I see where you're coming from, but this is somewhat an impossible ideal to reach for. Now there is obvious benefits of the ability to simulate. That's something that is uniquely human. Being able to simulate something in our head, before it happens and strive to see likely outcomes (even too our detriment at times. Overthinking is killer).
But we're never faced with a situation of perfect clear understanding of the exact consequences. Never. We only understand the big stuff

[rjroy3]

""Last but not least, if we could subscribe to it (maybe too idealistic), it allows us to largely *converge* on our values applying a sound method that actually allows us to deprecate or reject inaccurate hypotheses in favor of increasingly accurate ones.. "

This actually relates back to something you said earlier when you said "irrational ideologies". All ideologies have rational to them. There's just emotional beliefs tied into many of them. Every ideology has reasoning for their values. Doing this with a scientific method of your choosing is no different. What you're hoping for a is religion of science, which many people already subscribe to today. The Big Bang is the origin story. Evolution is how we got here and the Nihilism view of nothing mattering is the meaning of life. That's the religion of science with a slight variation between Nihilism and Atheism.

[ak666]

That's actually a good thing as I see it that science can't predict perfect consequences of our actions, like that scenario where we're deciding whether to send a rescue team to save stranded people. If we knew the precise probabilities down to black and white, success or failure, it'd ruin the notion of virtue if knew we were 100% guaranteed flawless success and also entirely prevent the attempt if we knew we were 100% guaranteed failure.

But the main problem I see with humanity is that so much harm can be done in the name of the greater good. And every time I inspect in history when that has happened, the ideology fueling it hardly seems scientific, hardly seems validated by independent parties to test the accuracy of its predictions.

If anything, I often see rigorous methods of obtaining and validating knowledge steering us away from that sort of thing. It's like science doesn't make us favor torture, quite the contrary. It points out that it's ineffective.

[ak666]

A lot of people fear science as though expanding scientific knowledge and the increased number of people adopting a scientific mindset will lead to this cold, utilitarian society. But so far I've not found science turning off empathy.

If anything turns off empathy for the masses, it almost always seems to be a radical, unscientific ideology.

[rjroy3]

"It's because I never find a case where one organized group of people clashed into another and started acting in horrific ways unless the two groups had *incompatible* values. Incompatible values is what seems to lead to massacres."

Islam proves this every day. If the world would just convert to the "correct' sect of Islam, then we wouldn't have terrorism. That's exactly where they're coming from too.

[ak666]

>> If the world would just convert to the "correct' sect of Islam, then we wouldn't have terrorism.

That kinda boils down to my whole problem with religious ethics. A scientist may never successfully convert many religious people to adopt a more secular style of thinking. But at the very least his idea of "correct", or at least "accurate", can be accompanied by consistently and independently verified results.

I see it as nothing but stabbing around in the dark when we try to argue "correctness" based on beliefs that revolve around faith in the supernatural, in the untestable.

[rjroy3]

My last statement in regards to Islam was dripping with sarcasm lol. I do make the mistake of hoping sarcasm reads over texts, but I seem to run into the problem over and over xD.

"If anything turns off empathy for the masses, it almost always seems to be a radical, unscientific ideology."

Well not necessarily. I wholeheartedly disagree with Hitler. But any white nationalist will tell you that most problems stem from a huge difference in culture and values and that if every ethnic group had their own homeland then those problems would cease to exist. There's nothing unscientific about that ideology and as you said already most major issues begin, because of a difference of values and that you wish people to take on the same values. The difference is that your view isn't ethnocentric nor separatist.

[rjroy3]

"If we knew the precise probabilities down to black and white, success or failure, it'd ruin the notion of virtue if knew we were 100% guaranteed flawless success and also entirely prevent the attempt if we knew we were 100% guaranteed failure."

Not necessarily. You're still taking a bet at lives lost. So those men risking their lives are still doing virtuous acts. We would just have an even higher faith in their strength and success. It's just russian roulette with who is coming back alive.

