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Science, Ethics and Observation1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2013
Abstract
This paper examines the idea that ethics might be understood as a domain of straightforwardly empirical inquiry with reference to two of its defenders. Sam Harris has recently urged that ethics is simply the scientific study of welfare and how best to maximize it. That is of course to presuppose the truth of utilitarianism, something Harris considers too obvious to be sensibly contested. Richard Boyd's more nuanced and thoughtful position takes the truth of the ethical theory – homeostatic consequentialism – he favours to be determined by what best explains the success of moral practice over its history. But what is to count here as success is too theory dependent for this to be helpful. From consideration of both Harris and Boyd, the conclusion emerges that once we have satisfied ourselves by ethical reflection about what we ought to do, it may then be a straightforwardly empirical question how to do it, but that arriving at that point, the core concern of the moral philosopher, is far less clearly a straightforwardly empirical affair.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 72: Phenomenology and Naturalism , July 2013 , pp. 261 - 274
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2013
Footnotes
1
This paper develops some thoughts I adumbrated rather breathlessly in a footnote (pp. 66–67) in James Lenman, ‘What is Moral Inquiry?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 81 (2007), 63–81. It was written for the Royal Institute for Philosophy Conference on ‘Human Experience and Nature’ at the University of the West of England, 30th August-2nd September, 2011 at the kind invitation of Havi Carel and Darian Meacham and was read a second time to the University of Hull Philosophy Department in December 2011. I am grateful to lively audiences on both these occasions. I am grateful also to Nick Zangwill for comments on an earlier version.
References
2 Boyd, Richard, ‘How to be a Moral Realist’ in Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 181–228Google Scholar. Reprinted in Darwall, Stephen, Gibbard, Allan and Railton, Peter (eds.), Moral Discourse and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 105–135Google Scholar (page references to latter), 124.
3 Harris, S., The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (London: Bantam Books, 2010)Google Scholar.
4 Ibid., 197.
5 Mill, J.S., Utilitarianism, ed. Crisp, Roger, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 2Google Scholar.
6 Ross, D., The Right and the Good, ed. Stratton-Lake, Philip, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 5.
7 Harris, The Moral Landscape, 62.
8 Ibid., 19.
9 Ibid., 28.
10 Ibid., 62.
11 Ibid., 32, 64.
12 Ibid., 12.
13 Ibid., 35.
14 Ibid., 36.
15 Ibid., 37.
16 See, e.g. Parfit, D., On What Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, chapters 24–27. It is interesting here to compare Parfit's ‘Hard Naturalist’ with the ‘consistent naturalist’ of Prior (see Prior, A.N., Logic and the Basis of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949Google Scholar).
17 Harris, The Moral Landscape, 64.
18 See, e.g. Lenman, James, ‘The Politics of the Self: Stability, Normativity and the Lives We can Live with Living’ in Bortolotti, Lisa (ed.) Philosophy and Happiness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 183–199Google Scholar; Lenman, James, ‘Humean Constructivism in Moral Theory’ Oxford Studies in Metaethics 5 (2010), 175–193Google Scholar.
19 See esp. Boyd, Moral Discourse and Practice, 112–114.
20 Boyd, Richard, ‘Finite Beings, Finite Goods: The Semantics, Metaphysics and Ethics of Naturalist Consequentialism, Part I’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (2003), 505–553CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Boyd, Moral Discourse and Practice, 123.
22 Ibid., esp. 125–128; ‘Finite Beings, Finite Goods’, esp. 515–19.
23 Here my critique of Boyd is helpfully viewed as continuous, in its concern with independence, with Nick Zangwill's of Boyd's fellow Cornell realists, Nicholas Sturgeon and David Brink, and their contention that moral naturalism draws support from the ability of moral judgements, when conjoined with auxiliary hypotheses, to have observable consequences. (Zangwill, Nick, ‘Science and Ethics: Demarcation, Holism and Logical Consequences’ in European Journal of Philosophy 18, 2008, 126–138CrossRefGoogle Scholar). This, they maintain, shows that moral judgements are regular empirical judgements subject to empirical confirmation. Moral judgements can indeed, Zangwill concedes, pass this test, but so too does all manner of garbage. However moral judgements, he goes on to urge, do not pass the stronger and more discriminating test that Ian Hacking, Philip Kitcher and Peter Kosso have proposed, that the evidence for the auxiliary hypothesis be adequately independent of the judgement it is proposed to test.
24 Boyd, ‘Finite Beings, Finite Goods’, 543–544.
25 Boyd, ‘Finite Beings, Finite Goods’, 545.
26 Williams, B., Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana/Collins, 1985)Google Scholar, 142ff..
27 Adams, Robert Merrihew: Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 77–82Google Scholar.
28 Boyd 2003, 545–546.