[ak666]

Oh sorry, maybe I failed to communicate the example. I'm talking about some futuristic hypothetical device which could say, with 100% certainty, that no one would be harmed in the entire process. For example, imagine such a device saying that if I rescue an old woman crossing the street from a bus, both of us would come out unscathed. Suddenly a lot of the virtue of the act is lost since there's no risk involved. Of course it's still nice that I'm choosing to save the old lady anyway in spite of the fact that it comes at no risk to me to do so, but it has a very different impact on how we look at morality if we possessed such a device. It might still be virtuous in the sense that I dedicated a few minutes to saving this old lady instead of letting her die, but without risk, a whole lot changes in this scenario. At the very least it no longer becomes so "heroic".

[ak666]

Another way to look at this is that morality is based on guiding principles. Guiding principles are based on a rule of thumb kind of mentality of what works best given a situation with unknowns. "Probability-wise, it's better to be kind to a stranger than to punch him in the face", as a blatant example. Of course there might be a scenario where if we punch a stranger in the face, he might become our best friend and give us a million dollars. But that seems incredibly unlikely. Yet if we had technology so advanced that it would eliminate all the unknowns involved in our actions, we'd lose the notion of "guiding principles" outright.

[rjroy3]

Ah, I see what you mean. It takes away from the Bravery aspect. You and everyone knows you'd be okay. So the virtue is still there for merely doing the act, but just to a lesser extent. 100% agree, but that's so futuristic I can't take it at it's face in regards to this topic lol. It's kind of like trying to reference Avatar for what could be possible in the next decade and making decisions based on that. You just can't xD.

" Guiding principles are based on a rule of thumb kind of mentality of what works best given a situation with unknowns. "Probability-wise, it's better to be kind to a stranger than to punch him in the face", as a blatant example."

That's not really the basis of morality example. Morality is "punching people is wrong. Don't do it". Adding in the aspect of "this could be better in the future" is irrelevant in regards to the "why". Merely saying, "Do good heart" is enough. You don't need the hammer in the background saying you'll get in trouble if you do this.

[I-am-a-nobody]

"For a start, I'm going to claim that objective morality does not exist."

Yeah, might as well go wrong from the start and save time.
While you're basically worshiping at the altar of science, you might want to consider that people are killing, raping and basically harming other people at a pretty good rate in spite of advances in science.

"If we examine the people and their ideologies and what they believed to be absolutely true, they weren't "bad" people necessarily; they were misguided."

Knowing the consequences of our actions isn't making people better regardless.
So, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc. were just "misguided", right?
The problem is not a scientific problem. If it were we would have solved it by now.

Sometimes, it seems the more people learn, the less they know.

[ak666]

But it is making people better, is it not? How many people from STEM do you know committing suicide bombings, honor killings, raping people, joining gangs, etc?

[I-am-a-nobody]

@ak666
I didn't know him personally, but how about Dr. Mengele?
Does he count?
www.ranker.com/.../ranker-crime

Science doesn't stop people from harming each other.

[ak666]

That would be quite a bold stretch, yes, to say science stops people from harming each other, and as you pointed out there are definitely people in these categories who do. I was using a broad statistical comparison in mind of what contributes to our prison population. Today the majority come from impoverished upbringings, over 70% from broken homes, poverty is a recurring factor, etc.

My overall claim is quite simple:
Take people from the LDS movement baptizing a child to provide it eternal salvation.
Take a Muslim extremist performing a suicide bombing to ensure his entry into paradise through martyrdom.

Now one of these actions is very benign, the other is definitely harmful to both the believer and those surrounding him. But how can either of these two people criticize each other and say that what the other believes is wrong?

That's the part I'm getting at. How do we arrive on any reliable idea of right and wrong if neither of these two people can validate their predictions?

[ak666]

>> Take people from the LDS movement baptizing a child to provide it eternal salvation.
>> Take a Muslim extremist performing a suicide bombing to ensure his entry into paradise through martyrdom.

If you believe either of these two people are in the wrong, how do you personally justify it?

[I-am-a-nobody]

@ak666
And again, science can go off the deep end. To be honest, from the standpoint of pure utility it makes sense to create the master race, but it's full of problems from a "God wouldn't like that POV". Even now, we have people aborting 1000's in the pursuit of the "right child". I have a huge moral problem with that, but I'd bet your science doesn't.
In just about every "first world" country 1/3 of all the unborn are killed.
So how in the world are we more moral than say the ancient Romans?

At some point somebody is playing God and saying what "ought" to be.
Sorry, but that stinks.
I'd rather trust the One (God) who originated sanitary laws in the Law of Moses nearly 3000 years prior to the Bubonic Plague, thus keeping some Jews from dying in the first place.
I think He knows best.
Science is fine. I like science. But it can't make moral decisions.

[ak666]

>> Science is fine. I like science. But it can't make moral decisions.

It guides them. We probably can't see eye-to-eye on this subject. You are on the same footing as a Jihadist as far as being able to justify your beliefs. That's my main point, and hopefully we can at least agree there.

[ak666]

I'm not saying you're like a Jihadist in any way whatsoever, mind you. As far as I can tell you sound like a very decent person who would avoid harming others for no verifiable reason. All I'm saying is that you can't say what you believe is right with any more data and accurate predictions supporting it than the Jihadist. That's the problem I see when we allow faith to guide morality. It allows anyone to believe anything.

I could suddenly believe one day that I need to go on a shooting spree to wipe out demons from the land. That would be a faith-based belief; it'd be something I cannot validate with any data, I can't make any accurate predictions to show who is a demon and who isn't with consistent results. And no religious person can say I'm wrong in any way except to point to claims that cannot withstand any rigorous method of testing.

The only person that can actually point out that I'm a totally loony with bogus beliefs is the scientist.

[I-am-a-nobody]

@ak666
The issue is sometimes your "consensus" is horribly wrong.
Honestly, like most people, you have way too much faith in mankind.
You say that man is an "empathetic and cooperative species", and you're wrong.
If man were so empathetic, he wouldn't murder 1/3 of his children before birth!
I see that some animals display similar kind of behavior and I know Komodo Dragons eat their young, but aren't we beyond that?
All the simultaneous equations and social engineering in the world won't deal with the problem.
The problem is within man himself.

[ak666]

There are a few remaining tribes out there in the world, untouched by civilization. From what we can gather they seem to be peaceful and cooperative among themselves... though that's a crucial part -- among themselves. If we approached, they might start firing arrows at us. Xenophobia is unfortunately a natural instinct along with altruistic behaviors as far as I can gather. :-(

[ak666]

Is my point about faith vs. faith kinda clear though? For example, how can we convince a jihadist who believes that suicide bombings and martyrdom is the key to paradise? Do we try to just convince him that things like baptism and praying for forgiveness for his sins and accepting Christ as his lord and savior and so forth is the key to paradise? How can we even say his faith is wrong while Christian faith is right?

I don't see how an independent party like myself could determine a clear winner in such a debate if it's just faith vs. faith. The only way I see to settle the dispute is ask:

"All right, please both of you present your hypotheses. My colleagues and I will test them and see which one makes consistently accurate predictions."

That's the only type of approach I see to gain an upper hand over a faith vs. faith matter.

[I-am-a-nobody]

@ak666
Knowing missionaries to a remote village in Indonesia, I can assure you're their pre-Christian behavior would not be considered all that good. (Post-Christian is getting marginally better) The men are lazy and leave most of the work to the women. I believe physical abuse of the women occurs. Once in a while fights erupt where murder is considered. (i. e. people are people, wherever)

I don't expect you to be an arbiter of faith vs. faith. As it is, for the most part, different societies pass laws that reflect their morality, but these systems are flawed because the people that pass such laws are flawed. If 90% of the people are Muslim, I'd expect the society to reflect, for better or worse, Muslim beliefs. The same could be said of 90% Christian or 90% secular societies. Eventually the good and/or bad of each of these is manifest in each nation. Secularist would probably like your scientific approach, but their values are much different from my own.

[ak666]

If a society could converge on a modern form of Christianity, I think that would be beneficial. It would also allow us to converge on moral principles even if there isn't a rigorous way of validating Christian claims. I just see that as a much more difficult goal to ever hope to accomplish since it's that whole faith vs. faith thing.

[I-am-a-nobody]

@ak666
And what would your "modern form of Christianity" look like?
If it's a wishy washy "just be nice to people, but don't judge" Christianity, I'd rather not.

Here's a better plan:
How about Christians get back to their counter cultural role until secularists and Muslims decide to try to annihilate them out of frustration?
Honestly, that works better for me and it's the way I predict things will go anyway.

[ak666]

Exactly that sort of one, like that new-wave type that might even allow homosexuals among its members. :-D I could see quite a peaceful society if the world could magically converge towards that.

Convergence is part of what I see as necessary at some point if we're going to avoid this kind of annihilation scenario. Scientific thoughts actually seems the easiest since we can be like, "Hey look, here's a lighter, it can make fire."

It's harder to pull that off to an unbeliever and say, "Adam was the first man formed from dust and God gave him life by breathing into his nostrils, and he lived to be 930-years old [...]"

[I-am-a-nobody]

@ak666
Annihilation doesn't bother me so much. (Especially since I believe in life after death.)
Realize that convergence is totally impossible on some things.

As much as I disagree with the Muslims, I do understand that they are at their very core anti-secular. Unfortunately, the secularists can't wrap their brain around that mindset, so they come at them with secular reasoning.
It looks like this:
1) Muslims flew planes into our buildings,
2) It must be because of their poverty,
Therefore
3) We need to send more financial aid to Muslim countries.
This is the kind of "logic" I heard after 9/11.

Anyway, your whole thesis makes me realize it would help if Christians demonstrated to secularists that Christian morality is measurably superior.

I heard former atheist Lee Strobel (author of "Case for Christ) on the radio today and he pretty much told how his Christian wife did that with him.

[ak666]

Belief in life is a huge one. I just can't really accept it with that mindset that wants a rigorous way to validate these claims. That said, I must divorce myself from the secularists in this case. I actually think these acts are more the result of ideologies than poverty, at the very least to exclude the ideology and only look at poverty seems to be ignoring a whole lot.

[ak666]

Belief in [after]life is a huge one.

[zagor]

But there was no reason to believe that Jews or witches were the cause of the plague. That was just blaming unpopular groups or individuals for something bad that was happening to society at large. There was no religious basis for that, just a projection of fear and hatred.

[zagor]

And antibiotics aren't a viable solution hundreds of years before they're discovered.

[ak666]

Xenophobia is one of the most dangerous traits in humanity as I see it. Still, how can we steer such people towards a reasonable path? How can we appeal to an authority and say, "What you're doing is failing to accomplish your own goals. Here is how we actually accomplish what you want with sufficient data, and here is an actual case where we cured various people suffering from the plague." There's only one way to do that as I see it.

[ak666]

Yes, but the reason we can condemn their actions as immoral *today* is because we have antibiotics. Scientific knowledge is what steers us towards a moral course of action.

[zagor]

True, but xenophobia is often a false accusation. I live in California. I hate traffic, crowding and high housing prices. Therefore I oppose large-scale immigration and illegal immigration. Some ignorant fanatics label this xenophobia, rather than what it is: A love for the place where I live.

[zagor]

Yes, but science is a mutable subject. Things that were considered scientific truisms a hundred years ago are disregarded today.

[ak666]

Yeah, some people throw about xenophobia left and right when the reasons motivating certain political beliefs could actually be quite rational in nature. Another case though where demanding independently-verifiable knowledge that makes accurate predictions can help, for example, is against the idea of the sub-humans (Untermensch) in Germany. It was fueled by all sorts of complex factors starting with the most primitive xenophobic instincts towards the most complex antisemitism, but this claim that the people is sub-human could actually be refuted if we demanded scientific rigor over propaganda.

It's the scientific method and the rigor behind it that I see as useful to help guide our decision-making. Europeans in the time of the Black Death most certainly couldn't have come up with antibiotics, but they could have potentially countered some of the superstition and fear and propaganda with a scientific mindset that demands rigor before people go off killing others.

[ak666]

>> Yes, but science is a mutable subject. Things that were considered scientific truisms a hundred years ago are disregarded today.

That's very true, but that's a good quality as I see it. It gets refined towards increasingly accurate predictions. I don't want to suggest science as absolute truth, but only boiling down to: "does this theory and framework make accurate predictions about what happens when we do this?"

That's the only part I want to focus on because it's the only thing that comes close to it as I see it, of making testable claims that start converging towards making increasingly accurate, independently-verifiable predictions about the consequences of our actions.

Just demand for the method itself also repels a lot of beliefs that cannot make any veritably-accurate predictions whatsoever about the consequences of our actions.

[Blitzkrieger]

You forgot one massive aspect of it all and that is that science progresses, thus therefore also its morality will progress. What is un-misguided today may be looked upon as misguided 100 years or 1000 years in the future with farther progressed science.

Example: its now better to control rodent life than to let rodents keep spreading the plague and just administering antibiotics.

[ak666]

That's quite true, and one thing people pointed out correctly is that science on its own is neither moral nor immoral. The other crucial element is empathy towards other human beings. Without the altruistic constraints, we can use it towards any purpose we want, including destructive ones.

The main thing is that if protecting those we care about is our goal, then we can only do it effectively if we know the consequences of our actions. All faith-based beliefs cannot claim to do that in any way that is verifiable. All tyrannical ideologies in the past which took so many human lives cannot be said to be wrong if we do not apply any rigorous criteria of validating their predictions.

[ak666]

The notion of "objective morality" is based on the idea that we can say that certain actions are "right" and certain actions are "wrong". Rigorous methods like science are pretty much the only thing that allows people of any religion to begin to converge to some idea of right and wrong.

Otherwise the same thing that causes Catholics to baptize people has as much going for it as far as making verifiable predictions about the consequences of their actions as a Muslim extremist killing infidels.

We can't converge on any notion of right and wrong if faith is what guides us, unless we begin converting the entire world to a particular religion.

[GARY-]

Science has zero basis for morality. Do try to turn science into a religion.

I also like how religious you started sounding like a religious zealot when you detailed on 'morality'. Secular morality remains subjective at its core, the only point you properly detailed on was 'deranged killer'.

[ak666]

Empathy is the key as I see it, not science. But my point about science is that it's about the only thing that lets us reliably converge on ideas of "right" and "wrong" since there's a criteria behind it. Another less rigorous method but one that at least places a criteria on obtaining and validating knowledge is the court of law.

As a basic example, take a Mormon vs. a Jihadist. The former argues that baptism is the key to paradise. The latter argues that suicide bombings and martyrdom is the key to paradise.

Who is right and who is wrong, are they both right, both wrong? How does an independent verify whose moral principles are guided by proper knowledge of the consequences of their actions?

[ak666]

If the Mormon is allowed to base their moral principles on faith, why shouldn't the Jihadist?

The only way I see to kind of settle such a dispute is to come at it and require a rigorous method of validation:

"Hey, both of you, no need to cite your scriptures back and forth endlessly. Please just present us your hypotheses. The winner is the one whose hypothesis can be verified to produce consistent results that support its assumptions."

[ak666]

The closest thing to "objective" comes from rigorous methods that can actually validate claims and invalidate others. We can't arrive at something being "more accurate" or "less accurate" otherwise. That doesn't lead to morality, empathy covers the rest, but that leads to the closest thing resembling "objective".

[GARY-]

Science doesn't cover what is right and wrong (morally speaking) it cover what is correct and false, since that applies to scientific theory and mathematical equations.

As for your example, you explained yourself that we can understand something to be "right" or "wrong" if they produce consistent negative/positive results right?

The mormon's argument is based on biblical instructions to follow divine law that have been proven to right. Whereas the Jihadists argument is based on despotic belief that has only wrought negative results.

But when looking at this from a secular perspective, you have zero basis to judge neither the mormon nor the jihadist since they are acting from a position which they both belief to be right.

[ak666]

What do you mean by "negative results" and "proven to be right"?

[ak666]

I'm guessing you are a Mormon then?

[jacquesvol]

Morality is about empathy.
All the rest they connect to it is religious humbug

[ak666]

Empathy without science is a stab in the dark as I see it. It's actually a limited form of empathy which caused Europeans experiencing the Black Death to attack Jewish communities. They were attempting to save humanity. That's the problem as I see it when we cannot understand the actual consequences of our actions.

[jacquesvol]

Jewish communities too were victims of the plague. Those anti-semites wanted scapegoats.

[ak666]

Very true, but say we could go back in time with our modern knowledge of medicine and start curing the plague, trumping superstitious ideas with actual cures and knowledge which is demonstrably capable of being verified by independent sources. Isn't there a good chance, in that case, that the outcome would be considerably different? Science trumps these arbitrary ideologies. It makes actual predictions about the consequences of our actions that can be verified and tested and consistently reproduced.

[jacquesvol]

IF we could go back in time with our modern knowledge of medicine and start curing the plague, the dumb people wouldn't look for scapegoats.

But even now, we KNOW VERY WELL that only a few Muslims are responsible for terror attacks.
That knowledge doesn't stop the media from depicting ALL Muslims as terrorists.

[ak666]

That's very true, but even that knowledge that extremists are not representative of all Muslims cannot be derived from, say, holy scripture. A scientific investigation seems like the most reliable way to obtain this knowledge and set the people straight.

[jacquesvol]

Propaganda is stronger than scientific knowledge.

[ak666]

Unfortunately so. :-( I'm hoping we can start promoting a society which is increasingly immune to it. It might be a tad optimistic.

My point at the end about a global caliphate was not to suggest that this is the goal of all Muslims, sorry. I just used that example because there are only two ways I see to achieve hope of uniting humanity on a common set of moral principles:

1) For the world to unite on an ideology which is pseudo-scientific or not scientific at all (ex: one world religion) and makes unreliable claims about the consequences of our actions which cannot be consistently tested and validated. We then start operating based on these untestable claims (ex: avoiding work on the Sabbath to avoid potential consequences in the afterlife).

2) For the world to unite on scientific claims that do make accurate predictions that accurately predict the consequences of our actions in ways which we can independently test and verify.

#2 doesn't lead to moral principles directly [...]

[ak666]

[...] but we have no hope of doing that whatsoever if no one can even agree on the consequences of our actions in this life or the next.

[jacquesvol]

@ak666 after WW2 everyone had a healthy distrust of propaganda.
THe Wilson's Cold War was restarted and both sides wanted it back. Thus the distrust was shoved aside.

[jacquesvol]

EDit: *Then Wilson's Cold War was restarted and___

[ak666]

How do we counteract propaganda, or at least gain the ability to criticize it as wrong while favoring another set of data to be right, if faith is an acceptable criteria for believing something that makes no verifiable predictions whatsoever?

[ak666]

As a simple example take someone in the church of LDS baptizing a child to ensure its eternal salvation. What is the rationale for him doing this? Faith, right? He can't provide any solid data to support the idea that baptism has anything to do with eternal salvation, let alone that eternal salvation exists in the first place. His claims have no verifiable predictions. He based it on the teachings of Joseph Smith and possibly what his family and community believed, and ultimately just faith that what he believes is true.

If that's an acceptable criteria and method for believing something, what is to make us immune to propaganda?

[ak666]

How do we converge on any remotely solid footing of what is "right" and "wrong" in any category, not just morality, if the above criteria which accepts things based on no verifiable predictions whatsoever is an acceptable criteria for believing something?

[jacquesvol]

"All the rest they connect to it is religious humbug "

[ak666]

Agreed. :-(

[afs_99cent]

Morality doesn't exist... it's just a concept that the rest of the world has created to convince themselves that they are not a shitty person.

[ak666]

That reminds me a bit of George R. Price. He was a geneticist who tried to prove that the source of altruism in humans. After giving away all of his belongings to the homeless, he became homeless himself and then committed suicide.

[skeptic002]

Lacking any significant anomalies brain damage, extreme social conditioning

WE ARE PROGRAMMED ALL OF US

[skeptic002]

also my religion is 100% correct if you wanna know

[G-Daz]

Stop trying to turn science into a religion

[I-am-a-nobody]

@G-Daz
Exactly! He has as much faith in his science as the religious zealot has in his faith.
Science is not the answer to moral issues. If it were we'd have a scientific solution by now.

[ak666]

Science isn't a religion. It's based on beliefs that make actual predictions about the world. The rest is just empathy.

As a religious person you can't say anything is wrong unless you can say that other people's religions are wrong and yours is right. You have to do all of this without being able to show that anything you believe makes accurate predictions whatsoever to people who likewise cannot show that anything they believe makes accurate predictions whatsoever.

[ak666]

You have no criteria for saying that anything is right or wrong, moral or otherwise, if you cannot apply any rigorous method to show that it makes any accurate predictions whatsoever. That's the problem when we allow faith in something which cannot be validated whatsoever to be an acceptable way to justify actions, especially those that harm others.

[I-am-a-nobody]

@ak666
Bottomline: You're basically saying I can't use your science to prove my religion, so my religion is irrelevant, right?
And your science begins with the assumption that there is no God (or any outside interference).

I'm saying you're using a philosophy of materialism and trying to arrive at some utilitarian "morality". Again you're the one claiming there's no objective morality from the very start.
(So the train goes off the rails early.)

I'd guess the Nazis did the same and utility meant killing the inferior races and so you get the wonderful science of Dr. Mengele (or maybe Margaret Sanger). No thanks!

The problem with the world is a spiritual problem and not a knowledge problem.
Sure, you have fewer witch hunts, but there is way more "Brave New World" kind of stuff going on.
You want to play God with your science guiding you, but it doesn't work.
The part that's broken is YOU, but your worldview won't allow for that kind of moral judgment.

[ak666]

@I-am-a-nobody There's no assumption in science that there is no Yahweh, no Allah, no extraterrestrials, ghosts, etc. The main thing about science is that it doesn't believe that anything exists until it's verified to exist by independent parties with testing that can produce consistent results.

>> [...] at some utilitarian "morality"

That's incorrect. Utilitarian morality can only be achieved if we lose the altruistic constraints or if we can perfectly predict the future.

As an example, if we have soldiers stranded in enemy territory and we could predict the future and knew that all rescue attempts had 0% chance of success, then no one would save them. Then you get utilitarian morality.

However, short of magic, we never arrive at 0% probability. We tend to believe the probability is greater than 0% that we can rescue them successfully and avoid losing the rescue team. That's why we take these risks.

[ak666]

@I-am-a-nobody Psychopaths have no altruistic constraints, and psychopaths can come from all sorts of backgrounds, they can even have a scientific background as you pointed out.

The difference is that for a psychopath to begin a cult or rule a state and have everyone believe all sorts of rubbish that he believes without any verifiable data or predictions whatsoever, it requires the people to throw aside all rigorous methods of validation and accept what he preaches on faith.

That's how we end up with mass acts of tyranny, which anyone coming from a faith-based belief can't really discredit as being immoral unless they're simply saying "My beliefs that make no accurate predictions are right, while your beliefs that make no accurate predictions are wrong."

The one who demands rigorous methods of obtaining and verifying knowledge is the only one with an edge in this scenario since he can say, "My beliefs that do make accurate predictions are right while yours that don't are wrong."

[John_Doesnt]

Yes, I agree that science always works in the end.

[ThisDudeHere]

I agree.

[Ggrimes65]

Isn't a "goal" just another ought claim?